PRISMATIST

Many families report considerable resistance when they’ve had to take the car keys away from Dad.  (It’s almost always Dad, by the way; Mom, if otherwise in good shape, is generally too wise to keep driving after she shouldn’t.)  That must be how the great and good elders of the Democratic Party felt when just about the entire world was begging The Aged Incumbent to spend more time with his family. Everybody, including many actual Republicans (that is, not Trumpeter Swains) , breathed  a collective sigh of relief that would have been heard on Mars if anyone besides Elon Musk had been there.  

 

Literally overnight the Vice President, who had been even less well liked than The Aged Incumbent, became more popular than Jesus—admittedly not as high a bar as it once was—and the party’s convention morphed from a wake into a Mardi Gras party.  All of a sudden, the press discovered that M. Petits-Doigts has been even more mentally impaired than Olde Joe ever was, and took to pointing out his various fluffed lines and outright falsehoods in the lede instead of the eighth graf.  

 

He has finally begun to achieve recognition as an unstable old buffoon, and the  reversal of fortunes has unhinged him even more than he already was.  He has taken to flailing and babbling so that he has become the VP’s most effective campaign worker.  If this were funny, it would be very funny indeed.

 

There are a few sorts of voters who either haven’t noticed or don’t care.  First are the willfully ignorant, who adamantly refuse to hear anything like facts that conflict with their ideas.  These are numerous in both parties, of course, but the Democrat ones haven’t threatened the Republic much since the election of 1948, or at least since Nixon converted all the dangerous ones to my party, more’s the pity.

 

The second group are the honestly ignorant.  In the US, these are mostly concentrated in the southeast where the schools are reluctant or unable or forbidden to point out that the sun does not in fact go around the earth, much less how economics works, or government, and where people say things like (and this is a real quote) “I get my news from the Bible.”

 

The most unforgivable are the plutocrats and their hangers-on who throw great lashings of money at anyone who promises them more tax cuts and fewer restrictions on their operations or products.   They  recognize a kindred spirit in the Republican nominees who present themselves as being Of The People and and will happily sell us the handbaskets in which we can go to hell for all they care.  To prove they are truly Of The People, they will only take a profit of fifty or sixty percent, though.

 

(Full disclosure:  I have friends in each of those groups, but I don’t try very hard any more to bring them into the light.  I have realized that this is a job for the younger and smarter.)

 

Depending on what states they live and presumably vote in, these gangs are probably not enough to return the President-Eject to Pennsylvania Avenue, but it would be well to remember that the Dems have not exactly been a tree full of owls of late.  If this election has now become theirs to lose, one fears that they will undertake to do just that.  

 

Sooner or later the VP will have to conduct a press conference or submit to some interviews or both.  She will than have to be able to make a reasonably clear statement about what she plans to work on as President and how she will approach the task and stuff like that.  She has not in the past been especially good at that sort of thing, and in the current state of affairs she is well advised to stay as vague as her interlocutors will allow.  Still, she’ll have to say something.

She’ll also have to come up with some reasons why she has shifted her position on several key issues.  This is where it gets tricky.  In a rational polity, she might say, “My position changed as I learned more about these issues.  That’s what adults do.”  However, the charges of flip-flopping will immediately fly-- including among the press, who should know better.   We require our elected leaders to pretend that they were born omniscient, you see, so learning new facts or perspectives shouldn’t intrude on their decisionmaking.   There is nothing to be done about this.

 

She and her team will have to get better at irritating her opponent and his comical sidekick.  The “weird” thing works pretty well at getting under their extremely thin skins, but it will wear out.  I think, however, that skillful needling will push him to be even more incoherent.  I have a couple of modest suggestions.

 

You may not remember that Stormy Daniels called Mr. Tangerine Man “Tiny,” but he remembers it as he does every slight.  The little-fingers rap still sets him off as well.    So in the debate if there is one, the VP should use that word or a synonym as often as possible.  He has a tiny mind, a tiny vocabulary, a tiny vision for the future—stuff like that.  My ideal outcome for this is that during the debate he can’t take it any more and rips open his trousers to show that he is not tiny.  Unless of course he is, and knows it.  However that plays out, she and her surrogates and ankle-biters should play this card at every opportunity.  Sooner or later he’ll break down and do or say something really stupid, this being one advantage of having an opponent with no impulse control.

 

The other thought is for one of her ankle-biters to voice.  My gang of thugs have noticed that her dad is a Marxist economist, and will try very hard to hang that on her.  In the VP debate if there is one, the avuncular Governor Walz might ask Whatever His Name Is Now, “Do you believe that she is a Marxist because her father is?”  Any nearly affirmative answer should elicit the question, “We already know that Donald and Eric are crooked businessmen like their dad, of course.  Does that mean they are serial rapists, too?”   A low blow, but our guys started it.  The Ds’ candidates and ankle-biters need to be civil but not necessarily demure.  

 

Sid Caesar is quoted as saying, “There are people who always have to be right. Those are the ones you make fun of.”  Now that Little Bobby has checked into the loony bin, the field for this is wide open.  Characters like M. Petits-Doigt,  Whatever His Name Is Now, and Little Bobby love being reviled but hate being laughed at.  Let the games begin.