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By Chris Satullo

When Thanksgiving rolled around this time, one thing for which I was thankful is that we have nearly a year left before America elects its next president. 

Perhaps, please God, there will be enough time for a huge and crucial chunk of the nation’s electorate to emerge from the fog of illogic, hyped grievance, false narrative and wish-casting in which it now wanders. From all over the political spectrum, people are posting things on social media and telling things to pollsters that make little sense.

On the right, people decry the “weaponization” of the justice system, then cheer their lungs out when Donald Trump vows to turn the entire federal government into a machine for punishing anyone who has ever dared to cross or criticize him.

On the left, progressives claim to have no doubt that re-electing the Orange One would be a calamity for the Republic but still whine constantly that Joe Biden hasn’t fixed every item on their long to-do list in precisely the way they’d prefer. This is why, they say, they must consider voting for Cornel West, Jill Stein, Robert Kennedy Jr., or some other fringe no-hoper.

These same folks also love to bash the Electoral College, but they can’t seem to get it through their heads that this hated anachronism isn’t going to disappear magically before next November. Wish-casting as they often do, they wave off the obvious fact that any votes they might cast next November for anyone but Biden will function as a potentially decisive vote for Trump.

A New York Times-Siena College poll of voters in six battleground states freaked out many Democrats when it was released last month. In it, 71 percent of respondents said Biden is too old to be president, while only 39 percent said Trump was.  Biden, folks, is a lean and fit 81. Trump is just four years younger, quite fat, with a perpetually red face that suggest a coronary could hit at any moment. What funhouse mirror are you all using to view these two gentlemen?

What’s more, Trump’s numbers on whether he has either the mental acuity or the temperament to be president, while not great, have actually improved since 2020, even as his public appearances have degenerated into ever-more-rambling, incoherent howls of vengeful rage against an ever-growing roster of enemies, real and imagined.

Meanwhile, Biden, now in the last year of one of the most successful first terms of any president in any of our lifetimes, has seen his numbers on those poll questions plummet to a point far on the wrong side of Trump’s.

It’s as though NFL fans had watched the Turkey Day game in Dallas and came away thinking, “Boy, those Commanders are one tough outfit, but those Cowboys suck.” (Note to non-football fans: Dallas won the game 45-10.)

In the Times’ story about the poll, an Arizona guy who voted for Biden in 2020 says this about the president who organized an effective global coalition in support of Ukraine: “I don’t think he’s the right guy to go toe to toe with these other world leaders that don’t respect him or fear him.” As if Trump were ever anything but a laughingstock to our allies’ leadership. Well, yes, I’ll concede that other leaders fear him – because he’s ignorant, unstable and in Vladimir Putin’s pocket.

The Times-Siena poll, along with others, makes it clear that for most voters, the call comes down to pocketbook issues. And many Americans seem determined to remain glum and sour about an economy that has rebounded from the pandemic and inflation in ways that have left professional economists smiling with impressed wonderment.

“I don’t see anything that he’s done to benefit us,” a Nevada woman told the Times about Biden, whom she voted for in 2020.

Apparently this woman is one of the millions of Americans who think the pandemic recovery dollars they received – and promptly spent – just tumbled down randomly from the heavens, rather than being pushed through Congress by their incumbent president. Apparently she’s too busy listening to Joe Rogen’s or Candace Owens’ podcast while she’s driving to notice all the bridge and highway repairs under way thank to Biden’s infrastructure package – which he actually got done, as opposed to Trump, who merely blathered endlessly about it.

Apparently, marinating in her media diet (likely longer on The Bachelor than the Bureau of Labor Statistics), this woman has not heard that programs initiated under Biden have spurred a boom in domestic manufacturing capacity, including in red states that didn’t vote for him.

Even many progressives, who should be hailing Biden’s surprising fervor for attacking income inequality, don’t seem to grasp that Black unemployment has dipped to its lowest level in history and that the middle quintiles of the nation’s income distribution are seeing, for the first time in a very long time, a gain in real wages (i.e. net of inflation).

Ah, there’s that word again, the one that haunts Biden’s prospects: inflation.  

And, yes, inflation was bad for a seriously long while a while back. And, yes, Biden’s ardent deficit spending to help Americans survive the pandemic’s effects probably did worsen it a bit, even though other global trends are what spawned it. But inflation has been tamed now, while avoiding the recession that most economists thought was going to be the inevitable, grim price for doing so.  

Speaking of illogic, consumer confidence ratings are in the dumps even as consumer spending soars and the stock markets climb to heights never reached even under the rosiest of Trumpian times.

It’s as though America was telling you, “This economy sucks, and I’m really upset about it…but can I show you a photo of the boat I just bought?”

Actually, I do get the lingering sourness to a degree. High inflation was a hard shock to many who’d never experienced it in their working lives, and consumer opinion usually lags a few months behind economic reality.  

Inflation is also a burden that hits everyone in ways visible every day. If you yourself didn’t get a good-paying job at one of those new high-tech plants getting built, that bit of good economic news won’t mean as much to you as the number at the bottom of the grocery bill you just paid. If you don’t have a lot of money invested in the markets, their giddy days don’t help you directly. If you’re  now looking to rent an apartment or buy a house, you’re grappling with one sector where inflation hasn’t been tamed at all.  

I also know that Americans increasingly view the economy through a partisan political filter, so Republicans are likely to cling to a gloomy view long after facts on the ground begin to change.

But why are so many Democrats so down on Biden?

One reason, I suspect, is that, for many progressives, the happy facts on employment  and income contradict their current pet narrative, to wit: For “people of color,” America is an evil and inescapable web of systemic oppression and nothing short of a revolution could ever change that. How could merely tweaking the levers of capitalism suffice?

So often, people would rather hold tight to their grievances and chosen villains than embrace a solution that forces them to adjust their narratives.

Biden isn’t senile, and he isn’t a socialist. He’s a devoted, deft compromiser who’s put his considerable political savvy to work in support of an agenda which, when disassociated from his for-some-reason toxic name, polls wonderfully well with the American people.

Trump is not, and never was, a man worthy of the Oval Office. He is a liar, a bully, a crook, a man almost wholly ignorant of macroeconomics and world history, an insurrectionist with demonstrated contempt for the Constitution, and a man now consumed by dreams of vengeance that each day take on a more distinctly fascist tone. (If the jackboot fits, wear it.)

Only inside the deepest of fogs could it seem that Biden v. Trump is a close choice. That the contest is close – and one now seeming to lean Trump’s way – is exasperating not just to insignificant me, but to a long list of distinguished Americans who joined the Trump White House to serve their country, but left in appalled disgust: John Kelly, H.R. McMasters, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and many more.  Here’s how Kelly put it in a recent interview:

“What’s going on in the country that a single person thinks this guy would still be a good president when he’s said the things he’s said and done the things he’s done.It’s beyond my comprehension he has the support he has.”

One year to go.  May the fog begin to lift soon.

Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia