One of the crucial differences, if not the crucial difference, between America and Europe is that Americans, on balance, are more optimistic.
It has been that way, really, since the founding. The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville famously recognized this American trait in the early nineteenth century.
It’s also been validated by a Pew poll as recently as 2015. Americans are “upbeat” while Euros are a bunch of Gloomy Guses.
The Europeans who came here in waves, escaping the poverty and totalitarianism of their continent, tended to be among the more hopeful and ambitious types of their group, the optimistic risk takers, amplifying the contrast between the old and new worlds.
It may be a bit simplistic—and, yes, a counter-narrative exists exemplified by this year’s, again nauseating, Pulitzer winner “1619,”—but American positive thinking accounts as well as anything for the great expansion of the United States into the most powerful country in the world.
And therein lies the basic problem for Joe Biden and the Democrats in the Year of the Pandemic 2020. (They obviously have others, including the candidate himself, who appears to have reversed the recent trend and made 87 the new 77.)
Since what seems like time immemorial but is actually only three and a half years, Joe and the Dems have largely built their political opinions and virtually everything else on 24/7 attack dog criticism of Donald Trump.
First it was Trump-Russia collusion (erased), then it was an impeachment about… what was it?… oh yes, about thirty seconds of a phone call to the president of the Ukraine (also erased)… and now it’s about “mishandling the pandemic.”
All three reflect a tremendous misjudgment of the American people that de Tocqueville could have explained to the Dems two hundred years ago. They, and their media friends, have turned into, if they weren’t already, what Spiro Agnew (no de Tocqueville, clearly, but this at least was memorable) referred to as the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Stuck in their basements figuratively and literally, Biden and the Dems have little positive to offer.
With three, or is it six, trillion already spent on the pandemic and more to come, the trillions and trillions of further “free everything” spending proposals from their house leftists Bernie Sanders and AOC seem so bizarre it’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around where the money could possibly come from. (Gold mining expeditions to Alpha Centauri? Elon Musk, call your office.)
How does this all add up for Donald Trump, an eternal optimist if there ever was one, who wants us all to get back to work in the American way? (Besides being optimists, we’re also workaholics.)
A pile of good news has recently appeared for Trump—the best of which is a new CNN poll of the battleground states showing Trump ahead 52 to 45. Even though Biden is still ahead, for now, in the popular vote, that portends a bigger electoral college advantage for Trump than he had in 2016, when it was already substantial.
Biden’s vaunted “lunch bucket” appeal with the working class doesn’t seem so great after all, especially since his allies—Democrat governors—have contracted a severe cases of stay-at-home-itis, locking up their citizens with no end in sight.
With blue collar folks losing their jobs by the millions while white collar rich Dems continue to earn their high salaries working from home, the once people’s Democratic Party is branding itself, consciously or not, as the party of elites. Trump, not Biden, turns out to be the tribune of the working class.
So it’s not surprising the president has an even bigger lead in the only poll that really counts since it is still early days, the poll that has the greatest reputation for accuracy—the betting odds.
There Trump is up by a solid 10.2 over Biden, according to the Real Clear Politics average. And if you look at their graph,
David Adams
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