PERFORMANCE v. PERFORMANCE ART
Productivity or Entertainment
President Biden last night gave the nation a performance to remember. Despite his life-long speech impediment and advanced age, he delivered a strong, reasoned, and impassionate talk that told the world “I know what I’m doing, I know what I have done, I know what I want to do, and you need to know it too.” Too many voters don’t seem to know what he has done.
The person who claimed the presidency before Joe Biden has also been giving memorable performances around the country. Trump’s speeches are memorable for their three-hour duration, their incoherence, and their nonsensical blather. They are performances as pure entertainment, with no substance, no action, no history, and no sense. And yet, his followers adore him.
The difference between the performances of these two apparent choices to lead our country for the next four years could not be starker. Joe Biden has led a national economic recovery that belied the assumption of virtually every economist who expected a recession. That is what has always happened in the past after a disaster like the pandemic. He quickly untangled supply chain issues that seemed insurmountable, directed desperately needed financial support to those who most needed it, and cut the rate of economic inflation in half.
At the same time, he got congress to pass legislation and appropriate funds to rebuild and replace aging bridges and other transportation infrastructure, expand high-speed internet service into rural areas of the country that overwhelmingly vote Republican, and brought back hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs that had been outsourced to countries with cheap labor. And, when Putin invaded Ukraine, he used his long and deep diplomatic experience to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization so it could effectively assist Ukraine’s defense against a threat to its own democracies.
Trump, in contrast, pushed tax cuts that benefitted mostly himself and other wealthy elites, while ballooning the national debt more than any president since George W. Bush, who refused to raise taxes to pay for his war for control of oil resources in Iraq. Trump’s bungling of the national response to the COVID pandemic led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of elderly people, many of whom had voted for him. Had he not been president, with access to experimental therapies, he too would have died of COVID. Then, on his way out the door, he nearly succeeded in overturning a free and fair election and remaining in power as a dictator for life.
The question facing every voter in this country this year is “Which performance do you prefer?” You can vote the effective performance of presidential duties by a man of proven competence, or the ineffective performance of a showman. One could continue his remarkable work toward bringing our country not just back to its former world leadership position but also moving far beyond it. The other promises openly and without a hint of irony or shame to use his power to destroy our democracy, our economy, our position in the world, and every person who has not shown him absolute fealty.
That is our choice.