Joe Biden Can’t Restore Normalcy The Democrats may now represent more disruption than coronavirus-fatigued voters want to hazard. Daniel Henninger
https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-cant-restore-normalcy-11598483215?mod=opinion_featst_pos1
Donald Trump Jr. described Joe Biden as the Loch Ness Monster, a lifelong swamp creature. That was patty-cake compared with what Democrats think of and won’t stop saying about Donald J. Trump. Wash away the neurotic personal animus, and the Democratic case for Joe Biden is that by ending the nonstop Trump disruption, or “chaos,” Mr. Biden will restore the country to normalcy. He won’t.
Only the most sound-asleep voters can believe that with one day’s voting in November they can melt the Wicked Witch of Trumpland and dance down the yellow-brick road to more temperate times. Returning to pre-2020 normality anytime soon, no matter which candidate wins, is impossible.
Most people aren’t thinking about the next four years; they’re thinking about the next 12 to 18 months. They are wondering each day when or whether the pandemic will end and what the post-coronavirus world will mean for them and their families.
The economic and personal disruption has been immeasurable. Within weeks, daily economic activity went from normal to nearly nothing—an event with no precedent in modern history.
What comes next for the daily work people took for granted isn’t clear. At first, salaried workers were OK, but then the ranks of people on paychecks were thinned with furloughs and layoffs. American Airlines said this week it would unload 19,000 people. JPMorgan Chase says rotational work is likely to become permanent. Laying off unseen remote workers will be easier in the next recession.
A significant migration is occurring out of urban centers into the more predictable calm of suburban life. Younger people are choosing to live closer to where they grew up.
Normalcy? Joe Biden is running in an election year when liberals are fleeing New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities overwhelmed with protests, homelessness and spreading disorder.
For nearly all families, one of life’s basics—educating their children—is in flux. With public-school teachers and their unions refusing to go back to work under nearly any pandemic conditions, parents are spending evenings discussing immediate educational alternatives for their kids.
The annual fall ritual of going away to college is in disarray. Remote learning for higher-ed is looking more like the long-term normal. Joe Biden may lose the election if college-age voters, always hard to turnout, are in turmoil with their personal lives this fall.
More than any presidential election one can remember, this one will be determined by two overwhelming domestic events—the coronavirus pandemic and the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing on May 25.
If Donald Trump loses, it will be because he confirmed voters’ negative opinions of him with the self-inflating press briefings he ran in the early weeks of the health crisis. Disapproval of his handling of the pandemic hit nearly 60%, while approval for governors was over 60%. Barring a big event, the election was all but over in early May. Then that event happened. George Floyd was killed.
While the case against Mr. Trump is that people can’t take more disruption, the Democratic agenda itself has grown so disruptive that the idea of a Biden return to normalcy is nonsense.
The Floyd-related events have put unexpectedly complex political forces in motion for the Democrats. It was remarkable that no one at the Democratic convention mentioned the post-Floyd protests, looting or shootings, often in black neighborhoods. How hard would it have been for Chicago-born Michelle Obama to say something useful? Instead, Team Biden decided it was in their interest to pretend a major political event doesn’t exist.
And maybe that calculation was right. Back during the pre-pandemic, pre-protest primaries, the general-election difficulties posed to a Democratic presidential candidacy by Bernie Sanders and the other progressives were already evident. Improvising a solution, the Democratic elders (literally) decided only Mr. Biden could soft-soap these “transformative” policies—now codified in the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force—while purporting that the election is entirely about Mr. Trump’s Twitter -sodden persona.
In normal circumstances, Mr. Biden and his convention might have been able to get away with conjuring “10 million well-paying jobs” after his party has banned fossil fuels in 15 years. But in the three-month George Floyd aftermath, the party has moved way past even this platform.
At the same moment the country is struggling through a pandemic of personal and economic uncertainty, the Democratic agenda has stretched to include their intention to overturn a pervasive, irredeemably racist American social structure. And without Joe Biden having to say it, that party to-do list includes truly novel ideas such as defunding big-city police departments.
Add in the Pelosi multi-trillion virus-spending blowout. Surely some sense is growing among suburban swing voters that this Wizard-of-Oz spending can’t go on.
This is the party running on making the U.S. normal again?
For many voters, this election is a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. But the Democrats’ blue sea has risen past embracing transformation to defending tumult. That may be more disruption than pandemic- and protest-fatigued Americans want right now.
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