Things I Got to Tell Joe

 

Now, if I can just get Joe on the phone.

I know his handlers are preparing him for the debate.

I know they are telling him to keep his answers short and punchy.

I know they remember what happened in 2019 when he spoke at the Community Oven in Hampton, New Hampshire in the run up to the New Hampshire primary, where he got run out of town and came in at fifth place.

Poor Joe. He could not remember the question long enough to answer it. He could not remember the first part of his sentence by the second half of it.

But he won't have to, if he comes prepared.

First, he will know Trump will attack his son and try to rattle him with that.

Biden should be rehearsing his response:  "Everyone knows you want to rattle me with attacks on my kids, on my family.  Hell, everyone knows the reason I didn't jump in last time was because of what happened to my son.  But I'm not going to dignify that stuff with a response, beyond saying I'll put up my kids against your kids any day. And I never gave any of my kids an office in the White House, or made the public's business a profit center for my family."

Population of Coasts=Population of Center

2nd: On Trump's divisiveness

"Every despot in recent history has tried to divide and conquer. 

For you it's about calling migrants an "infestation."

It takes the form of throwing little kids into cages.

LA County Population= or > Each of these States

3rd: Very fine Nazis

"Even in this time of divided government, what people have called an 'angry moment' I thought all Americans could agree there is no such thing as "a very fine Nazi."

New Hampshire Pig

4th: On Science Denial

"You went from warning that vaccines cause autism to claiming a vaccine will save us by election day. You denied coronavirus is anything more worrisome than the common cold. You insisted it would "melt away like magic." You muzzled your best scientists and tried to substitute wishful thinking for real science. Where did that get us? It got us 200,000 deaths. 

Does that feel like winning to you?"

Those Who Served Civil War Hampton, NH

5th: On Medical Care

"You promised to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better. All you've done is to defund it, undermined it but you never had an idea of your own about any alternative. You're great at throwing Molotov cocktails and burning the building down, but you're a miserable failure at building anything--except for bankrupt casinos" 

Those 5 things; count 'em on your fingers. Throw them out there, if you can.

UPDATE: 

#6:  "$750 A'INT MUCH PATRIOTISM"

Finding Your True Loathing in the Era of Trump

 All I ever needed to know about Milton Friedman was contained on a tape of an interview with Mr. Friedman I acquired somehow, in which Mr. Friedman declaimed we had no need for the Food and Drug Administration, that the free market could regulate drugs as scrupulously and ruthlessly as evolution eliminates unfit organisms and selects for the best competitors. 

No need for the FDA at all.

But what about drugs like thalidomide? 
This product, and a profitable one it was, was used in England until it was noted that thousands of children born to mothers taking thalidomide were born  with no arms or legs.  An sudden epidemic of limbless babies did not escape the notice of the British healthcare system, but too late.

But in the USA, the FDA refused to allow it to be sold,  exerting the heavy hand of regulatory government on the pharmaceutic industry, saving untold millions the nightmare that played out in England.

And how did Friedman reply to this example? Oh, but that's what the courts are for, Friedman replied blithely.
The companies which make such things get sued out of existence and others will be more careful when developing new drugs, seeing that example. It struck me that Friedman's solution would be scant solace to the parents raising those kids. 

Listening to my tape, I wondered: Who is this moral midget, this self assured moron?

For Mr. Friedman, the misery of those families is a small price to pay for the glorious liberty of a free enterprise system.
And here's the question I'd really love to ask the sage of Chicago:  You want to disband the Food and Drug Administration and all such government agencies which thwart the animal energies of the great capitalistic American economy?  So what do you do with Farmer Jones, who has a herd of cattle, 300 head infected with Mad Cow Disease? 
Mad Cow Dsease is a prion disease, transmissible to human beings where it causes Jacob-Creutzfield, a horrific degenerative disease which ravages human brains and leaves its victims twitching their beds, with a rapidly progressing dementia and quivering tongue. It does not reveal itself quickly; no, it takes its time, 20 years sometimes, until the first symptoms, but then it moves rapidly.

So the inspector from the Dept of Agriculture shows up on Farmer Jones's farm and tells him he has to kill every last cow in his herd, and thus the heavy hand of government has struck, intent on depriving Farmer Jones of his property, his wealth, a substantial chunk of his livelihood. Farmer Jones could sell those 300 head for substantial profit and the companies down stream could sell the hamburgers made from these cows to unsuspecting citizens, 30,000 hamburgers, 30,000 happy citizens, who 20 years later will wind up drooling in their beds while their families shrink in horror. 

And how does the great American judicial system compensate for all that?  Heaven forbid the Dept of Agriculture or the FDA interfere with all that! 

Oh, socialism! Public Health, the great socialistic anathema!

What say you great Professor Friedman? How does that scene get resolved by your free wheeling system of unbridled capitalism?

And having seen how malpractice claims played out in that theater of the absurd we call the  American courts, I knew for sure how totally ignorant Mr. Friedman was about the salubrious role courts might play as the regulators of truth and justice and behavior in America.
A special section in the New York Times of Sunday, September 13, 2020, a seven page extravaganza of self congratulation based on the seminal paper by Milton Friedman: "The Social Responsibility of Capitalism Is to Increase Profits," which was, we are reminded, lest it escape our notice, was published in the New York Times September 13, 1970, and, of course, this document "changed the course of capitalism," no small thing, that.

And to review this seismic event, "Nobel laureates and top thinkers" get to debate in this special, multi colored presentation what the genius, Nobel prize winning economist "got right--and wrong."

Of course, at the core of Mr. Friedman's teaching is that corporations and businesses need not worry about anything but making money, and all efforts to do more are rank socialism: "When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the 'social responsibility of business in a free enterprise system,'...eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are--or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously--preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

Socialism. Oh, the horror.

Each paragraph of this epoch changing paper (published, lest you forget, in the New York Times) is presented, with especially brilliant passages highlighted in yellow and annotated with comments from "top thinkers" in the margins in red ink, as if monks had labored centuries illuminating the manuscript.

Of course, none of this drivel is anything at all new: George Bernard Shaw gave us all this and better in "Major Barbara" as his hero, Undershaft, who has provided a whole city of happy and prosperous workers with lives enhanced by high salaries, wonderful schools for their children, playgrounds, parks, swimming pools, theaters, orchestras, ballet,  all of which benefit the workers who make bombs and armaments which wreck havoc, destruction and death on other cities around the world. Your first duty in life, Undershaft argues, is to not starve, to not be poor and to provide for yourself. And Shaw was writing nearly 65 years before Friedman and doing it better. 

Shaw, however, slyly undercut Undershaft's argument, by simply making him a munitions manufacturer. (As was the founder of the Nobel prizes.) None of us have to be told the limits of virtue, when we are talking about bombs and dynamite. After all, there are men who make their living understanding DNA, curing diseases, organizing hospital systems in places like Scandinavia. 

Which is to say, there are other options available beyond starvation or bomb making. 

Shaw, of course, was writing about Empire, the British Empire, where wealth brought home to the aristocracy was enjoyed at the expense of the colonials, and the underclasses. It really was "blood money" having been gathered at the cost of the blood of poor, mostly colored people both at home and abroad.
For Shaw, the message of those happy white Brits living in Undershaft's town is there is no such thing as clean money in a society where the wealth of the whole enterprise is grown in soil drenched in blood.

Gustav Klimt 

And as for dumping of chemicals into all the Love Canals--the free enterprise system will eventually see to the end of such companies. Not soon enough for the victims, but these victims will be fortunate enough to be living in a free enterprise system, where the liberties of corporations are protected against unadulterated socialistic government regulation. 

Regulation, you see is "socialism." The heavy hand of government intruding into the free market, restraining the stallions of innovation and dynamism.

Never mind, there is no such thing as a free market in these United States of America--just ask the farmers who sell corn to be incorporated into alcohol or folks who work at un unionized shops.

 

Nincompoop

But in Friedman's case, we have the Ayn Rand of economics sporting his Nobel Prize and the New York Times elevating this nincompoop into some sort of savant. 

If the choice is between the knuckle dragging, babbling dementia of our current President and the self assured savants University of Chicago, I suppose we have to choose the officious over the delirious.

You Would Fight for Strangers?

Trump spoke honestly when he said he thought men who went off to fight in the Vietnam war were suckers. It was a stupid war and you'd have to be stupid to fight in a stupid war like that, he said.

When Sonny Corleone tells Michael those who rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor were fools and suckers, he is stating the tribal creed of the Italian family mob: You fight for your family, not for some idea of country.  Michael tells him he sounds like his father, who, of course, is the Godfather. Sonny agrees, and he's proud of it.

Only your family matters: Patriotism is for suckers

And that is the creed of Donald Trump, who is the Don of his family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-I4VIR5yGg

I felt the same way at the time of Vietnam--not that we had no country worth fighting for but that we were not fighting for our country in Vietnam.  There was the good war against Hitler. But there was a stupid war in Vietnam and I thought you had to be stupid to fight in that war.
But I would never say or think people who did go to Vietnam were stupid. They were fighting for their country, as far as I could see.
Even Rhett Butler ultimately goes off to fight for the doomed Confederacy, in the end. 
My own brother, who got a rocket fired at his swift boat, and trudged through the jungle, still believes he went to war to serve his country, and if he thinks that way, he did. He had a little Rhett Butler in him then.

There was a movie called, "Born on the Fourth of July" which depicted how badly ordinary American boys were deceived about Vietnam, and there have been book length analyses, like Max Hasting's masterful "Vietnam" and Neil Sheehan's "A Bright and Shining Lie." All of these depict the folly of those wars and the folly of fighting in them.

But once you are committed and over there, once you come under fire, all the glory stuff disappears, and you are just fighting to stay alive and to keep your brothers-in-arms alive. That much I can understand without ever having been in the military, because I've been in other less dire situations where the team mattered, and it didn't matter if anyone else saw what you were doing; you fought for each other.

So what Donald Trump was saying was, for once, honest and we can believe he meant that.

A lot of my generation agrees with him on that one level: you can be fooled into thinking you are doing something great.

But you can also be foolish: Pat Tillman dropped out of a million dollar NFL career and went off to fight in the Middle East miasma and got shot dead. And he was shot by his own men in a friendly fire incident. Such is the absurdity of ill conceived wars for no good reason.

Tillman: Shot by his own troops

But what Trump gets wrong is there are other wars, where you might not be wrong: the men and women who rushed off to fight after 9/11 may have been fools, but at least this nation was under attack. The foolishness of waging war on someone who had nothing to do with that attack can be argued. As John Kerry said, attacking Iraq after 9/11 made as much sense as  attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor. 

Abu Gharib: Fighting for your country

And then there is that other good war: The Civil War.

America, to my mind is not exceptional in any of the ways pundits claim. 

But it is exceptional in one way: It is the only country which has ever fought to free an underclass, to free slaves and the people who had no skin in the game  went to fight to free slaves on principle.
It's true many if not most Union soldiers may have marched off for more mundane reasons--adventure, glory, boredom--but at some level and eventually, the war became about slavery and the armies, if they did not understand that at the outset came to know it and yet they persisted.
Those Union soldiers fought for the idea of America, for the great experiment in government of the people, by the people and for the people. That was real heroism and patriotism.
And by Trump's thinking, those Union soldiers were the ultimate in fools and suckers because they did not have to fight, and they could have made money buying and exporting and manufacturing King Cotton leaving the slaves to produce it.

This latest tempest will be kept in its teapot, but it will be interesting to see if any minds or hearts are changed.

True Believer

I would bet not. 

The Next American Revolution

Since the founding of our nation, roughly 12 generations ago, the idea of America has been tested by war twice. We had two revolutions: the original freed the 13 colonies from the rule of a single man, who called himself king, who justified his powers as handed down from God. The second revolution occurred only four generations later, as this country fought its most costly war in which every drop of blood drawn by the lash were paid by another drawn with the sword, and slavery, which may not have been the stated purpose of that conflict but which ultimately became the reason, as Lincoln said, "All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."

Lincoln observed at the time of his 2nd Inaugural Address that 2nd revolution was geographically defined, a sectional conflict: "One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it."  

Today our divisions are not so neatly defined.

It has been said that every state is like Pennsylvania:  Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Alabama in between.  Which is to say there are the cities and the country folk and two groups loathe each other, even though they are mutually dependent upon each other. 

The issue at stake in 1776 was a rule by one man, claiming all rights to himself and the assertion that he was just a man and that all men were his equal in the eyes of God and in the natural order of things. This was a radical idea: That all men are created equal. That no one man is more important, more entitled than any others. 

Europe had been struggling with this idea for centuries but now you had this upstart amalgamation of colonies with the temerity to actually say it, men who signed their names on a Declaration, risking hanging and worse, to say it.

The second revolution began with the election of Lincoln and the firing on Fort Sumter. The people of the South thought they had begun the revolution; they thought they had fomented revolution against oppression as their forbears had. But the fact is, the revolution came from the North. 

Fewer than 15% of all Southerners actually owned slaves, but Southerners typically took offense to being told they were tolerating an anathema. So they fought. 

We can never know, but it is likely many, if not most, of the men who joined the Union armies did not care much about the slaves or the original sin of the United States Constitution which embraced and codified slavery.  But as the war ground on, as farm boys from New Hampshire tread the roads and fields of Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, they came to see the reality of a horror they had no previous first hand experience with, and hearts and minds changed. 

Then you had a real revolution, not of guns and cannon but of values and will.

When Lincoln rose to speak at Gettysburg, the outcome of the conflict was by no means secure, and he felt he had to bring order to the confusion. Why had that horrific battle been fought? Why had so many battles been fought with so much carnage, not restricted to soldiers but to all inhabitants who found themselves in the way of armies from Fredericksburg to Sharpsburg?  If most of the Union soldiers were unmoved by the plight of the slaves, if there were draft riots in New York City, for what purpose was this bedlam pursued?

What was the meaning of this national calamity?

The answer Lincoln said  was this was a contest to determine whether such an audacious experiment, self government without a king, a government by the people, of the people and for the people could survive.

Or would self rule by the people, government which at its essence required men to cooperate with one another, to compromise, to see the point of view of the other guy, was that idea of "self rule" doomed? Would it, as Lincoln put it, simply perish from the earth?

The revolution in which we are now embroiled is nothing less than an re examination of that question. 

The people elected a President four years ago as they have done in the past, not really knowing the man they voted for, but taking a chance on him.

And they have discovered that he has no tolerance for compromise, or for personal rights or for tolerance. 

He has called human beings "an infestation."  He has reflexively defended his police, even when they have been shown for all the world to see shooting defenseless men or strangling them, and this President reacts by saying that law and order is more important than justice--as if the two were mutually exclusive. 

He has flaunted laws, turned the people's house, the White House, into his personal palace. 

He has called Nazis, "very fine people."  When, in all our discord, did it become all right to say that any Nazi is a very fine person? 

White supremacists have flocked to his banner, and he has pretended they just love him for his honesty and he cannot reject their love. 

He has invented "alternative facts" for any truth which demeans him.  

Whenever anyone accuses him of duplicity or callousness or hate mongering he simply replies, no not me, that's all you.

There can be no person in this country on the fence now. You would have to be asleep, in a coma or willfully ignorant to have not seen this President for what he is.

The trouble is, of course, things have changed in this country since 1861. If all those who really would prefer to live in a country ruled by a strongman, by a man who believes in white supremacy, lived in the Southern regions of the country, we could simply decide on war or a divorce.  But with Alabama in between in every state, we have to fight it out in each and every state all over the country.

We cannot simply cut off a gangrenous arm--the malignancy of hate, racism, anti government bile, anti social sentiment has spread throughout the bloodstream of the nation and implanted in every state.  We need voter chemotherapy now.

Maybe Lincoln was right--maybe the idea of self government is on the ballot. The survivalists, the militias, the Tea Party, the Libertarians and the Free Staters will tell you this is about individual freedom. But for them, individual freedom means living off the grid. It means an ultra nationalism which abjures trade with the rest of the world, which sees international trading partners as adversaries, which means if a man disagrees with you, he is a traitor, an-Anti Christ or worse.

Evangelicals will justify their bargain with devil as being the only way to eliminate abortion. But, of course, there are better ways, beginning (but not ending) with contraception.

Handing over real freedom to a strong man or to the mob is the easy way out.
Government by the people is never easy or clean. It is always messy. 

But it is better than every other form of government ever tried, or at least it was, until the people got tired, and whimped out. It is just so easy to stop thinking, stop arguing, to simply allow the bully to have his way.

Watching West Wing in the Time of Trump

Needing something new to watch on my morning treadmill hour, I chose something old, so old I had forgotten watching most of it.
"West Wing" came out in 1999 and ran 7 years into 2006, starting with Bill Clinton in office and lasting through most of the reign of George W. Bush. 
I had not watched it until 2008, when I moved to New Hampshire.
I don't know why I started watching it then, but I was quickly captivated, and returning to it now, I found myself  loving it the second time around.

And that's how I knew there was something really wrong.

Of course it's escapism, but what's wrong with a little escapism?
What's wrong with escapism is it's  like religion--an opium. I keeps people sedated and pleasured and it begets inaction and mellowness. 

In the case of "West Wing" it's the experience of floating off on a cloud of emotionalism, over a sea of the tangled woof of fact and unforgiving reality.
The first episode begins with chatter that Josh Lyman, who works for the President of the United States (POTUS) is about to lose his job because he was indiscreet and undisciplined enough to tell a sanctimonious Evangelical leader on TV what he thought of her.  She tells him as far as she can see he does not worship any God she worships and he replies that's because he can't worship any god indicted for tax evasion.

Illustration--Alice and Martin Provensen

We are quickly informed that the President feels he needs the Evangelical vote and will have to axe Josh for speaking what most of the White House staff thought to be speaking the truth, or at the very least, being very amusing.

In the climatic scene where Josh is brought in by immediate supervisor, Toby,  to apologize and make nice with the Evangelical lady and her cohort, Toby, sits stone faced, as Josh recites the apology they have worked on, saying he should not have used the TV as a platform for a quick joke and so on. Toby's boss, Leo, the President's right hand man listens impassively.

Things get even more interesting when the Evangelical shrew says she was offended by Josh's "New York humor" and the apology is not accepted, and at any rate, she knows Josh is about to be fired so an apology from him doesn't count for much. She has got her ounce of flesh but wants more.

Josh tries to cool things off by quipping he is actually from Connecticut, so it's not New York humor.

She doesn't quite realize it yet, but the tide in the room as begun to shift, as we notice Toby's face has gone from expressionless to dark anger. And Toby says, "She means Jewish humor, Josh. She's talking about you and me."

The woman says she doesn't like what she thinks she might have just been accused of, but she presses on.  

Now is the time for power politics, and she looks to Toby and his boss, Leo, to satisfy her demands: They must endorse either school prayer, or an end of abortion or they have no deal.  They have to give her one of these things. She knows she has the power to get Josh fired and now she is using that power to make the White House kiss her ring. 
One of her group throws in that Josh has violated the first  commandment: thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain.

The penitent White House officials realize this woman and her two Evangelical compatriots are now playing hard ball: If you want the Evangelicals to refrain from bringing Holy Hell down upon the White House, you have to give us something we really want, not some simpering apology.

At this point the President enters. We have heard about him for nearly 20 minutes, so his entrance has been well prepared, almost Shakespearean, and he enters amiably, correcting  the pastor who has said the first commandment is to not take the Lord's name in vain, when,  in fact, that's the 3rd commandment, and the first is "I am the Lord thy God and you shall have none other before me."  

The President, smiling,  avers he has read the Bible cover to cover and is as holy as anyone in the room and then turns to one of the congregants and asks him why he has not renounced one of the radical Evangelical groups the President particularly loathes. The man protests he cannot control every faction, and the President's rage boils over as he tells about his 12 year old grand daughter who was interviewed on TV and said she was for a woman's right to choose an abortion, and the next day got a doll in the mail, with a knife through its chest. 

The President orders the Evangelicals out of the White House.  He does not need them and they can go to Hell. 

What we love about the President is that he blows by all the bowing and scraping and the careful parsing of sentences his staff felt compelled to engage in, and he hits the smarmy, sanctimonious Evangelicals between the eyes, just the way we'd love to do, just the way Josh had done, less emphatically, on TV.

He is a righteous man of character; damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.

But as I watched this scene, I realized what I loved about Josiah Bartlett is what Trump's fans love about him. He is brash and bold; he believes deeply in something and he doesn't care if he offends people he finds offensive, and he does not buy the proposition that he needs to prostitute himself before every interest group.

To Hell with you. I can get elected without you.

Politicians never do that, or never did that, before Trump. 

They were always careful to not offend. If they could not agree, they tried to be soothing and respectful. But not Bartlett, who tells the Evangelicals to get their fat asses out of his White House. 

And not Trump.

I've watched three episodes now and the sinking feeling that I've been susceptible to worshiping graven images has crept in. 

What the folks at the White House love is their own sense of power. They are close to the sun there.  Watching the President launch into an announcement of an attack on Syria from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office,  the President's newly hired personal aide murmurs to Josh, "I've never felt this way before." And Josh replies, "That feeling never goes away."

Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the series gives us the emotional tide of working for the President, the sense of being something important, of being powerful. Most of the characters, at least the men, flex their power on lesser mortals outside the White House and you can feel powerful with them, as they intimidate Congressmen, as they humiliate random lawyers in a hotel restaurant, as people in Washington respect their position and power.

In Sorkin's world and in Trumps world emotion trumps reason.  Hitler had the key insight that people want emotion, feelings not logic and graphs. "Trust only your heart! You mind can lead you astray, but your heart never will," Hitler told his fans. Politicians who fail to appeal to the emotions are lost. Just as low energy Jeb Bush, or more famously, Calvin Coolidge--when Dorothy Parker was told Silent Cal had died, she asked: "How can they tell?"

Every episode of "West Wing," thus far, has a tear jerking moment--President Bartlett in conversation with the Black naval officer who is the White House doctor learns the man is proud of his family's history of rising from slavery to prominence and when he shows the President a photo of his wife and new baby the President tells him: "You have more than the past to be proud of." He is saying, "You are part of a vanguard, the proud future."  Not a dry eye in the house. 

But  when Sorkin tries to show the substance of what these Democrats in the White House are pushing for,  it is less convincing. They want to pass legislation, over the objection of the NRA to outlaw "cop killing bullets" as if that is some holy crusade, as if that will really save 55,000 lives a year.  They are not immune from sanctimony themselves. 

Reading "Ahead of the Curve" by Shane Crotty, about David Baltimore has provided me a counter point to "West Wing." 

 Baltimore's career in molecular biology is not without arrogance or ego, but all that is just testosterone venting; what he really is about is trying to understand how cells work, and in doing so stumbles across clues to how cells go wrong and devolve into malignancy. 

As Crotty outlines Baltimore's struggles to find the truth in complex cellular mechanisms,  I'm reminded of what real power is.

Oncology has changed radically over the past 40 years. Time was at Memorial Sloan Kettering Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases, most of the patients on the wards were treated with "poisons" which were delivered in hopes of killing off the cancer cells faster than the normal cells--in hopes of killing the cancer before killing the patient. 

Nowadays, for a wide variety of cancers, therapies are designed to meddle in the genetic expressions of protein kinases which throw switches in the cells from "off" to "on" and result in unstoppable cell growth, i.e. cancer. 

That happened as people in Baltimore's world worked slowly, meticulously toward a new reality.

Halfway through the book Baltimore is hauled before John Dingell's  Congressional committee on investigations, concerning an alleged case of research fraud, and we see the phony power of the bloviating, preening, Congressional staffer, who, when asked "You mean [Baltimore's] humiliation is a necessary part of your enterprise?" replies, "Yes...in science you have to lie to survive."

As if he had any idea what the hell he was talking about.

It turns out, years later, the accusation of scientific fraud was in itself fraudulent and the Committee had engaged in what one of Dingell's home town newspapers called a second "Galileo's Trial."  Reality turned out to be a victim of emotion and the path to the truth required patient, meticulous unglamorous work. 

There are truths which are constructs of human ego--I am important; I am doing great things; I matter. And then there are the truths which you might call, the truth reality and nature impose: When you have cancer. When you face fire in battle. When you see people dying all around you--that is a different sort of truth, and that sort of truth has a way of demolishing the other sorts of truth of the ego.

In his first three years, Trump was lucky. He was able to ride the roaring economy bequeathed him by Obama and the Democrats. 

But then  reality came to bite. 

Disease, pestilence cannot be denied. Oh, Trump has tried, but bodies coming out of hospitals have a way are arguing eloquently.

West Wing gives us a President who has rock solid bone fides: He is a Nobel prize winning economist who spouts Latin phrases appropriate to the moment. He may also be a lawyer and he was governor of New Hampshire. 

But he is every bit a puff of opium or marijuana. Puff, the magic dragon. 

 He is not actually what you need in a President. 

Obama came as close to that image as any President in my lifetime, but he was stymied by a Republican Senate and his "shellacking" in the 2010 midterms spelled doom for any real change he might have wished. 

He was wiser than Clinton, in focusing on Healthcare, and he spent his capital on that, as he should have, but he never could sell Obamacare; he was not enough of a fighter.  

He never got us out of Afghanistan; nor did he manage to close down Gitmo.

He was everything we love about President Josiah Bartlett, but that meant he was too civil.
Mitch McConnell announced his only job was to oppose everything Obama wanted to do. McConnell looked forward to the white backlash election of 2010.
Obama should have got testy and mobilized, we can now see with the benefit of hindsight. But it was not in his character. He did not relish the battle, and he had no wish to humiliate.

Maybe our government needs imperfection to function properly.

LBJ was a womanizer, a buffoon, unsure of his own intelligence in many areas, inelegant, a man who could not wear a tuxedo and look like anything but an impostor.  

But he was one of the most effective Presidents in history, passing the most effective Civil Rights legislation, so effective the Dixiecrats all bolted the Democratic Party and defected to the Republicans.  No matter, he passed sweeping Great Society legislation and said he didn't need the Dixiecrats to win re election. 

Then,  LBJ ran up against a reality. He could not bluster or bluff past a lost war and he wasn't smart enough to get out.

Trump faces the same sort of ineluctable reckoning with COVID.

We can only hope it will bring him down, but I wouldn't bet on it. The American people have found in him the greatest and truest reflection of themselves, as H.L. Mencken warned they eventually would: a downright moron.