The Jerk in the White House

In his regular New York Times column Bret Stephens characterizes the 2020 presidential campaign like this:

In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win.

How to avoid that outcome?

The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate,national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensus, threats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve, and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory.

But anyone who thinks blowout government spending, partly financed by an unconstitutional and ineffective wealth tax, is going to be an electoral winner should look at the fate of Britain’s hapless Jeremy Corbyn.

What would work? Smart infrastructure spending. New taxes on carbon offset by tax cuts on income and saving. Modest increases in taxes on the wealthy matched to the promise of a balanced budget.

What these proposals lack in progressive ambition, they make up in political plausibility and the inherent appeal of modesty. They also defeat Trump’s most potent re-election argument, which is that, no matter who opposes him, he’s running against the crazy left.

Hence the second point. Too much of today’s left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness. But millions of ordinary Americans see it, and they won’t vote for a candidate who emboldens and empowers woke culture. The Democrat who breaks with that culture, as Clinton did in 1992 over Sister Souljah and Obama did in October over “cancel culture,” is the one likeliest to beat Trump.

I think his assessment is about right but his prescription is wrong. The problem that the Democrats face is that American voters just don’t care as much about Trump as the Democratic leadership does, there is no consensus on issues on the part of those voters, and a GOTV campaign is likely to produce the same result as the 2016 election with the additional indignity of an even lower popular vote total.

As evidence I would suggest the following. First, Trump’s net approval rating, based on the RCIA, is the highest in his presidency. That’s after months of complaints, investigation, fulminating, and impeaching Trump, accompanied by non-step in-kind contributions from the press.

The second bit of evidence is that Gallup finds no consensus in the views of Americans on the most important issue. The issue with the greatest response, “the government/poor leadership”, is inclusive not just of Trump but of the House, the Senate, and the civil bureaucracy. Proposing major expansions of the reach of government, as all of the top Democratic presidential candidates have, in essence doubles down on a losing issue.

There certainly is no consensus on building roads and bridges, increasing gas prices, and balancing the budget. That’s nonsense.

What I think the Democrats need to do is both simple and insuperably difficult. They need to convince the voters that they care more about them, the voters, than they do about themselves. And for goodness sake ix-nay on the eplorables-day.