LIVING IN A BUBBLE

Way back in the in the later years of the presidency of George W Bush, moderate conservative columnist David Brooks and several other right wing media figures went to visit the  president in the White House.  Everytime they broached the difficult subject of the war in Iraq, he fell back on the same talking points about how everything there was going great, without mentioning any kind of specifics.  Brooks said that even these men who were some of his biggest defenders clearly couldn't believe what they were hearing.  Was the president delusional about what was shaping up to be one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in history?  The answer is even worse: Bush's own advisors later admitted that he told them that he wanted to hear no more negative news about the war, behaving more like an ostrich with its head in the ground than the leader of the free world.  Amazingly,  the average American citizen probably knew more about how poorly the war was going than the president himself did.
Is that really a surprise?  Bush was raised in family of enormous wealth and privilege, and had spent the first forty of his life drinking heavily and avoiding work.  Someone that spoiled could not stand to hear that the voluntary invasion of a foreign country that he had pushed so hard for was turning into a disaster.   In interviews he started to defend the war by saying that history would say that he was right, and to this day he maintains that the biggest regret of his presidency was not passing Social Security reform (!).
I tell this story about our former president to draw an obvious parallel to our current one.  Now, naturally, a war and a pandemic are very different things, and Bush more clearly brought the disaster of the Iraq war upon himself than Trump did the coronavirus.  But the similarities are striking; from the beginning, Trump has downplayed the deadliness of the virus and completely botched the national government's reaction to it.  From saying it would disappear when the weather got warmer to putting his absurdly unqualified son in law in charge of medical supply distribution, Trump has stumbled from one terrible decision to another, just like Bush did during the Iraq war.  And just as Bush's premature declaration of mission accomplished turned out to be a tragic mistake, so has Trump's assertion that the worst of pandemic is behind us and that his administration handled it well, even as the number of Americans infected is actually increasing.  Trump has even started asserting that history will judge him well, no matter how unpopular he is now.  Sound familiar?
The fact that Joe Biden is now the favorite to defeat Trump in November (although I won't stop holding my breath until the inauguration) seems to show a clear pattern in this century: Democrats win the White House by pledging to clean up the mess that the Republicans leave behind.  Just as Obama won by saying he would end the Iraq war and fix the broken economy, Biden is winning by saying that he will handle the pandemic better than Trump has been.
In America, it often seems like  the Republican party is more like a stern father figure (supporting defense spending, tax cuts and law and order).  While  the Democratic party is more like a caring mother (supporting expanded health care, education and protecting the environment).  Right now,  the situation we have  is the wacky sitcom dad that accidentally floods the basement while trying to fix the pipes, and then leaves his wife to clean it up while he drinks beer with his friends!
Now am I saying that rich people should be excluded from politics?  Of course not, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is one of my favorite presidents.  But I do feel that the kind of family that you're raised in can impact not only your life, but the lives of other people around you, and that goes double for politics.  And of course what I really hope is that middle class white voters in this country will stop supporting politicians who pass huge tax cuts for the rich.  And that maybe they could support raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for national health care and daycare.  But I'm not holding my breath for that either.