Waiting to Exhale

I am under no illusions about what the future holds. Joe Biden was not a transformational candidate and he will almost certainly not be a transformational president. Make no mistake about it: the country did not elect Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Instead it elected a caretaker; someone who can manage the triage room long enough for the wounds to heal. If you're looking for any major legislative accomplishments over the next four years, my advice to you is to not hold your breath because it ain't happening. Apart from a short-term stimulus and keeping the lights on, it'll be business as usual. If, as expected, the Supreme Court upholds the Affordable Care Act, you might see some slight reforms to the law, but that's about it.

It will not be for lack of trying that Biden will fail. His entire campaign was predicted almost exclusively on one premise: restoring a sense normalcy to a political system that has been broken for well over a decade. Trump may be an inept would-be dictator on life support, but his party are experts when it comes to obstructionism, and should either of the two Georgia Senate runoff elections in January go their way, Mitch McConnell will have Biden's balls in a vice grip for the foreseeable future. And even if by some miracle both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock defy the odds and win, Biden will have one helluva job navigating a Senate majority that has Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin in the same caucus with no margin for error. Good luck managing that crew, Joe.

The good news, aside from Trump departing the Oval Office - and it's looking more and more like his coup attempt will fail - is that help is on the way. Moderna and Pfizer have announced vaccines that are 95 percent effective against Covid-19. The nightmare pandemic that has ravaged this country will soon come to an end. That's assuming, of course, that the majority of the population actually gets vaccinated. Vaccines only work if people take them, and from what I've seen on social media, a lot of people will be hard sells.

I can't wrap my head around how some people continue to throw a fit over wearing a mask that doesn't even weigh an ounce and refuse to avoid large gatherings. They treat government restrictions meant to safeguard their health as if it were the second coming of the Boston Tea Party. Such displays of stupidity make me wonder how this country managed to win World War II.

But we shouldn't be surprised. Trump not only broke our politics, he broke our sense of reality. Things are so bad that almost half the population thinks up is down and right is left. Even after this president leaves office, more than two-thirds of Republicans will believe the election was stolen. Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again won't be easy. In fact, it'll be the hardest job Biden will ever undertake.

Am I optimistic? Not particularly. I voted for Biden in large part to get rid of the autocrat in the White House, and now that we are just about two months from that happening, I'm looking forward to being able to exhale. Like millions of people, I just want to know what it feels like to go to bed and not have to worry about what shit he may have pulled or tweet he sent during the night.

Not that there isn't a lot of damage he can still inflict on the nation between now and January 20. He's firing people faster than Macy's the day after Christmas. This score settling is not only childish, it will almost certainly cost lives. While Rudy Giuliani makes a fool of himself in the courts trying to overturn the election, Trump's refusal to direct the GSA to release the funding necessary for the Biden transition team will hamper the distribution of the vaccines. 

My God, six year-olds are better behaved. 

With each passing day, Trump's actions only confirm that the majority of the electorate made the right call when it handed him his pink slip. And while we're not yet out of the woods, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

For our sake, let's pray it isn't a train.