Monday, October 12, 2020

22 Days and Counting

Just over 3 weeks from Election Day, and with many millions having already voted, Joe Biden is riding high with a 9.8% lead in the RCP polling average. If we take just the last 11 polls, Biden average is 10.5%.

As I said yesterday, no election is a panacea (a universal remedy) though the professional partisans treat it that way. This is why, at victory celebrations, the bands play Happy Days Are Here Again. But I'm here to tell you, it's just not true.

A voter in any presidential election basically chooses the problem that looms largest and picks the candidate that will handle that problem best. In this election, that problem is the COVID-19 virus.The campaigns will try to present their candidate as the solution to everything from clogged drains to global warming, but most Americans kno in some inchoate way that they're peing played. We're deeply aware that most of what emerges from the propaganda-machines more popularly known as electoral campaigns is pure bullshit. 

At least I used to think we were. Nowadays I'm not so sure. Facebook, it seems, is a great vehicle for the transmission of a campaign's main talking points. People are remarkably happy to repeat them over and over to one another with no hint of skepticism. It's doom all the way down if the one is elected, happy days at last if the other. Maybe we're not as hard to fool as I'd thought. Unalloyed faith pops are in the strangest places!

As a conservative Never Trumper who has voted for Joe Biden, I try to entertain no illusions. As a Christian, I know that our trust cannot be in governments. At best, the election of Joe Biden will have solved one major problem this country faced, and one that we desperately needed to solve. That problem is Donald Trump. As for everything else, I can just about guarantee you that it's not the end of the world, no matter what the Republicans say.

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I'll just note that the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings start this week. I won't watch them, because they are typically turgid agitprop with only occasional flashes of honesty, but it will be interesting to note how the hearings impact the polls. I'll be watching for that.

Read also:

Talk Radio I Turning Millions of Americans into Conservatives

Who should run the country?

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