THE Question
We get the leadership we deserve. That is the most profound and depressing political statement I’ve ever heard.
Our elections are a fiasco. Elections should be about qualifications for the position and policy alternatives. Instead, we vote for the candidate we like or the one who is most telegenic or the one whose ethnicity resembles ours or as a way to signal virtue at the altar of diversity. You wouldn’t hire a charming tree surgeon to fix your computer, but that is what we do when voting for a President. It isn’t about who will be the leader of the free world; it’s American Idol.
Joe Biden has worked this reality to perfection. His campaign can be summed up in three short sentences. Donald Trump is an obnoxious clown. I’m not like him. Vote for me. If the polls are to be believed (polling as a profession will disappear if they aren’t right this time), he will be the next President and a Democrat controlled Senate will ride in on his coattails.
The proper metaphor for this comes from our agricultural past. We will be buying a pig in a poke. We will get a sack with something moving inside. It might be a defective pig or even some other animal.
THE question is which Biden we will get. In the primaries, he posed as the moderate alternative. Since securing the nomination, he has bent over backwards to cultivate the progressive wing of his party. Will he simply be a front man for the progressives? We have no idea.
The media was supposed to inform us about the policy prescriptions of the candidates. In their fever to get rid of the cancer of Trump, they have utterly failed to do so. Nora O’Donnell made a faint attempt in her interview with our next Vice President. She prefaced by mentioning that Comma-La had the most progressive voting record of 100 Senators and then asked if she would be pushing that agenda if elected. The answer was a forced laugh and a short riff on Comma-La’s immigrant parents. There was no follow-up. Joe was asked if he favored court packing. He refused to answer. He was then asked (by a Fox reporter) if the voters deserved an answer to that question. He said NO! He later cleaned it up by saying Republican voters didn’t deserve to know. When asked the same question by a respectable reporter, he said voters did deserve to know and he would provide an answer prior to election day. As I write this, we are less than 48 hours from the opening of polling stations and 90+ million votes have already been cast. No answer has been forthcoming. We are in process of closing the deal for the pig in the poke.
We’re fools. We deserve the leadership we get.
