Dog days of mailbag

Reconstruction, the death penalty, and Joe Biden is old

The sun is going down earlier but it’s still really hot — not my favorite time of year.

Meanwhile, the big good news political story this week is clearly the victory for abortion rights in Ohio. Kari Lake getting ready to run for senate in Arizona is good news for Ruben Gallego, but I’m not sure it’s really good news for the country. GM’s electric cars will be able to provide backup emergency power in a blackout, while small/cheap electric golf carts can meet many transportation needs. Barbie’s crossed the billion-dollar mark. Semaglutide reduces heart attack risk.

A small example of the kind of projects now moving forward in California thanks to SB-35. In general, apartment construction is hitting new records, which is cool.

M Bartley: What’s your theory behind Biden’s low approval ratings? The economy’s good and improving, COVID is over, he’s not out there tweeting nonsense, republican control of the house means he isn’t pushing any divisive partisan legislation, and yet his approval ratings are still mired in the low 40s, just like they have been for the past 2 years. Why?

Let’s start with the economy. Here, I think, the basic story is that we had a pretty long run of falling real wages that really soured people. That turned around just over these past few months, and consumer confidence numbers have started to improve, as you’d hope. But of course consumer confidence going from “very bad” to “kinda bad” doesn’t necessarily make people like Joe Biden.

What he needs is for the improving trend to continue for three, six, nine more months and for the confidence numbers to keep going up with it. That said, people also don’t obtain direct, unmediated information about the state of the national economy. It matters what they read and see on television. The real wage situation turned around starting in May, and then it was really only in late June that the White House launched its “Bidenomics” push. I think doing it earlier would have rubbed people the wrong way, and this was smart. Positive economic data points, meanwhile, have generated some more positive press coverage of the economy. I don’t want to urge complacency about any of this, because it’s going to be an information warfare dogfight where Fox News will not only invest in forecasting economic doom, but a lot of wealthy business owner types will want to spread negative messaging in hopes of Trump cutting their taxes. But so far, I do think the administration sees the challenge and is taking appropriate action. You, too, can take appropriate action by clicking on and sharing accurate, positive stories about economic trends.

But this gets us to the other challenge for Biden’s approval: Voters keep saying that one of their problems with Biden is that he’s old, and I think we should take them at their word because he is, in fact, old. And not only is he old, he comes across as old — he’s got an old man squint in his indoor appearances (outside in aviators looks way better) and he clearly struggles more to master his stutter than he did 15 or 20 years ago.

But the broader issue here is that while Biden has a lot of strengths as a politician, he’s actually never been a first-rate public communicator. When he was in the prime of life he was known for making gaffes. He had a presidential campaign derailed by a plagiarism scandal. Now, lots of successful politicians aren’t great public communicators. Nancy Pelosi is a genius legislative tactician but she’s not someone you put up in front of the microphone to give a rousing speech. Mitch McConnell is the same way. Biden has been remarkably successful as a legislative leader and policymaker given his thin congressional margin and I think that’s because — not despite — his limits as a public communicator. The public has high expectations of presidential speech-making as a mode of governance but it doesn’t actually work. Biden, wisely, avoids it and gets things done. Making slick television appearances isn’t actually part of the president’s job, and rational people should not see the fact that Biden isn’t very good at it as a big problem.

But making slick television appearances is a huge part of a presidential candidate’s job.

That’s why you basically see two kinds of people winning major party presidential nominations. Either you get someone who is a more charismatic television performer than the average politician (Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump) or you get someone who used to be vice president (Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore). A lot of the people on the Veep-to-POTUS pipeline have been good, effective presidents. But the best-loved presidents are the skilled television performers. Trump does not actually have a large age advantage vis-à-vis Biden. But in terms of “who could plausibly host a reality television show?” he’s clearly the guy. That was true in 2005 and it’s true in 2023, and it’s objectively a problem for Biden’s re-election bid even though I don’t think it’s remotely close to being a good reason to vote for Trump.

I also think it’s important for Democrats to come to terms with the fact that nobody else will be walking onto the stage as a nominee in 2024.

I wish that Julián Castro or Cory Booker had the wisdom and foresight to run in 2020 on a Biden-esque message and try to present themselves as the true heir to the Obama legacy. But they didn’t. So we got the nominee who had the best message and the best judgment, even if he’s not as good at playing a politician on television as those guys. I sometimes try to talk myself into the idea that it would have been better if we let the operatives in smoke-filled rooms pick a nominee and they’d picked Steve Bullock. But the fact is if party elites had that power, they would have picked Elizabeth Warren and lost. Biden and his team showed better judgment than the donors, better judgment than the bulk of the top-flight staff, better judgment than the younger politicians, and better judgment than most of the commentators in the press. That’s how he won, and all things considered, “making good decisions” is a pretty important part of the job.

Zachary Smith: Do you think that decline in church attendance can be primarily explained by your thesis that staying home is more appealing than it used to be?

“Primarily” is a strong claim, but I do think people underrate generic time-crowding as an explanation for all kinds of specific phenomena. These days you can watch Bundesliga soccer matches or argue with people on Twitter or fire up obscure art films on the Criterion Channel or scroll through endless viral TikToks, so it follows that people have to spend less time seeking out things to do outside of their homes than they did previously. The opportunity cost of going to church is way up, and that’s surely a factor in fewer people going.

City of Trees: What's your general take on the death penalty? I'm curious after you said that it “seems good” that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter got the death penalty, and also after you said “true” to a periodic reminder that Jefferson Davis should have been hanged.

I didn’t really think of the Jeff Davis tweet in a capital punishment context so much as expressing a view about Reconstruction.