It’s a jubilant July for Republicans for the first time in… *consults library microfilm archive* one-hundred-and-twenty-four years. Not since the wild and wooly days of Warren Harding’s porchbound campaign has the Grand Old Party actually appeared to be nominatively deterministic, living up to the last part of its name and having a merry good time.
Naturally, a memento mori is in order as Republicans, being the stupid party, have a penchant for clutching defeat from the jaws of victory. Polling shows promise, but just as one swallow does not a summer make, so as one midsummer bump does not an election secure.
Just ask Hillary, who’s probably belting her fifth glass of Moscato in the Hamptons, only if you’re reading this column in antemeridian hours. Post-noon, Clinton is assuredly passed out in a pile of polished off bottles.
The botched assasination attempt of Trump by some loony Pennsylvania hiklib created the most iconic presidential picture (and campaign fodder) of the decade, symbolizing strength of will in the face of literal death. And thanks to the media now letting us in on the heretofore kept secret that President Joe Biden acts as old, doddering, moldering, and absent-minded as he looks, Trump campaign lackeys are knocking back gin rickeys and lighting off Partagas, eagerly anticipating an electoral rout. Nobody—and this doesn’t contain one whit of facetiousness—believes Biden is cognitively, physically, or physiognomically ready to serve another term. Not Hollywood, which is imploring him to step down, not Democratic lawmakers, who are also pleading for a drop-out, nor his own West Wing apparatchiks, who are dishing to journalists in dark corners and parking garages that their boss isn’t just over the hills but off the coastline and out at sea.
The moment seems ripe for Team Trump to pop another Pol Roger, crank up the yacht rock, strap on some trusty Kevlar, and give in to all hedonic desire well into August. And why not? The Swamp heat is punishing, but the DMV’s skies are an uncanny crystalline blue this summer, with the Potomac throwing off an occasional cooling breeze. The President is well past his expiration date. And the mechanisms and bylaws to remove him from the ballot seem like a Gordian knot no Democratic fixer wants to touch, let alone start tugging.
What’s the Biden battalion’s reculer pour mieux sauter strategy? Embrace the deep state. Not only have the DOJ and its various DA outposts been sicced on Trump to tag enough felonies on him that he sinks in public estimation, but also the President’s boosters have a new pitch: don’t just vote for our guy, but his personnel. Basically, Biden isn’t just touting his legislative achievements, but his LinkedIn connections. Or, dare I say, a blue Project 2025.
“Reminder: You’re electing a team,” former Biden video producer Chris Strider PSAed on Twitter, trying to quell worries about the President’s ability to lead the free world. He accompanied his reminder with a Sgt. Pepper’s-esque collage of whom I guess are supposed to be high-ranking officials, though most Americans probably can’t name ninety percent of the Photoshop-trimmed faces.
Our politics is run by PR raiders who twist and torture language in service to subliminal messaging. But you don’t have to play exegete to grasp what Strider is really getting at: Biden voters need not worry about the President’s obvious senescence. The adults are still in charge—adults who go AWOL and lie about prolonged absences, adults who play anti-American anthems in the sticky basement bars of warzones, adult men who purloin designer dresses from baggage carousels, adult women who swoon over yellow school buses.
“Trust the team” is the Democrats’ bounce-back slogan, but some pundits aren’t buying it. Bret Stephens, from his cloud-high perch at The New York Times, gives us a civics reminder: “We still elect a president, not a cabinet, and the president alone holds the vast constitutional powers of war, peace, justice and administration.” He then tut-tuts the President’s various hands who ensure us their boss is still able to unitarily sign declarations to turn various desert countries into glass: “If the president’s secretaries, confidantes and family members think they are helping him or the country by assuming an ever-increasing share of his decision-making, they aren’t. They are usurping his authority, deceiving the nation and enticing our enemies into mischief or miscalculation.”
That’s all nice and good in freshmen social studies theory, but how does it work in practice? Are voters incensed that their elected tribune isn’t a hot, sweaty Vishnu keeping the world whirring from the molten core, but someone who relies on tens of thousands of underlings to keep the government operational? Do they angrily rend their pocket constitutions when they hear some unelected czar mandates how many hot dog bits go into SpaghettiOs with franks?
Stephens’s unitary-executive theory, and his belief in by-the-book public administration, is the kind of facile understanding that exists only on editorial pages. In praxis, politics is, as Matthew Walther opined in the same paper, a franchise sport. “When most people vote,” he averred, “they are expressing something like a rooting interest, not because they expect their support to carry their preferred team to victory but because cheering on one’s side is simply what one does.”
Many Americans scoff at the duopolistic party system, with its smattering of desperate, dotty third parties that never grasp more than three percent of the vote. But the party system serves a useful purpose, providing an easy signal for general policies preferences. The “independent” voter is a myth K Street consultants trot out to sell an untapped demo to candidates. Most Americans confer themselves the burros or pachyderms affiliation, and vote along those lines up and down the ballot, because only autistic politicos or Twitter users—but I repeat myself—scour candidate issue pages.
Personnel is of a piece of party politics. As much as I like agreeing with the bishop in Brideshead Revisited who contended that “there is no fundamental diversity between the two ideologies. It is a matter of personalities,” the strange, paradoxical, incomprehensible truth is that Americans—AMERICANS of all people!—actually vote with larger ideas in mind about the scope of government. They know and understand presidents appoint scores of drudges to carry out laws in line with a particular philosophical view. There’s no fiendish scheme afoot: If Joe Biden can’t keep his peepers wide after his blue-plate special, there’s no way he can draft an order to unconstitutionally nix student debt after a day of meetings and briefings. So he, like all presidents, relies on beavering bureaucrats to do the job.
The division of labor goes for government, too. Even if Adam Smith would lose his chyne of mutton lunch over there being almost 3 million federal salarymen.
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