Did I make a mistake?

 

As I confessed earlier, I cast my vote for President-elect Biden in the general election.  I realized at the time that I was sentencing myself to 4 years of asking “Did I make as mistake?”  It’s early days yet, and the answer is certainly still occluded.

Part of the answer comes in the form of the flickering cave shadows cast by Biden’s first few appointments.  I write with some trepidation here because far more politically astute observer was scolded, scalded, and kicked to the side in this morning’s Washington Post Op-ed page for his view that the foreign policy team “… will be polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”

This is actually a pretty fair assessment, even if it did come at the end of a sentence full of the petty anti-elitism the Republican Party has disgraced itself with over the past several years.  But as to the conclusion, it very much sounds like my stock answer over the past few years to the question, “Well, running dog Republican, what do you think of the Trump administration now?”

I’d generally answer along the lines of, “It’s a complete dumpster fire [apologies to WMX], but the alternative would not have been good policy.  Rather, it would have been the continued slow erosion of America’s power, position, and prestige in both international and domestic affairs.” 

In the foreign policy arena, I am not at all sure the new team understands their mission: Advance the interests of the United States of America.  Not advocate, not explain, not put forward, but advance the interests, foreign and domestic, of the United States of America.  The first test of their understanding will come in the execution of what have been announced as “day one” actions, rejoining the Paris Climate Agreements and the World Health Organization (WHO).

If, as I suspect, they go to Paris and Geneva and politely ask, “Please, pretty please, will you let us back?  We’ll be good. We’ll pay our full dues and maybe even a fine for delinquency.  Please, pretty please,” then we’ll know.  We’ll be in the hands of that cabal that holds that American policy should be multilateral, collaborative, and apologetic.

At the very least they should, as prerequisites to the United States resuming their disproportionate financial burdens of these international institutions, require renegotiation of the more-onerous-to-us terms of the Paris Agreements and removal of the executive team at WHO that conspired with the Red Chinese to hinder the world’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.

The outlines of the domestic side of the Biden team are also beginning to emerge.  So far, the selections have looked pretty good.  I am a little concerned about the reception the selection process is getting in the press.  The New York Times recently listed eight attributes the President-elect had to consider when making selections.  “Competence” came in at number six.  Sounds like the left still focuses on what seems cool to them—ideology, gender, racial identity, party affiliation, etc.—rather than what’s important in governing a complex business economy. 

What the economic and domestic policy team need to focus on is the urgent need to get money into the hands of tens of millions of individual Americans who have been locked out of work by order of various government entities.  As necessary as these measures have been—and as much fun as it would be to point out that the urgency was magnified by China’s duplicity, WHO’s complicity, and Trump’s utter incompetence and indifference—the stark reality is that millions of workers are still living on unemployment insurance, many thousands of businesses are on or past the edge of bankruptcy and closure, and not one Biden appointee could be suspected of knowing in any detail what a workout specialist does for a living.

Even after all this cavil, I still believe, uncertainly, that I did the right thing in voting for Biden.  After all, it is a common bit of folk wisdom that if you find yourself at the bottom of a deep hole, stop digging.  The 2016-2020 era marked a deep hole; hell’s bells, it was a catastrophic crater of an administration.  My fear is that the new administration of the left is not going to pull the Nation out of the crater but will carry on with the slow erosion program that marked their ideological predecessors.