The Blob on the Ballot

Below, Bankruptcy Court is back in session with a look at Seinfeld Conservatism, and a spectacularly silly Wall Street Journal op-ed inadvertently showcases everything wrong with the oversimplified models of economics. But first…

THE BLOB ON THE BALLOT

Through its steady flow of press releases, briefings, and readouts, the White House Communications Office would have the American people believe that President Joe Biden remains hard at work conducting their business. Here he is quarterbacking negotiations over the release of prisoners held in Russia. There he is delivering a tough message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of course, no one who has watched Biden’s attempts this year at speaking extemporaneously or answering simple interview questions, let alone participating in a high stakes debate with a political opponent, can believe he possesses either the critical thinking or communication skills to do more than play-act at the duties of his office. We can only hope that others are formulating the strategy, making the tough decisions, conveying the U.S. position. The alternative is too dangerous.

And yet the casual assumption normalized by this state of affairs, that the president is a figurehead rather than the government’s chief executive, represents the anti-democratic endpoint of the long-term progressive project to reallocate power from the government’s politically accountable actors to the appointees and civil servants of the administrative state. Until now, legal maneuvers were central to the effort. Delegations from Congress. Independent agencies. Special counsels. But in the Biden White House, for the first time, the president is entirely beside the point.

This context is especially important as Vice President Kamala Harris embarks upon what appears likely to be the most substance-free campaign ever run by a major presidential candidate. Harris skipped the primary process, of course. Two weeks into her candidacy, she has yet to take a question from the media. And she is rapidly renouncing the most distinctive positions she did take when she ran for president four years ago, on everything from single-payor health care to fracking. What’s left is her track record as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, which she now abhors, and the comedy of the “Oddly Specific Kamala Harris Policy Generator,” which pokes fun at her penchant for hyper-targeted identity politics with proposals like “a work visa program for international spies who open a Wendy’s that operates for 7 weeks in an excavation site.”

Elections are never about policy specifics but, for democracy to function, they do have to be about competing worldviews, areas of focus, and visions. The message instead coming through loud and clear is that nothing matters. What voters are selecting is the coterie of experts who will govern however they see fit. The president doesn’t, shouldn’t, and won’t have the power. The president’s positions are merely of convenience, binding no one. Really, there’s no point in asking her questions or reporting the answers anyway.

Still, Republicans have chosen to run Donald Trump against the amorphous blob, and it’s entirely plausible that the blob will win. If it does, we will be all the way through the looking glass, to a form of government in which elections mark odd moments in time when voters get to express not their preference for how the country will be run, but merely their choice of which out-of-touch elite will rule over them however it wants until the next election comes around.

The good news is, it’s never too late for leaders in either party to choose a different course and offer up a political vision responsive to the concerns and priorities of voters. Indeed, that’s the dominant strategy for building a durable governing majority. The bad news is, it’s getting awfully late, at least this time around.