FIRST LOOK INSIDE THE GOLD VAULT BRICKS:
Pictured above are the Gold Vault Bricks containing the only Jumbo State Gold Bars known to exist bearing the name of the First Bank of the United States of America and the state they were minted for. State residents are rushing to get them because the Gold Vault Bricks are still loaded with four 5-ounce Jumbo State Bars layered in valuable 24 Karat Gold. Everyone lucky enough to get them better hold on to them because there’s no telling just how much they could be worth.
Joe Biden ran for president on a “return to normalcy.” His challenge is that there are three competing definitions of normalcy for him to contend with.
Biden didn’t actually use the slogan “return to normalcy.” But as numerous political observers (including yours truly) noted during the campaign, that was both Biden’s implicit appeal and his best shot at victory. As Jonathan Martin and Sydney Ember of The New York Times wrote in March 2019, “Biden, in speeches at home and abroad, has used much of the first part of this year pledging to restore the dignity he believes that the country has lost in the Trump years, promising a restoration rather than a revolution.”
For much of the primary season, the competition among Biden’s Democratic opponents was over who could offer the most radical agenda. When it became clear to rank-and-file voters – and a few key Democratic leaders – that such radicalism could cost Democrats the general election, Biden surged to front-runner status.
The interesting thing about Biden’s return-to-normalcy campaign is that it predated the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden has accomplished the easiest of the three normalcies already. Simply by refraining from venting his id on Twitter, he has turned down the political temperature.
But there are two other normalcies Biden has to address. Today, for most Americans of either party, a “return to normalcy” means being able to eat out, go to work and, most of all, send their kids back to school. If the first normalcy was instantaneous upon his inauguration, this second one is proceeding at a snail’s pace. Biden is getting a grace period, but national exhaustion with the pandemic is cumulative, and patience is in short supply.
Biden’s reluctance to forecast when Americans will return to anything like a pre-pandemic life may be prudent. He clearly believes in under-promising and overdelivering – a marked contrast with Trump. But there’s certainly hardball politics involved as well.
The Biden administration’s reluctance to dial down the government’s crisis rhetoric is surely part of the strategy to cram through, on a partisan basis, a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package. Given that a large number of former Obama administration apparatchiks are now in the Biden administration, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they believe “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
Similarly, Biden’s sometimes painful effort to stay on the good side of teachers’ unions – a core constituency for him and his party – illuminates how the Democratic base isn’t on the same page with most of the public on what constitutes normalcy.
And that points to the third normal. Among party activists, the presidency is supposed to be an engine for social progress. A restoration of serenity and equipoise – which Biden hinted at in his inaugural – is the last thing the base wants from this White House. They want action of the sort they expected from Obama. Indeed, they want Obama-plus, given that the new conventional wisdom on much of the left is that the Obama years were a “wasted opportunity.”
Biden’s almost unprecedented suite of executive orders dismantling much of Trump’s legacy but also pushing a base-pandering agenda on everything from energy to racial and transgender issues is its own kind of a return to normalcy – the normal partisan and ideological activism we’ve come to expect from presidents.
This third normalcy is the most regrettable, but it’s likely to be the most enduring, which is why our politics will ultimately be equipoise-free for the long haul.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of the online news site The Dispatch (unrelated to The Columbus Dispatch) and the host of The Remnant podcast. @Jonahdispatch.