Beneath the Surface
The Grey Swan Case for A New Democratic Candidate
May 23, 2024 • 7 minute, 14 second read
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
– Emma Goldman
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May 23, 2024 – If all politics are local, then Biden’s got a near impassable row to hoe this November.
Last Saturday was both prom night for my daughter and the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, which takes place in my neighborhood.
For both those reasons, we had a cross-section of potential voters wander past us at school gatherings or through our house, pregaming for the race.
For reasons I’d rather not explain – but will anyway – this is a crowd of people who would ordinarily vote for a Democrat, regardless of whom the candidate is.
Baltimore is as blue as they get. Maryland, barring one successful Republican governor, hosts only one congressional district out of eight. It’s well-gerrymandered to contain nearly all the state’s Republican voters.
As the Maryland primary took place last Tuesday, it’s fair to say every conversation – with kids, young adults, parents – at one point turned to politics. The usual suspects won all the Democrat spots from city council, to mayor, to state legislator, to congressional districts.
One Senate seat is up for grabs because outgoing Democrat stalwart from Maryland, the 80-yr-old Ben Cardin, is retiring at the end of his term this year. The aforementioned popular republican governor, Larry Hogan, will likely take his spot.
Here’s why the local scenario is enlightening for the broader national election in November:
First and foremost, not one of the parade of new to veteran voters would willingly say out loud they supported the Biden-Harris ticket.
In a Democratic state where there are no viable Republican contenders or open Trump supporters, all the candidates ran campaigns against “extremist MAGA Republicans” – even at the city, county and state levels.
And yet, no one expressed support for the incumbent president and his vice president. In fact, the mention of the two of them were often met with chuckles.
What kind of bizarre election is this?
Mind you, as a libertarian, I have no horse in this race myself. The most shocking thing I could add to any of these disparate and random conversations only proved to shock people, if I bothered at all.
When pressed, even in polite society, I paraphrase the late PJ O’Rourke and mumble “I don’t vote” ~ gasp ~ “I don’t want to encourage the bastards.”
Putting my opinions and strategy for surviving an election year aside, the Democrats have a credibility problem at the national level. This morning, betting odds favor the indicted former President Trump. This one from the online odds-maker The Line:
We’re likely accustomed to look at these sites because betting on the ponies is a state-wide obsession in the early weeks of May every year leading up to the Preakness Stakes.
Still, given that Trump is still facing two state and two federal level indictments, totaling 88 felony counts of (fill in the political infraction here), the Democratic party still has been unsuccessful in convincing the general voting public, even here in Maryland, that Biden deserves a second term.
Trump indictments in 2023 alone (source: Wikipedia)
Far more aggressive Trump supporters than me will and do rail against a weaponized Department of Justice. But that’s not likely to sway traditionally Democratic voters, right?
Once the party of “peace and love”, the Democrats also have an issue with the Biden administration’s eagerness to send money to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
Not because of progressive drones protesting in support of Hamas at university commencement ceremonies across the nation. Rather, it’s because of Biden’s inability to articulate a coherent foreign policy strategy that doesn’t include ceding billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded, borrowed money to the defense industry.
That fact doesn’t sit very well with the average voter during tax season, at least the ones in my neighborhood.
Nor does a cooling inflation rate. The “cool” rate of 3.4% year-over-year officially acknowledged for April still means that prices for food, energy, goods and services have been compounding every year the incumbent president has been occupying the basement level of the West Wing.
Consumer prices across the board are 19.3% from 2021-2024 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics own published account. During Trump’s term? It was cumulatively up only 7.8%.
Typically, “the wealth effect” of the historic stock bull market would sway noncommittal voters to choose an incumbent president so as not to fix what ain’t broken. But this wonky election year is anything if not a reminder that “the stock market” is not the same as “the economy.”
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On the economy as a whole, we tend to agree with Reason’s Liz Wolfe:
Quite shockingly, voters don’t seem to like being lied to: Biden said inflation was “at 9 percent when I came in, and it’s now down around 3 percent,” in an interview with Yahoo Finance earlier this week – a claim he keeps making!
Actually, inflation was 1.4 percent when Biden took office—a fact any half-wit can easily find by Googling—and it’s the massive increase in government spending (under the guise of COVID-19, during both the Biden and Donald Trump presidencies) that led to the predictable result of high inflation.
So it’s not just that inflation remains high-ish, or that interest rates are high, but it’s also that the guy in charge keeps trying to act like nobody could’ve possibly predicted or prevented this. That’s not true.
We could go on about how 6.5 million undocumented immigrants have crossed the Southern border in the past three years.
But why? No amount of fact-checking done by the site FactCheck.org is going to explain away the fact that Republican candidates are scaring the shit out of relatively uneducated voters that the nation is being invaded.
Abortion, too, a likely “wedge” issue in November, has lost its sting. Most reasonable candidates are going to do what Larry Hogan has done here in Maryland. He’s a Republican but already owns the phrase “the government has no place in a discussion of reproductive rights. That’s a decision between a woman and her doctor.”
There are plenty of fringe political opinions from both extremes. But at least from a local perspective here, deep in a blue state, Biden and Harris have a credibility problem that their “criminal” predecessor can’t help them overcome – even when his name shall not be mentioned in polite conversation.
Your thoughts? Hit me.
So it goes,
Addison Wiggin,
The Wiggin Sessions
P.S. Our early Grey Swan forecast this year: another Democrat will step up and win the party nomination before too much damage is done.
That forecast was bolstered after Special Counsel Robert Hur, who is also from Maryland, exonerated President Biden of charges he criminally absconded with classified documents when he left the office of Vice President, but went on to state his reason: A jury would perceive the President as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and thus unlikely to convict him of the crime.
But the fact Biden is a forgetful, old White guy only seems to be the beginning of his public relations challenge.
The odds makers at The Line still only give Gavin Newsom a 5% chance of winning the White House. Those odds are exactly what makes such an event “highly improbable” but “entirely predictable.”
(How did we get here? An alternative view of the financial, economic, and political history of the United States from Demise of the Dollar through Financial Reckoning Day and on toEmpire of Debt— all three books are available in their third post-pandemic editions.)
(Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at AmazonandBarnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites:Bookshop.org; Books-A-Million; or Target.)
Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
