We haven’t won this yet

I was interviewed on Wednesday for two hours by The Mystic-Skeptic Radio Show, a media entity that doubles as a podcast. The pre-recording of my interview is slated to go out on “Radio Free Nashville” sometime in late August. The two hosts, young-ish progressives, were eager to see progressive policies enacted that they doubted that Joe Biden and the DNC machine were equal to. I did my best to introduce them to reality as I saw it, pointing out that, yes, that painting near the Captain’s Table might look better over by the Grand Staircase, but didn’t they think we had better attend to the task at hand first, namely getting the damned passengers off the Titanic?

I’m deeply puzzled by people who are in such a hurry to see certain pet programs succeed and yet are blind to the greater peril. I think single-payer healthcare for all Americans, for instance, is a cracking good idea, long overdue. As an American living in England I’m atypically positioned to comprehend the difference between the two systems.

But one thing at a time, please. Politics, I cautioned my hosts, is a long game, one of give and take, a game of conceding small concessions for larger ones. You can seldom get everything all your own way overnight, and revolutions too fast sometimes spawn counterrevolutions. These matters must be handled delicately, to invoke the Wicked Witch of the West.

It seems, though, that the older one gets the more time one has. Put another way, the younger one is the more in a rush. So I caution my younger readers to have patience. We have paid a terrible price for Trump, let’s at least learn a lesson that can partly justify that price. Once we’re in charge we can use our newly empowered sense of urgency to shore up the nation against another Trump ever happening again. Then we can get down to the business of fixing the nation and healing the planet.

If we get back in charge, that is, and there’s the rub. Engagious, a focus group company, claims that focus groups they have conducted over the past year suggest that swing voters in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida favor Donald Trump two to one. They studied the oddball voter who voted for, say, Romney in 2012 and Clinton in 2016, or Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. In other words, the Unpredictables may turn out to be a subset of the Deplorables. This is cause for concern, but not alarm.

As British athletics commentator Brendan Foster once put it, races aren’t run on paper, they’re run at races. What we need to realize above all else is Biden may look to be way ahead in the polls but he hasn’t won yet. The race is still on for November third, not August third. Even so, these focus groups sometimes pick up on trends that polls miss, and that is another reason why we must not be wholly reliant on polls.

Engagious notes that of the 17 recent focus groups of swing voters they conducted, all but one — the one in Erie, Pennsylvania — favored Donald Trump. The reason for the oddball result in Erie was that due to when it was conducted, according to Rich Thau, President of Engagious. Mr. Thau explains: “Erie was done in June, right after we had all the social unrest and there was still a fit of pique that a lot of people felt, and I think they were still sorting out their emotions, and at that point some of them were more frustrated with president Trump than they typically would be.“

As to the concerns of my two hosts, I’m not insensible to the injustice that exists in America, where every day families must decide between economic ruin and saving one member. But I hope they noticed that while these injustices continue in America its president boasts of beefing up the largest military budget in the world — larger than the combined budgets of the next seven nations — while fighting in the courts to deprive twenty five million Americans of their healthcare. That he would do this during a pandemic is evidence enough of how egregious he is and how critical it is that he be stopped. As I pointed out to them, if you’re dying of thirst in a desert you don’t turn down a canteen of water merely because it isn’t Evian.

You and I see clearly how evil Trump is and how inimical he is to the continued survival of the republic. Why can’t some others see it? I don’t know, I’m still reeling from the results of the 2004 election. The message is clear that the capacity for Americans to make stupid choices appeares to be undiminished.

It is a grim reminder, and I hope everyone is grimly reminded. We have not won yet. We will not win if we don’t go to the polls in November and vote in large numbers. They call us snowflakes, so let’s live up to our name and give them an avalanche. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.