A WILD FINISH

 In early August of this year (which feels like ten months ago!) I wrote that I was feeling cautiously optimistic about the upcoming presidential election.  And now, with only around two weeks to go before before that big day, I'm feeling a little less cautious.

The funny thing is that, with everything that has happened in the last two months, the polls have hardly budged.  Joe Biden has consistently been running a lead of around ten points nationally over President Trump, and Biden also leads in most of the important swing states.  Amazingly, this is basically the same lead that he had way back in the Democratic primaries!  Biden has even out performed the president in campaign donations, a rarity for a presidential challenger.

The televised debate between Trump and Biden back in September was a chance for Trump to dig himself out of the hole he's in, and not only did he not win, he may have dug himself in deeper.  Instead of looking presidential, Trump displayed his true character as a bragging, insulting, dishonest bully.  Only Trump himself and his loyal base thought that he did well.

And when Trump revealed that he  had tested  positive for Covid 19, he received no sympathy bounce.  If anything, his own infection seemed to personify his failure to slow down the pandemic.  And that is what has been hurting him politically more than anything else; the president may have survived  his bout with Covid 19, but it could still drag down his presidency. 

The problem for Trump is obvious: the pandemic was a serious problem that required a sober, consistent, well thought out response from him based on information from scientific researchers and other experts.  In other words, the complete opposite of the chaotic style of governance that Trump had brought to the White House from the very beginning.  The fact that he dismissed the dangers of the outbreak, and then often ridiculed masks while often contradicting the advice of his own scientific advisors shows just what a mess he has made of this crisis.

And it appears that Trump's flailing attempts to dig up some kind of October surprise (from pressuring his Attorney General William Barr to arrest Joe Biden and Barack Obama for some vague and absurd crime to his refusal to disavow Qanon)  are failing because it's hard to distract the American public when they know that the pandemic is still raging, with almost two hundred and twenty thousand Americans dead as of this writing.  It looks like, for the first time in his life, Trump has been confronted with a problem that he can't sue, ignore or insult away.  And while I'm sure that he will attempt to deny the results of the election if he loses, Biden's lead seems strong enough to dispel that denial.  Like I said before, I'm cautiously optimistic about the election, and hopefully in  few months America will have a decent and admirable leader again.