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Perhaps you have seen the video of Hillary Clinton delivering the victory speech she had planned to give on election night in 2016.
Here’s the long excerpt “Today” showed.
Had Clinton taken the oath of office in January of 2017 and won reelection, I found it startling to realize this morning that she would have only served about five years of her eight.
Three events – the Trump presidency, the election of 2020, and the pandemic – have warped our collective and individual sense of the passage of time as much as anything in our lifetimes.
I had to check myself three distinct instances to make sure I was right about this Clinton presidency thing.
To be honest, I’m still not really sure.
In any case, Clinton’s friend Joe Biden, about whom she always thought of as a potential president as Barack Obama did, is actually in the Oval Office now.
It is a room with a very full inbox.
Here’s my thumbnail sense of how President Biden plans to solve some of the major issues the world, the nation, and the Democratic Party face right now:
Inflation: Pass trillions in new spending, count on the Fed to lend a big hand, and hope business and consumer behavior doesn’t make it worse.
The supply chain: Urge business and labor to adapt best practices, hope that consumer behavior changes somewhat, get the pandemic under control.
Ukraine: The threat of sanctions and other economic sticks on Russia, keeping Europe on Team USA, negotiating with Putin, telling the Ukrainians that NATO membership is years away, win a staring contest with one of the planet’s great starers.
The geopolitical competition with China: Build a quasi-NATO of the Pacific, bring some manufacturing home, something something with trade, espionage, assume Beijing will be distracted by domestic challenges.
Beating the pandemic: Finally find a way to get more people vaccinated.
Climate change: Pass Build Back Better, use every possible executive action, continue to press for international deals.
Iran: Sanctions, wait for Arab Spring II.
Immigration: No idea (and I don’t mean that I have no idea…), re-adopt some Trump era policies, get Central America and Mexico to have better economies and less corruption, hope people stop wanting to come to the U.S.
Taming the negative societal impact of social media and tech monopolies: See what ideas all the egghead regulators they have been put in place want to do after the midterms.
Getting to the bottom of what happened related to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021: Defer to Congress.
Preserving American democracy: Jaw, jaw, jaw.
Uniting the country: Encourage Republicans to come to their senses by bashing them and/but appealing to their better angels, throw up their hands.
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Passing Build Back Better: Leverage, wear down, rely on Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer.
Protecting voting rights: Overcome the challenges of the 50-50 Senate.
Overcoming the challenges of the 50-50 Senate: Rely on Hill Democrats to leverage, wear down.
Winning the 2022 midterms: Pass BBB, sell the heck out of the benefits in the real lives of real people of a remarkable amount of first-year spending, adopt and adapt the Terry McAuliffe playbook, hope Republicans nominate the wrong people in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, and Georgia.
Winning the 2024 presidential election: Hope/assume Republicans will nominate someone who is flat-out unelectable.
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Ending as we started, with something that is both unbelievable and paradigm-shifting:
The nation’s large and diverse group of Hispanic voters is showing signs of dividing its support between Democrats and Republicans more evenly than in recent elections, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, a troubling development for the Democratic Party, which has long counted on outsize Hispanic support.
One year after giving Democratic House candidates more than 60% of their vote, according to polls at the time, the Journal survey found that Hispanic voters are evenly split in their choice for Congress. Asked which party they would back if the election were today, 37% of Hispanic voters said they would support the Republican congressional candidate and 37% said they would favor the Democrat, with 22% undecided.
Hispanic voters were also evenly divided when asked about a hypothetical rematch in 2024 of the last presidential contenders, with 44% saying they would back President Biden and 43% supporting former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 63% support among Hispanic voters, nearly 30 points more than Mr. Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a large survey of the presidential electorate.
If the implications of this survey play out in any manner close to what the data suggests, Democrats will indeed be wiped out by a Red wave in 2022 – and there might not be anything like a flat-out unelectable Republican presidential nominee in 2024 (even if that person is named “Trump”).
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