(Dobbs) It's Depressing. And I Don't See Much Way Out
If Republicans win big in November, it will be hard to recover what we’ve lost.
Maybe there’s hope.
The picture that’s been painted of Donald Trump by the January 6th Committee evidently has been too much for even some of his most ardent advocates to bear. Two publications that have long backed him— both owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News— at long last have just declared that they’ve had enough. In a piece titled “The President Who Stood Still on Jan. 6,” The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his.” The New York Post this weekend was even more scathing, calling Trump “unworthy to be this country's chief executive again.”
If they can finally see it, maybe more everyday Americans will too. But there’s also still despair.
Between the divide on guns, the pain of inflation, the rightwing Supreme Court, and the millions of Americans who still swallow Donald Trump’s shameless lies, we’re not out of the woods. Not even close. I hate to say it but it’s depressing to be an American. And even more depressing to be a Democrat.
First, because for all his failings, President Biden does not deserve the low approval ratings he has right now, which threaten to bring down the whole party in November’s mid-term elections and give control over our lives to right-wing extremists. Even some Democrats are publicly besmirching Biden, which as columnist Frank Bruni points out, can be “to some degree self-defeating.”
Second, because so many Republicans— in some states, the majority of Republicans— are voting for zealots who, in the mold of Donald Trump himself, are doing all they can to undermine our democracy. It’s the better part of two years now since he lost the presidency by seven million votes, yet they still are regurgitating Trump’s egocentric, unabashed, and absolutely unproven lie that Democrats stole the election because, if they hadn’t, they surely wouldn’t have beaten Trump. And, they’re downplaying the insurrection of January 6th as “political protest.”
— What we are up against —
Third, because in almost every state controlled by Republicans, new laws make it harder, not easier, for typical Democratic constituencies to vote, laws that reduce the times and places to submit a ballot, laws that put election oversight under the control of partisan legislators which, according to a report released last month titled A Democracy Crisis in the Making, “would increase the risk of election subversion.” Once election outcomes are in the hands of a single party, there is nothing to keep them from tilting to the extremes.
And fourth, because going back a full fifty years to the first presidential races I covered, with only a few exceptions, Republicans have had few scruples about fighting fair. Remember how they falsely claimed Michael Dukakis had freed a killer from prison? How they stamped Vietnam vet John Kerry as a traitor? How they painted Barack Obama as a Muslim? They’ve always played hardball. Democrats haven’t, at least not as well. To their detriment, they still don’t.
It’s depressing, because short of a record turnout for Democratic candidates come November, I don’t see how to turn any of it around. Yes, Democrats are fired up about guns and abortion and civil rights and all the rest, but Republicans are fired up about their passions too.
In the case of the president’s low approval ratings, they began to tank with the pullout from Afghanistan. It was chaotic and, for thirteen members of the military targeted by a suicide bomber, fatal. But Biden gets little credit for taking on the nasty mess he inherited: an unappeasable Taliban enemy fighting on its own soil, a corrupt Afghan government which never fully armed the army we paid for, and an unworkable withdrawal on an unrealistic timeline irredeemably negotiated by his predecessor. Yet at the end of the day, almost 125,000 American and Afghan refugees successfully escaped, thanks to the evacuation this president orchestrated.
He gets little credit either for successfully battling the headwinds he inherited from the country’s battered economy, from its eroding infrastructure, and from the pandemic. After a record post-Depression high of almost 14.7% unemployment in the last year of Donald Trump’s presidential term, it’s now down to 3.6%. Employers are adding jobs again. Our economy right now is growing faster than China’s. Biden worked both sides of the aisle to win passage of the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” to modernize everything from roads and bridges, to drinking water and wastewater, to broadband and public transit. Then he won support the same way for victims of the pandemic economy. And he built upon the foundation of Trump’s vaccination program and made tests and vaccines available to every American.
President Biden also is getting pilloried for inflation, even though no president could have avoided it, because it’s largely a consequence of factors beyond his control: supply chain shortages brought on by the pandemic (which Biden has been mitigating), and the inescapable shockwaves of the war in Ukraine, brought on by Russia (which he has been tempering). Americans gripe about a nationwide average of more than $4 for a gallon of gas, and they hold it against the president. What they don’t seem to appreciate is, even at $4-plus, it’s still a bargain. In Europe, people have been paying $6 and more.
In the case of election laws, A Democracy Crisis in the Making identified 229 bills, almost all Republican bills “that would allow state legislatures to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with elections.” They are, as the report put it, “solutions in search of a problem.” And yet the Republicans pushing them are unrepentant. Basically, they don’t contest the integrity of races they win, they only seek to overturn the ones they lose.
Which brings us to the Americans who have bought into the copycats and wannabes and zealots who sometimes seem to almost out-Trump Trump.
These candidates aren’t winning every race, but they’re winning some. The other day I quoted Liz Cheney and it bears repeating: “The forces that want to drag us over the edge are strong and fighting.” Politicians who spout “Stop the Steal” are getting their party’s nominations. Case in point: QAnon queen Marjorie Taylor Greene has been renominated to the House from Georgia. A politician of principle like Cheney, by all accounts, is going to lose hers.
And finally, the Republican game of hardball. They’ve gotten so good at it that after I denounced the dark designs of Trump’s disciples in a column last month, a guy I know wrote to me, “I am not a fan of any of the politicians that you have pictured and found fault with. However, you left out the biggest of the scum balls. Hunter Biden is probably the worst of them all.”
Really??? We have citizens who attack our democracy, we have politicians who overtly join forces with racists and anti-Semites, but even if he’s as corrupt as they charge, Hunter Biden is the worst scum ball? Thanks to right-wing media, this is Republican hardball at work.
And of course there is the unified Republican refrain that Joe Biden isn’t running on all his cylinders. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman did his best to rebut it: “For all you knuckleheads on Fox who say that Biden can’t put two sentences together, here’s a news flash: He just put NATO together, Europe together and the whole Western alliance together— stretching from Canada up to Finland and all the way to Japan— to help Ukraine protect its fledgling democracy from Vladimir Putin’s fascist assault.” And, as Friedman points out, “not a single American soldier was lost.”
Biden isn’t one of our most articulate presidents, but he is one of the most productive. He hasn’t solved our nation’s problems, but he has taken action. Yet by changing the narrative, the Republican game of hardball inevitably will claim some wins in November.
Then, there will be less chance than ever of protecting a woman’s right to choose. And a greater chance of losing laws that safeguard interracial and same-sex marriage, a greater chance of laws prohibiting contraceptives, a greater chance of more banned books.
And there will be less chance than ever of gun reform, which means more slaughters like we’ve already seen this year in Buffalo, Uvalde, Highland Park. After the massacre at the elementary school in his own state, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, after professing that “We’re all completely sickened and heartbroken,” had the audacity to add, “Inevitably when there's a murderer of this kind, you see Democrats and a lot of folks in the media whose immediate solution is to try to restrict the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens.”
No, Senator, what we’re trying to restrict are mass murders.
Yes, Trump looks pathetic and his acolytes might suffer guilt by association, so maybe there’s hope. But by manipulating elections and misrepresenting Joe Biden, Republicans still might win big in November. If they do, there will be less chance that in our lifetimes, we will recover what we’ve lost. That’s why it’s depressing to be a Democrat. And in some ways, an American..
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Keep up the great work, hoping that more people read your letters Gil
I do think Dems may pick up a seat or 2 in the Senate
The Reps will pick up more state assembly seats
US House likely will swing Rep (God help us McCarthy succeeding Pelosi)