Last night's debate set me free

Good news: we really don't need to worry.

Everything everyone is saying about the debacle—um, debate—last night is true. If you have an opinion, I have no argument against it. It’s all true. But the debate gave me an epiphany, and I want to share it with you, because now I don’t have to worry, and neither do you.

unknown (not relevant to copyright status), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here it is. Read it and be set free, like me.

Joe Biden has not really been running the country for the last 3 1/2 years. He is president, and he appears at the appropriate times, pen in hand, to sign things. He gives speeches, sometimes creepy. Sometimes sleepy. He meets with foreign leaders. He attends conferences. He shows up at debates. But he’s not running things, and last night’s debate makes that fact crystal clear. Proven beyond doubt.

Joe Biden has a big staff. He has “handlers” at the White House. He has advisers. He has Jeff Zients—whom you have never heard of if you don’t chum around the Democratic Party insiders in Washington—that’s his chief of staff, who replaced Ron Klain. Klain, on his own time, returned to help the president prepare for his debate. But no amount of prep time could de-glitch Biden, who is, charitably, beyond his prime.

This is the man who has the codes to the “nuclear football.” He’s the guy who can give the order to initiate Armageddon. He’s the guy who can order troops to fight and die. He’s the guy who does none of this. He is there and he says things to people, who do what they think is best, and when it’s not really what Biden wanted, they listen to their boss scream and curse. Then they do what they think is best anyway.

Biden’s staff regularly walks back things he says, and Biden means the things he says, but he’s not running things. And that makes me sleep well at night, knowing it.

Go back before Joe Biden in the White House and we have Donald Trump. Before the world had the ‘rona, the White House had a bad case of the flu called Donald Trump. Trump did not run things. He fired people by tweet. He ranted and raved and threw lunch against the wall. He incessantly posted inflammatory things on social media. He stared into a solar eclipse with unprotected eyes.

Trump did things so stupid that you’d be forgiven to think his cerebral cortex was damaged from all the unprotected sex he had with women who craved his money. Thank God Trump wasn’t running things. Even his kids, Ivanka and hubby Jared Kushner, had more sense than he did. Trump went through more smart people—a veritable brain trust—than any other president I can think of. They left in droves or he fired them. But he was not running things.

Trump was watching television all day. Literally watching stories about himself on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other news channels all day. On his schedule, they called it “Executive Time.” During this time, he was not running the country. Trump leaked national security secrets (they’re not secret when the president blurts them) to the Russian ambassador. He bilked the government for millions in jacked-up fees for the Secret Service to stay at his properties, but gave away his $400,000 salary. A nice trade, and he looked benevolent doing it.

But Trump was not running the country.

The tariffs, the border, all that, yes, sure he did it. Biden did too. But both presidents had their handlers, and Congress was mostly a gaggle of morons and press-hounds playing for their own glory.

Thankfully, during both Biden’s and Trump’s term, the Supreme Court acted with some rationality and thought. Even if you don’t agree with SCOTUS rulings here and there, they weren’t drooling idiots and sycophants. But that’s their job, isn’t it?

Let’s go back further. Barak Obama ran the country. He was definitely in charge and worked with his staff. He did his level best to get his policies enacted, and the best he could do was a half-baked health care plan that doesn’t work (never worked) but nobody can get rid of. Obama’s foreign policy had good intentions but truly horrible results. America survived Obama.

Back further. George W. Bush ran the country. He was very engaged. His staff even managed to wow Bono. Bush did a lot for AIDS in Africa. He flexed the U.S. military’s muscles and kick the behinds of all kinds of people whether they were our enemies or not. He flew a plane onto a carrier (he didn’t land) and proclaimed “mission accomplished” under a banner that read “mission accomplished.” It took another 18 years, and we never accomplished much.

The country survived George W. Bush.

I wish Matt Drudge never existed. Because then perhaps the best president we have had in the last 40 years, Bill Clinton, would not have spent a year devolving into the kind of slimy lawyer who defines “is.” In more genteel times, discretion among the press corps and discipline among the White House staff would have prevented such indiscretions as playing “Baron von Xanten and the milkmaid Margery Tucker” with an intern outside the Oval Office from reaching the public. I mean, JFK, LBJ, FDR and likely other presidents had their “moments” and these scandals didn’t hit the news.

Clinton had the misfortune to be president during the adolescent years of the Internet, before such things could be trashed as “misinformation” and banned from social media. Clinton ran the country. He did it while playing cards and doing crossword puzzles at the same time. He read complex papers and briefings and digested them while he goggle-eyed young interns. Clinton even worked with Speaker Newt Gingrich to balance the budget. Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

America survived Bill Clinton, but American Christianity probably didn’t. A whole bunch of the most virulent folks pointing and shouting “sinner!” were projecting themselves onto Clinton, when they had their own stuff going on. A shame, and now that evil fruit has bloomed on the tree called MAGA. I blame Matt Drudge.

Let’s go back to 1989. Ronald Reagan spent the last year of his second term suffering from Alzheimers. There might have been days when The Gipper got up from his bed and didn’t know Nancy, or his valet. Reagan had a large staff. He liked them, and they liked him. He had advisors. He had Vice President George H. W. Bush, who was the head of the RNC and a heck of a glad-hander, if not a great president. Reagan governed into decline, and the country did not perish, though the Soviet Union was in the throes of chaos and breakup. We all could have died in an nuclear inferno, but we didn’t.

Our country is just that way. We’re resilient and the president, even if the job of that office is to run things in the executive branch of the government, doesn’t really run things. Even an engaged president who reads everything and micromanages (Jimmy Carter personally took over scheduling of the White House tennis courts, which he denied), doesn’t run the country, and can’t ruin it.

The debate last night cemented one fact into my cranium: neither of these people on the stage deserved to be there. Neither should be running the country. But the counterfact slammed me like an angel smacking the back of my head. Neither is going to run the country. In fact, as president, neither of them did.

Sure, Trump will try to fire five or ten thousand government middle managers under Schedule F. The courts won’t let him, and the case will wind its way to the Supreme Court over four years, then nothing will happen. The Senate, which will swing so blue that the RGB hex code for it will be #0000FF, will never approve a single MAGA-head to run any cabinet-level agency, so they will be run by acting heads, supported by people who want to keep their jobs and oppose Trump, and will run like a snout-rapped chihuahua to the media to yap incessantly about everything the Trumpists do and say.

Sure, Trump will try to dismantle international agreements. The other countries are already preparing for that and will work around it. Ukaine will get aid from others, and even if Trump tries to hand the country over to Putin, the rest of the free world (led by, maybe, Finland and Poland?) will find a path to keep Russia out. If you don’t believe that, you underestimate the blood-enmity between Finns, Poles and Russians.

Sure, Trump will be a daily annoyance and embarrassment. But he will do what he did the first term, except more of it. He’ll sit and watch television all day. He’s old, you know.

Biden, if elected (though it now seems less likely, but who knows?), will be like Reagan’s last year in office, played four times over. It will be a shame, but other people will run the country. Perhaps Congress will find its cojones, which it locked in a box sometime around 2001 and lost the key.

Yet, I will not worry. And neither should you. The fantasy that the president runs the country is just that, a fantasy and a fabulist tale told by the political parties that want your money and your vote.

There. Now you’re free, like me. You can thank me for it later.