Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people will sometimes step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for…
President Joe Biden held his first press
conference yesterday, responding to questions with his unique brand of passion,
compassion, honesty and dry humour. Against so many predictions, and in the
face of tremendous hope but little faith, he is succeeding in starting to impact on the damage done to the US – and the world – by the last administration and too
many years of Republican abuse of power.
This despite that Democrats don’t have an
easy majority in either the Senate or the House. The one thing that stands out
for me is that he’s so unafraid. Combined with his profound integrity it makes
him a powerful man.
Professor Paul Krugman recently wrote
a piece in the New
York Times about reasons for the GOP’s sudden ineffectiveness in
blocking progress. “Republicans may simply have lost the ability to take policy
seriously,” he wrote, agreeing with Jonathan
Cohn’s argument (with regard to the GOP’s inability to destroy
Obamacare) that Democrats do the work but Republicans, who don’t, “no longer know
how to think through hard choices, make the compromises necessary to build
alliances and get things done.”
My take on it is this. Since 2008 I’ve
never thought that there were any brilliant minds or hard workers in the
Republican Party or that any of their strategies had an ounce of common sense,
apart from gerrymandering and voter suppression which, together with a
mind-bending right wing media exploiting racist fear, is all they’ve needed to
hold onto so much power.
When you use corrupt methods to acquire it
and you can abuse it with impunity you get lazy, believe you’re infallible, and
don’t notice when your hold on it is becoming tenuous and when opposition is
building momentum. It’s the oldest story in the history books.
There’s also the possibility that
Republicans weren’t/aren’t smart enough to discern intelligence in their
opposition. Remember when they touted Paul Ryan as the party genius?
Truth is that Democrats have had all the
brains for a long time but as a voting group they’ve been an undisciplined
bunch, squandering opportunity when it was there for the taking because
compromise of any sort was anathema. But this crisis, of what they lost and
what Trump and the GOP were doing to the country, forced them to band together.
That’s the “bipartisanship” that has
needed to happen since 2010, and Biden was/is experienced, wise and smart
enough to recognize it. This president, with a universe of compassion in his
heart and wisdom of the ages, who has had the strength and courage to allow
repeated trauma to fashion him into a man of great stature, fears nobody, not
least of all Republicans. He gave them a chance to work with him and since they
won’t he has shrugged and moved on, undaunted.
At his conference yesterday, when asked
about his promise during the campaign to work with the GOP President Biden came
back smartly with, “I may not have united Congress but I’m uniting the
country.”
At this of monumental crisis, he’s risen to
meet the challenges and become the progressive I suspect he always wanted to
be. Humanity, supreme competence, expertise and experience reign supreme.
African Americans, minorities and progressives are represented in government and
have clout. They’re energised! It’s all coming together for them now and
falling apart for the GOP, who’ve finally reached that tipping point of being
too weakened by their own corruption to be effective.
When asked about 2024 and who he thought he’d
be running against, he quipped, “I have no idea whether there’ll be
Republican party. Do you?”
Joe Biden. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
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