Summary: Joe Biden became president-elect today. For Joe it has been the crowning achievement of a half-century of public service. For vice president-elect Kamala Harris, it’s something a little bit more. Kamala, or as some of us refer to her, somewhat avuncularly, particularly after her debate with outgoing vice president Mike Pence, as “Momala,” for the steely expression and reproving tone that accompanied her admonition “I’m speaking,” when he tried to interrupt her during their debate, will be a breaker of glass ceilings in a pronounced way. The first Black woman, the first South Asian, the first woman, to serve as vice president of the United States. All in all, many of us are feeling a kind of relief today after four years of Donald Trump, over a year of a hypertrophied election campaign, nearly a year of the pandemic, and the last week of almost unspeakable election tension.
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Cathedral City, Saturday, November 7, 2020 –- It’s over.
After more than a year and a half of pre-election posturing, after nearly a week of almost unspeakable tension and drama in the actual election process, it’s all over, bar the shouting and the results from as yet uncalled battleground states..
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the President and Vice President-elect of the United States.
How pleasant it is to pronounce the words "President Biden" and "Vice-President Harris."
We may perhaps be forgiven a few moments of joy. After four years of the unspeakable, unthinkable, frankly unwatchable, presidency of Donald Trump, American democracy, that hard-pressed, oft maligned, abstraction, has proven more resilient than we had given it credit for being. Thus, before Trump and his revanchistes attempt some dirty tricks this afternoon, this evening, or tomorrow, we may greet with a passing, indulgent smile, the celebrations that have occurred and which are breaking out in cities across the United States and among our allies.
For those of us who have been largely consumers and end-users of politics during these tumultuous times, the coming of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be greeted with more hope and more anticipation than the coming of any presidency since that of Bill Clinton in 1992. Indeed, we will probably expect more from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris then we expected from Barack Obama and Joe Biden when they took over in January of 2009.
Of course, the expectation game is a common one in American politics. When George Dubya Bush became president in 2000 after a questionable election and questionable intervention by SCOTUS, his partisans rather giddily expected a wholesale repudiation of all of the works of the previous Bill Clinton ministration. ABC anything but Clinton, was their mantra. Similarly, the Trump administration appears to be guided by the mantra of “undo anything of Barack Obama’s.”
For Democrats, the expectation, come 2021, will be that much of the early months of a Biden administration will be involved in restoring those Obama initiatives which Trump and his enablers sought to undo at every turn.
Most Democrats will be looking for a Biden administration to rejoin promptly the Paris climate accord.
Most Democrats will be looking for a Biden administration to reverse Trump’s anti-immigrant initiatives, and to unbuild Trump’s ridiculous border wall that has been demonstrated not to work.
Most of us probably expect that these iterations or initiatives will be set in train within the first hundred days of a Biden administration.
But, as much as Democrats of all types will have a long list of expectations; they must be prepared to temper those expectations with a sympathetic, pragmatic understanding of reality. Our Aotsunami (Big Blue Tidal Wave) did not materialize in quite the fashion we had hoped. We will have a Democratic president, we will have a Democratic House, but unless Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff prevail in their runoff elections in Georgia in January, the Senate will remain in Republican hands. That means that, again, unless Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are successful, Mitch McConnell will still be a one-man barrier to getting things accomplished. Thus, Democrats need to rally to Joe and Kamala rather than falling into the Democratic temptation of wagging fingers and criticizing the president of their own party because he has not brought about utopia in a day.We must not live down to the traditional Democratic stereotype of carping on the limitations our victory and crapping on those at the top of our ticket.
Indeed, utopia may be unattainable until and unless a Biden Justice Department is able to stamp out the wave of Trumpist revanchisme that, as former counterintelligence analyst Malcolm Nance warned us on Real Time with Bill Maher, last Friday night, might well take the form of a low-level paramilitary insurgency. Biden’s Justice Department and law enforcement agencies in the several states will need to pay close attention to any signs of such insurgency, and to any signs of other treasonable Trumpist conspiracies.
Moreover, it is fairly clear that unless there is a successful intervention by Republican allies of Donald Trump who are willing to speak truth to what still imagines itself to be power, Trump himself will try every means available to delegitimize this election. We had hoped for a lot less closer an election then we had. We had hoped that Aotsunami would sweep away not merely Trump but the Republican majority in the Senate and a large part of the Republican minority in the house. Unfortunately, the Big Blue Tsunami proved to be not tsunami, but a Little Blue Sazanami, the pretty, small waves ginned up by a zephyr, as most elections actually tend to be.
Nonetheless, Joe and Kamala should take office and govern as if they had come in riding a landslide. When timorous Democrats are foolish enough to complain to Joe and Kamala about the closeness of their election, Joe and Kamala should respond with the immortal words of California twice-Governor Jerry Brown, “we won, didn’t we?” They should, ironically enough, take a lesson from their immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, who governed as if he had a landslide when in fact the only reason Donald Trump was ever president in the first place was because of that ridiculous relic, the Electoral College, a foolish holdover of the slave power that should have died with the Confederacy at Appomattox in 1865.
At all events, Joe and Kamala need to govern on behalf of the broad majority of Americans who want to return to the civil society and politics of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Busch-Obama years. While 40% of Americans have sold their souls to Donald Trump, at least 60% of us would like to be able to go about our lives free from the kind of tribalist totalitarianism that Trump and his followers represent. That is the majority to which Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should govern.
Utopia will not be achieved in a single day. But we may hope that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris may set this country on a necessary path of recovery from the gross aberrations and organized treason that characterized the four years, the four excruciating, the four embarrassing, the four tooth grindingly awful years of Donald Trump. We must so erase the baleful legacy of Donald Trump and of Trumpism that it can never rear is disgusting head in our country again.
So, for a few minutes we can rejoice. But the challenge is still before us. Let us rise to meet it and beat it.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He has been a steady Biden loyalist since the President-elect first announced his campaign. He has little patience for Trumpism, for Republicans, and for traitors. The views contained herein are his own, though he rather expects that they are shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by roughly 60% of the American people. Right now, the other 40% don’t matter.
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