Not Looking Back in Anger

 

The Biden Administration wasn't perfect, but it was professional. You want the most benign, bloodless take I can make on it--there you go. We'll be asking ourselves for a long time what else could have been done:

Did they do all they could to prevent Trump 2.0 and bring him to any kind of justice? Did they try hard enough to whip inflation--or at least, leave a bigger impression that's what they were doing? Did they do enough for Ukraine? Could they have done less for Israel and prevent the worst of the suffering in Gaza?

Here's what I do know; hindsight is 20/20. The Biden Administration, like Biden himself, weren't perfect and weren't able to do everything they wanted to do. Biden himself would say, "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." You can pick apart what might have been different, in terms of policy, in terms of politics, that might have given us a second Democratic term. You can ask if Biden should have, oh, right about after the midterms, said that he wanted to concentrate on seeing out his term and promoting a new candidate to lead his party. 

History doesn't give us do-overs, just analysis. I think President Biden. Vice-President Harris, and their team did what they thought was right, and the best they could, and some of the choices weren't great and weren't easy. That's just the adult way. 

This was a team of adults. They weren't hyper-partisans, they weren't boot-lickingly loyal to a cult of personality, there weren't sociopaths among them. This was a team, if you like, of adult, competent professionals who believed in government. They did their jobs without stretching the Constitution until it screamed or with purges of people they didn't trust. 

So maybe there will be other people who want to know whether Biden could have been less old or less stubborn, or whether Harris could have run a different campaign once the ball was in her hands, and you can certainly have a lot of smoke for Merrick Garland and the DOJ, and believe they left something, somewhere on the table, because surely the person responsible for 1/6 and the stash of documents hidden about Mar-a-Lago should have seen some consequences before we ended up on this precipice of democratic government outlooking an abyss or authoritarianism.

But what does any of that do? Here's what I think I've gathered from all I've seen about how the Trump/MAGA dynamic works. 

It wasn't about what Democrats could do. The Republicans will have to determine what happens with Trump and his various hangers-on, and they will have to be the ones who acknowledge it when he fucks up.

And there will be fuck-ups. He isn't surrounded and won't be surrounded by grown-ups and professionals. As near as I can tell, what we will get will be more Trump-like even than before. Elect a clown--expect a circus. Elect a horror-movie murder clown, expect a massacre. 

I'm looking forward with concern, but not exactly fear. What I see no point in is looking back in anger. There's no joy in re-living old Trump scandals except as he returns to the scenes of old crimes, and of course, there will be new ones. 

As for Joe Biden--you won't hear anything more from me than he was a good and faithful public servant. It's what you should expect. It's what he gave, the best he could, and what I know Trump could never do.