Colin McEnroe: Race for prez comes down to a dance-off
First things first. A grilled cheese sandwich should be able to beat Donald Trump in the November election. His approval ratings have stayed underwater with remarkable consistency in his first three years in office. He has the lowest average approval rating at the beginning of an election year of any president since Gerry Ford (and we all know how that turned out).
Bad news. The Democrats have not been able to locate a grilled cheese sandwich and have instead chosen a couple of old guys who can’t figure out how to operate the Hamilton Beach Panini Press their grandkids got them for Christmas.
Bernie Sanders: “I don’t want a panini! I want a grilled cheese sandwich, dammit! Doctors, what do they know?”
Joe Biden: “I don’t know how this contraption works, man, but Jill can probably keep it from hurting me. As Lincoln said, ‘the world will little note nor long remember the thing situation deal.’ God bless America. Jill is my wife.”
How did this happen? How did we go from Big Tent to Big Stent?
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Actually, Mike Bloomberg and his two stents dropped out of the race Wednesday after having competed in the primaries for exactly one day and failing miserably, although he did extraordinarily well with soccer moms in Mapusaga, American Samoa.
Meanwhile, let’s hear it for former New Haven mayor Toni Harp, who was announced as Bloomberg’s Connecticut co-chair Wednesday morning, scant hours before Bloomberg dropped out. That’s going to look great on her resume. “CoChair, Connecticut for Bloomberg, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., 3/4/2020.” The other co-chair was former state party kingpin Ed Marcus, who is 92 and is reportedly considering a run for president in 2024.
The thing is, the party had a candidate who was better than a grilled cheese sandwich, could operate a relatively complex panini press, and, at a spry 70, looked like she could run a 10K in a kicky Eileen Fisher outfit made of lightweight wool from Argentinian ranchers who regenerate depleted grasslands through holistic farming methods, provided she was allowed to listen to an audiobook by French economist Thomas Piketty during the race.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Elizabeth Warren. Hello? Anybody out there?
I really don’t get it. Were people worried that she wouldn’t do well against Trump in debates? In the space of a few days, she ended both Bloomberg and Chris Matthews. She was just getting warmed up!
Do you know what Warren did while she was fighting for her survival in South Carolina and the 14 Super Tuesday states? She put out a coronavirus plan. Of course it was well-researched. Of course it was sensible. Warren called for universal access to testing and care, a $400 billion stimulus package to help the economy bounce back and, most important, paid leave for all infected people. (Both common sense and scholarly research compel the conclusion that we’ll all be better off if infected people stay home.)
Do you know what President Trump did? Called the “Hannity” show on Fox News to say that it is “just my hunch” that the death rate (from what he called, at one point, “Corona flu”) is lower than epidemiologists say it is and then said there are “thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better ...”
This is the most dire challenge of his presidency and he is less well-informed about it than the average American. For the record, even though asymptomatic infected people can do their jobs just fine, putting them in the workplace allows the virus to work its way quickly toward higher-risk people with less robust immune systems.
I wish I had a theory to explain Warren’s campaign collapse that was more imaginative than “because she’s a woman,” but I think it does boil down to that. It didn’t help that the only other time the party nominated a woman for president she lost to Trump. I know that seems reductive, but voters are easily spooked, like horses.
We’re left with Bernie and Biden.
Bernie Sanders deserves our thanks for dragging the Democratic Party back toward its core values. I’m serious about that. During the last four years, Sanders’ great achievement was to remind a party he didn’t even belong to of what it’s supposed to believe.
Having said that, I stand firmly among the people who believe he’s a much tougher “yes” for the centerright people who are dying to get rid of Trump and saying “just give me somebody I can vote for.” I think he hurts down-ballot races too. If Warren can’t be president, it would be interesting to see her become Senate majority leader, but that means picking up more Senate seats. Bernie wouldn’t be much help.
Also, at any minute, he could go from talking about health care to needing it. If Sanders is the nominee and is rehospitalized in October, you can kiss the election goodbye.
That leaves Biden. Big sigh. A Biden-Trump race feels like a campaign scripted by the Farrelly brothers — a preposterous dance-off between the reckless and ignorant behavior of the president and senior-moment crazy talk of the challenger.
But that’s just my hunch.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.