Where Have You Gone, Theodore H. White?
For Book Reviews No. 4 and No. 5, we will (briefly) consider Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (the same duo that gave us Shattered at the end of the 2016 presidential election) along with Mollie Hemingway's Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. After that subtitle, there are no spoilers, are there?
By way of prologue, I'll note that a Milwaukee radio talker, early in 2019, which is to say, before any weapons-to-Ukraine impeachment inquiry, before any batches of bad bat soup came out of Wuhan, before arrests went terribly wrong in Minneapolis and Kenosha, before any emergency measures to allow people to vote without risking a coronavirus infection or a mugging went into effect: before any of that, the radio talker suggested that Joe Biden was precisely the kind of anodyne Democrat who could unseat, simply by being boring and not controversial in the likes of a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders, unseat Donald Trump.
I'll also submit that, for all the turmoil that did take place, whether in civic life generally or electoral campaigns specifically, the simplest explanation for the outcome of the presidential election strikes me as people who sat out in 2016 turned out in 2020; and in my view, they voted to gridlock the federal government and might have done so but for Mr Trump injecting himself into the Georgia senatorial runoffs.
This is a review of books covering the campaign dynamics, and as such, will offer nothing on the dynamics of that anodyne Democrat getting delusions of Lyndon Johnsonness with the results we are seeing around us. The comments on the books continue below the jump.
Lucky offers indirect confirmation of two of my major themes.
First, at page 241, their description of Mr Biden locking down the nomination includes "the vast majority of Democrats just wanted Trump gone, and they weren't willing to take a chance on anyone whose lens was wider than that goal. ... Biden was on the verge of winning with a bland message and a blank agenda." Here, more of the Theodore White deep dive would have proven instructive: what were the positional maneuverings by which the various ethnic blocs and the alphabet people got promises of key spots on the ticket or in presidential appointments; and, later on, who wrote the platform on which the Democrats ran? Lucky notes that a planned map showing where the keynote speakers were streaming their speeches from during the convention, allegedly in Milwaukee, had to be scrapped once it became clear that the Hamptons, the Vineyard, and Hollywood would feature. Yes, but what sort of dealing took place in the platform committee, and the credentials committee.
Second, at page 391 the authors note, "The biggest reason Biden and his campaign had spent so much time, energy, and money on [Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin] was the notion that it would not take much to flip them back into the Democratic column. All three had elected Democratic governors in 2018." And, thus, the Trumpian experiment might well have stumbled on its own excess, and it's for some other sort of scribe to fret over whether a more anodyne platform or fewer box-checking giveaways to key constituencies might have produced a more effective government once it was sworn in.
That's not to dismiss Rigged out of hand. Yes, Ms Hemingway is a Trump cheerleader, suggesting that at the January 2020 State of the Union speech, Mr Trump was on the verge of locking down a win, and afterwards events got out of hand, with the connivance of the permanent bipartisan establishment. That might be a claim too far (see above: high unemployment plus a public health emergency plus urban unrest would undo even the most presidential of presidents; just ask Lyndon Johnson.) That noted, Rigged documents a number of procedural changes during 2020 that, in the words of her Federalist colleague Margot Cleveland, "Elections are rigged when systemic violations of election law occur, disparately favoring one candidate and allowing for tens of thousands of illegal votes to be counted." There was sufficient time from March to November for state legislatures to contemplate, as is their responsibility under the Federal Constitution, their responses. That didn't happen: perhaps having dictatorial governors take the fall for yet another manifestation of corona tyranny was the Politically Expedient thing to do.
Perhaps the extra-legislative efforts to shore up the elections were a Wise Expedient.They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
Or that might have been rigging the rules.Early voting started up to two months before the statutory election day, and one month before the first televised debate between the presidential candidates. Receipts were permitted days after election day, to accommodate the anticipated postal delays. More than 100 million of the 159 million ballots counted in 2020 were posted prior to election day. In 2016, the rate had been 33 million posted out of 140 million counted.
That part is moot now; I continue to suspect that at the margin, a little responsibility on the part of voters who took a pass in 2016 and showed up in 2020 in each precinct in each battleground state is what tipped the balance, procedural changes that are on state legislatures to change notwithstanding.
There's another element of Rigged's chronology, though, that ought to bother people who are serious about popular sovereignty, irrespective of partisan affiliation. Perhaps, in Wisconsin, it was the absence of a Green Party choice for some of those Madison collegians, rather than questionable signatures or late postmarks, that tipped the balance; and the state's election commission rejecting Kanye West's nomination papers because his messenger got to the office fifteen seconds (on the office clock) past the deadline of 4.30 pm.
That conversation, though, is for another day. The partisan wrangle over which voting rules are most beneficial to which faction of the Permanent Bipartisan Establishment (which, to this day, would still rather be rid of that tiresome Mr. Trump, even if he says an Act of Contrition) at any election cycle.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
By way of prologue, I'll note that a Milwaukee radio talker, early in 2019, which is to say, before any weapons-to-Ukraine impeachment inquiry, before any batches of bad bat soup came out of Wuhan, before arrests went terribly wrong in Minneapolis and Kenosha, before any emergency measures to allow people to vote without risking a coronavirus infection or a mugging went into effect: before any of that, the radio talker suggested that Joe Biden was precisely the kind of anodyne Democrat who could unseat, simply by being boring and not controversial in the likes of a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders, unseat Donald Trump.
I'll also submit that, for all the turmoil that did take place, whether in civic life generally or electoral campaigns specifically, the simplest explanation for the outcome of the presidential election strikes me as people who sat out in 2016 turned out in 2020; and in my view, they voted to gridlock the federal government and might have done so but for Mr Trump injecting himself into the Georgia senatorial runoffs.
This is a review of books covering the campaign dynamics, and as such, will offer nothing on the dynamics of that anodyne Democrat getting delusions of Lyndon Johnsonness with the results we are seeing around us. The comments on the books continue below the jump.
Lucky offers indirect confirmation of two of my major themes.
First, at page 241, their description of Mr Biden locking down the nomination includes "the vast majority of Democrats just wanted Trump gone, and they weren't willing to take a chance on anyone whose lens was wider than that goal. ... Biden was on the verge of winning with a bland message and a blank agenda." Here, more of the Theodore White deep dive would have proven instructive: what were the positional maneuverings by which the various ethnic blocs and the alphabet people got promises of key spots on the ticket or in presidential appointments; and, later on, who wrote the platform on which the Democrats ran? Lucky notes that a planned map showing where the keynote speakers were streaming their speeches from during the convention, allegedly in Milwaukee, had to be scrapped once it became clear that the Hamptons, the Vineyard, and Hollywood would feature. Yes, but what sort of dealing took place in the platform committee, and the credentials committee.
Second, at page 391 the authors note, "The biggest reason Biden and his campaign had spent so much time, energy, and money on [Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin] was the notion that it would not take much to flip them back into the Democratic column. All three had elected Democratic governors in 2018." And, thus, the Trumpian experiment might well have stumbled on its own excess, and it's for some other sort of scribe to fret over whether a more anodyne platform or fewer box-checking giveaways to key constituencies might have produced a more effective government once it was sworn in.
That's not to dismiss Rigged out of hand. Yes, Ms Hemingway is a Trump cheerleader, suggesting that at the January 2020 State of the Union speech, Mr Trump was on the verge of locking down a win, and afterwards events got out of hand, with the connivance of the permanent bipartisan establishment. That might be a claim too far (see above: high unemployment plus a public health emergency plus urban unrest would undo even the most presidential of presidents; just ask Lyndon Johnson.) That noted, Rigged documents a number of procedural changes during 2020 that, in the words of her Federalist colleague Margot Cleveland, "Elections are rigged when systemic violations of election law occur, disparately favoring one candidate and allowing for tens of thousands of illegal votes to be counted." There was sufficient time from March to November for state legislatures to contemplate, as is their responsibility under the Federal Constitution, their responses. That didn't happen: perhaps having dictatorial governors take the fall for yet another manifestation of corona tyranny was the Politically Expedient thing to do.
Perhaps the extra-legislative efforts to shore up the elections were a Wise Expedient.They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.
Or that might have been rigging the rules.Early voting started up to two months before the statutory election day, and one month before the first televised debate between the presidential candidates. Receipts were permitted days after election day, to accommodate the anticipated postal delays. More than 100 million of the 159 million ballots counted in 2020 were posted prior to election day. In 2016, the rate had been 33 million posted out of 140 million counted.
That part is moot now; I continue to suspect that at the margin, a little responsibility on the part of voters who took a pass in 2016 and showed up in 2020 in each precinct in each battleground state is what tipped the balance, procedural changes that are on state legislatures to change notwithstanding.
There's another element of Rigged's chronology, though, that ought to bother people who are serious about popular sovereignty, irrespective of partisan affiliation. Perhaps, in Wisconsin, it was the absence of a Green Party choice for some of those Madison collegians, rather than questionable signatures or late postmarks, that tipped the balance; and the state's election commission rejecting Kanye West's nomination papers because his messenger got to the office fifteen seconds (on the office clock) past the deadline of 4.30 pm.
That conversation, though, is for another day. The partisan wrangle over which voting rules are most beneficial to which faction of the Permanent Bipartisan Establishment (which, to this day, would still rather be rid of that tiresome Mr. Trump, even if he says an Act of Contrition) at any election cycle.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)