Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
It has been nothing short of hilarious over the last couple of days watching news pundits try to dissect why the governor’s race in Virginia swung so wildly in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin after the state voted so overwhelmingly for President Biden in the 2020 general election.
Once again, I am left to pick up the “common sense” pieces for the Democratic mainstream pundits whose jaws are on the floor because of a political victory that, in their eyes, not only shouldn’t have happened, but was near-impossible.
I thought about this for the last couple of days and arrived at the conclusion that there were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.
There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.
Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.
“It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.
And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.
On top of this toxic track record, President Biden has simply done a poor job of communicating with the public. His press conferences are often abbreviated and don’t include a question and answer session. At Town Hall events, Biden has constantly stumbled and mumbled over his own words, while his posture and narrative on key issues do little to give the impression that he is acting with any confidence.
All of this can add to an ethos that makes citizens wonder why government would have the gall to intrude on their lives and tell him what to do in the first place.
My guess is that, in Virginia, common sense simply won out.
The second part of explaining Virginia has to do with government under-reach, believe it or not.
While President Biden has been bragging about the number of jobs he has “created” (which, of course, are really jobs coming back after Covid), inflation in the country has been running rampant and the administration doesn’t look like they are serious in trying to address the situation. Meanwhile, analysts like Lawrence Lepard believe the market is on the cliff and is ready to crash.
Just yesterday, it was reported that Lael Brainard was meeting with the White House and may potentially be the next pick to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair. Brainard is widely seen as being more dovish than the already-dovish Powell in terms of her stance on monetary policy. This type of think is exactly what I’m talking about when I say the White House is out of touch, economically, with the middle class.
Some analysts and fund managers are predicting that commodities will “never” return to their 2020 lows again, mostly due to inflation. The country needs a Paul Volcker to rope in inflation right now. Brainard would be every last bit of Volcker’s complete and total foil when it comes to policy decisions.
As inflation and supply chain shortages that there’s “no quick fix” for ravage a country that hasn’t seen anything like it in decades, all the administration – and its mainstream media counterparts – are doing is trying to assure the American public that everything is OK, when it clearly isn’t.
Take, for example an editorial that the Washington Post wrote a couple weeks ago urging Americans to lower their expectations when it comes to supply chain shortages. I swiftly rebutted this editorial in a piece that argued that the left was trying to steal your quality of life by asking you to ignore that something is obviously amiss.
At the same time, the country is dealing with unprecedented inflation that, to the middle class, looks as though it has spun completely out of control. No matter how many times the government or the Federal Reserve claim that inflation is transitory, it doesn’t change the fact that prices for the American middle-class – like many people in Virginia – are rising faster than wages.
And instead of addressing this and taking it seriously, as these cost burdens significantly affect the well-being of American citizens, the government has continued to drag its feet and try to assure the American public that the pain is only temporary and that we are imagining things.
Another pathetic example was when MSNBC put out a tweet yesterday trying to urge the American public that the inflation that they are seeing is a good thing. The tweet, archived by Zerohedge, looked like this:
“Not surprisingly, after getting ratio’ed in a furious backlash, MSNBC did the only thing it could and deleted its tweet, as its latest attempt at mass gaslighting propaganda went terribly wrong,” Zerohedge wrote.
Fox News wrote about the content of the linked article:
An MSNBC opinion columnist is attempting to spin the current inflation crisis as a “good thing,” calling the coronavirus pandemic an “unlikely hero” in a new piece published Monday.
James Surowiecki began his column by suggesting the media has been fearmongering over the consequences of inflation Americans have been facing, calling out an “odd” CNN segment that highlighted the impact of rising milk costs for a family of nine who buys 12 gallons a week rather than a normal-sized family, writing “the segment succumbed to one of the media’s worst tendencies: taking a real issue and overhyping it beyond recognition,” accusing the network of “frightening” viewers instead of “enlightening” them.
The point of noting this idiocy from both the Washington Post and MSNBC in relation to Virginia is to make the argument that there are some problems you can’t explain away in the spin room.
The in the issues of inflation and supply chain logistics are very real and hit the American consumer head-on. Even President Biden‘s proposed solutions for supply chain issues – to micromanage the economy even more and print more money – are far off base. The Biden administration knows nothing about economics and has completely lost touch with the middle class, which I believe is the second reason they lost Virginia.
As I said earlier, the Democratic Party is going to have to get back in touch with the middle class that it claims to represent before midterms and the 2024 general election. You can’t run on a base of defending the worker while paying people not to work – it’s spitting in the face of those who get up every morning and earn. You can’t advocate for empowering the middle class and then burst through their front door to try to tell them when and how their children should be vaccinated, while at the same time ignoring that the price of basic goods and groceries has gone up double digit percentages over the last year in a lot of households.
No matter how long people have sworn their allegiance to the Democratic Party, there is always going to be a “fault line” where common sense usurps political affiliation.
For some people, this fault line is further left than President Biden has taken us so far, but for many people – like the ones in Virginia – it has already been crossed. To continue reading…
—
To support this type of journalism, I’d love to have you as a subscriber. Zerohedge readers are entitled to 10% off an annual subscription, which you can use at this link. You can also sign up for free here.
