Heart Me Out

How an unpopular president can still win the fight against fascism, and what that has to do with the queens of classic rock.

Heading into the critical 2024 election, America appears headed for a Biden-Trump rematch at the top of the ballot. Nobody really wants this. For South Park fans, it’s the classic Giant Douche vs. Turd Sandwich scenario. From Bloomberg,

“Americans aren’t itching for a rerun. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that only 37% approve of how Biden has handled his presidency, while only 38% approve of how Trump handled his. Half of respondents say both men are too old to serve another term.”

In one corner, we have the 77-year old twice-impeached, four-times indicted, 91-count-facing, insurrection-fomenting, career criminal, racist, fascist, liar, former President Donald Trump. In the other corner, we have the 81-year old incumbent, Joe Biden, already the oldest man to ever hold the office. Democrats coalesced around the experienced, steady hand of the former Vice President in 2020 only because of the COVID emergency. Now, I think Old Joe had been doing a remarkable job, all things considered - and I will elaborate shortly - but his poll numbers have been terrible, the party’s base is less than enthusiastic, and - despite the fact Trump is only a few years younger, technically obese, and consumes a trash diet - the Biden age narrative has taken hold. Look - I would vote for a corpse with a ‘D’ in front of their name before I would vote for Donald Trump. Governing, especially at the presidential level, is far more about the people staffing the administration than individual at the center. And as much as my personal politics much more closely mirror those of, say, Cornell West, I know voting third party is counterproductive. We deserve more choices, but alas. America runs on a 1790’s-era operating system with a lot of antidemocratic bugs in the code, like the Senate, the filibuster, Electoral College, legal gerrymandering, and first-past-the-post voting. Like it or not (and I don’t), this is the hand we must play.

I Didn’t Want to Need You

It should come as no surprise that a leftist like myself was not enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s candidacy heading into the 2020 campaign. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren served as my top two choices during the primary, and I was disappointed to see the two beat up on each other instead of directing their ire at the corporate wing of the party. I get it. Politics. There’s only one progressive lane. And the left always manages to cannibalize itself. I was furious when nearly everyone else in the “center lane” dropped out in a matter of days to endorse Biden, raging that the fix was in. I held out hope that Bernie might still pull through, but he dropped out a few weeks later. Still, Sanders surrogates played a major role in crafting what former President Obama called, “the most progressive platform of any major-party nominee in history.” And, from climate change, health care, and taxes to policing, education, and LGBTQ rights - Obama was correct.

Obviously, my corner of the left was disappointed Biden couldn’t get the entirety of that progressive agenda through Congress. No President ever gets their entire agenda passed. "The problem,” according to NPR correspondent Mara Liasson, “is that they oversold and underdelivered, even though what they delivered by any normal metric would have been pretty impressive." Yeah, it was. Look at all of this:

• The American Rescue Plan spent $1.9 trillion into an economy that desperately needed it in the wake of COVID, gave people stimulus checks and an expanded child tax credit, kept others afloat with unemployment benefits, and did the same for state and local governments.

• The Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 billion bipartisan effort, represents a massive investment in the nation’s roads and bridges. Additionally, the legislation includes historic spending for both passenger and freight rail, rural broadband, safe drinking water, public transit, airports and seaports, modernizing the electric grid, a national electric vehicle charging network, and in correcting the harms to marginalized communities caused by past infrastructure projects.

• The Inflation Reduction Act represents the single largest largest investment in tackling climate change made by any nation on the face of the planet. Ever. But wait, there’s more. The bill also improves access to healthcare for many families, allows Medicare to negotiate some drug prices, raises taxes on corporations, and funds the IRS to go after tax cheats.

• The CHIPS Act spends $52 billion into the economy, subsidizing companies to “expand or build new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the US,” as well as spending billions on semiconductor research, workforce development, investment tax credits.

• The bipartisan Safer Communities Act, though its reforms are quite modest, is the first piece of major gun safety legislation to pass Congress in almost 30 years. It introduces “reforms meant to incentivize states to keep guns out of dangerous people’s hands, provide new protections for domestic violence victims, enhance screening for gun buyers under the age of 21, and crack down on illegal gun purchases and trafficking. The bill also provides billions of dollars in additional funding for school safety and mental health resources.”

• The Respect for Marriage Act repealed the inexcusable 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and “guarantees that all states will recognize same-sex marriages, providing important federal protections if the Obergefell ruling were overturned.”

• The Electoral Count Reform Act “specifies the vice president’s role in the counting of electoral votes, and makes it harder for lawmakers to challenge the outcome of a presidential election,” hopefully thwarting future attempted January 6 coup attempts.

• President Biden has gotten 177 federal judges confirmed to lifetime appointments. This does not fully close the gap, as Donald Trump had 245 judges confirmed during his term, it makes a big dent.

• The Biden administration has approved debt cancellation for nearly 3.9 million Americans, totaling almost $138 billion in relief. (author’s note: this includes my own student loans).

• Working with a largely gridlocked Congress, Biden has wielded the pen with 132 executive orders like rolling back Trump’s most egregious executive actions, pardoning people with federal cannabis possession convictions, strengthening background checks for guns, and expanding access to child care & long-term care.

“So you’re saying Joe Biden is some kind of…”

Magic Man?

Hardly.

In the first two years of the president’s term, Democrats couldn’t get everything over the finish line. Bipartisan attempts at police and immigration reforms were thwarted by Republican obstructionism. Comprehensive student loan forgiveness was struck down by the stolen, corrupt Supreme Court. Many of the most ambitious progressive components of the “Build Back Better” had to be removed to win the support of conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, the resulting legislation becoming the watered-down-though-still-impressive Inflation Reduction Act. Manchin, along with Senate colleague and now-former Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, foiled attempts to strengthen voting rights and codify abortion rights by stubbornly clinging to the antiquated filibuster rule.

All of this is incredibly frustrating, but Congress owns this failure, not the President. I know a lot of folks might wish the commander-in-chief could snap his fingers and enact his agenda, but if the Oval Office’s previous occupant taught us anything, it is that no one individual should be entrusted with that kind of power. We don’t elect a king - nor should we. Why couldn’t Biden wrangle the senators from West Virginia and Arizona into compliance? I don’t know, how about corruption? The Republicans don’t have a monopoly on it. Manchin and Sinema have minds (and pockets) of their own. Their owners - fossil fuels and vulture capital, respectively - could offer something Biden couldn’t, and they got the obstructionism they paid for. He’s retiring and will ride off into the coal-hazed sunset in his Maserati, while she is likely to finish third in her reelection bid and fuck off to take a cushy do-nothing job on some corporate board.

Even despite all that, the week after this last Thanksgiving, Jefferson Smith - sitting in as host on the Thom Hartmann program - asked his listeners to engage in a little exercise, and I will challenge you to the same: rank the Presidents of the United States in your lifetime from worst to least worst. Remember, I’m not asking you to pick the best. Start from the bottom. I’ll wait. If you’re reading this leftist blog, your list will probably look a lot like what Smith has observed:

“…when I do the, my little exercise where I ask people to rank the worst presidents of their lifetime. The final answer, the most times I've asked progressives and prodemocracy folks that question, […] It's not always the same. The worst I've heard Reagan, I've heard Bush and I've heard most often Trump and then it moves down. The most frequent final answer, meaning the least worst, meaning the best - grading on a curve - president of people's lifetime, let's call it last 50 years, most frequent has been Biden, his first term, certainly better than Barack Obama's first term, his first term, certainly better than Bill Clinton's first term, his first term better almost certainly than Jimmy Carter's first term. You have to go back to maybe LBJ for a more accomplished Democratic president in their first term.”

On domestic policy, at the kitchen table level, “Biden is resetting the economic trajectory of the nation,” says author Franklin Foer, in an interview with The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland. “In fact, as a matter of substance, he is the most transformational president since Reagan.” Though Clinton, and later Obama, subscribed to the neoliberal consensus that the market always knows best, the Biden administration has resurrected “Democratic principles discarded in the Bill Clinton years, seemingly for ever: old-school industrial policy centered on an activist state making serious public investment in manufacturing; muscular regulation of corporations; and warm encouragement of unionized labor.”

These are all positive developments, and a blind taste test of Biden’s achievements at home should render his reelection a shoo-in. Like LBJ though, the current president finds his domestic wins overshadowed by international events. Just as war in Vietnam bedeviled the cantankerous Texan - ultimately rendering him so unacceptable to a large swathe of his own party he abandoned his reelection bid - Joe Biden’s steadfast public support of the ultra-far-right Israeli government’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza may yet doom his term in office.

Heartless

You know, for a guy who built his brand on empathy for 50 years, it’ been especially heartbreaking to watch as President Biden has stood by the Netanyahu government, offering only mild, token rhetorical criticism, as the Israeli Defense Force has carried out a genocide in Gaza. At the time of this publication, the IDF has now killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians in the enclave - two-thirds of them women and children - in response to the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7.

The Biden administration has aided and abetted this massacre every step of the way. “This administration’s policy [has been] absolutely abominable, devoid of any rationale, devoid of human compassion,” said Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American activist and civil rights lawyer.

From the beginning, the President dismissed calls for Israeli restraint. Less than three weeks into the IDF invasion of Gaza, 7,000 Palestinians - 3,000 of them children - had already been killed. Although international observers had relied upon, and vouched for, the reliability of numbers from the Palestinian Health Ministry, Biden said, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”

Though the US Congress has been gridlocked, and either cannot or will not enact legislation to the benefit of the American people, bipartisan consensus exists on one issue: Israel. By early November, even as the world had begun to catalog the wanton murder of Gazan civilians, US lawmakers had approved $14.5 billion in military aid to the apartheid regime. Since then, the Biden administration has twice bypassed Congress to sell a total of over $250 million worth of weapons to the Israelis.

While Biden has privately expressed frustration with Netanyahu, he has not denounced the Prime Minister publicly. While the President has begun to sharpen his criticism of the Israeli bombing campaign, referring to it as “indiscriminate” and “over the top,” Biden has refused to call for a ceasefire. Furthermore, the administration has wielded US veto power on the UN Security Council to block three separate resolutions calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.

Make no mistake, Biden could end the bloodshed with one phone call.

According to Politico, “Half of U.S. adults say Israel’s 15-week-old military campaign in Gaza has ‘gone too far,’” and “only 31% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s handling of the conflict.” He is bleeding support among young voters, progressives, Arab-Americans, and Black voters because of his stance on this issue. These constituencies feel abandoned by the administration, so…

Alone

Now, here is where we really get to crux of my argument. Heart, led by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson were successful in the 1970’s as a straight-up hard rock act performing songs they had written themselves. Having been dropped by their record label after a couple commercial flops, the band got new management, a new label, and brought in outside songwriters, including Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin. Their sound got slicker; their hair got bigger; and the sisters went full glam for the MTV era. I really want you to watch that video again and focus on Ann, the brunette. If you can’t see through all the hair tell what’s going on here, let this 1988 concert review in the LA Times describe it:

“On MTV, Heart’s lead singer turns into an incorporeal being. The reason? Wilson has committed a sin that image mongers will not pardon: like a lot of people approaching 40, she has put on weight…

This is show biz, and this too-large woman must be de-emphasized through disincorporation. The result? Heart videos show Wilson from the shoulders up. Infrequent full-body shots disguise her in the distortion of fun-house lenses, or position her in distant shadows, caped in black, an orphan from her own band. In her place, the camera focuses on the cavorting of Wilson’s lithe, blond younger sister, Nancy--the guitar player whose figure fits the glamour machine’s stamp.”

Now, let me state for the record, I do not endorse the misogyny and body shaming inherent in such trickery. ANN WILSON IS A FUCKING ROCK GODDESS AND YOU PUT SOME GODDAMN RESPECT ON HER NAME!!! For my money, she’s the best female rock singer of all time (sorry, Stevie Nicks). However, if you think about this November’s Democratic ticket as a rock & roll band, those sleazy video producers ask a valid question. “How do you hide the lead singer?”

This is turning into a massive column, so I’m going to split it into two parts. Next time: so the Democrats need to stick their flailing front man behind a piano to cover up his flaws? What is the “piano” we use in this scenario? And why we better damn well get it right.