Deja vu, again

I am suffering a little deja vu.  Twenty or so some years ago I had just been transferred to Australia.  Wonderful place and wonderful people.  But as with any new country, other people, other ways.

I am driving into work early one morning, listening to the news on the radio.  They are interviewing the Prime Minister John Howard about some new proposed legislation.  The interviewer points out some flaw in the logic, or inconsistency in the data or some other evidence.  Howard acknowledges and right then and there, on the radio, proposes a change that is going to have to be made to the proposed legislation.  Not a bargaining compromise but a change because they got the facts wrong.  

From a country with 330 million, half of them seemingly working in DC for the government and where everything is reviewed fifteen times, then study grouped half a dozen times, then polled several times and then reviewed by some grizzled old operative before it even sees the light of day much less is formed into legislation, this seemed astonishingly amateurish.  Agile, yes!  Nimble, yes!  But a proper way to form and and communicate legislation?  Well, it wasn't what I was accustomed to.  But, other people, other ways.

Shift to the present.  On Tuesday January 11th, Biden and Harris came to Atlanta to rally support for new voting rights legislation.  Seems like everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.  John Howard looked well briefed in comparison.

First off, this is football country and the University of Georgia Bulldogs beat long-time rival Alabama 33-18 in the College Football National Championship Game on Monday night.

A good retail politician, reading his crowd would have raised cheers by even a brief mention of this long awaited achievement.  It apparently was not mentioned at all.

Local civil rights groups in this Civil Rights capital of the nation, chose to stay away from the Biden/Harris event for variously ascribed reasons, most likely because it was seen as a shallow, insincere effort with very low chances of success.  A forlorn hope among crumbling ambitions.  

Then Biden mentioned a set of three pairings of good guys (One Republican, one unaffiliated, and one Democrat) and three bad guys (all Democrats) to illustrate being on the right side of history.  It came across as if he were ignorant of what should be readily known facts.  

Biden further enhanced the appearance of unhinged emotionalism by comparing the legislation to the Civil War in terms of its consequentiality.  A war in which we lost 620,000 men.

Then, in testy and uncontrolled anger, he created the impression that anyone opposed to his legislation must necessarily be ignorant and a racist.   

Then, a couple of days later in Washington, D.C. two Democratic Senators announced that they were not going to support the abolishment of the filibuster, a necessary pre-condition to the voting rights legislation.  The entire hand-wringing exercise had been for nought.  

So much for playing the role of the great uniter.  Or the role of the great leader.  

And all the time I am thinking, Biden may be mentally in decline but we have twenty layers of fact checkers, event planners, speech writers, policy planners, legislative reviewers, and Congressional head counters surrounding the president.  How could all of them not be doing their jobs.  I am left with seemingly three possibilities, equally improbable.  They are all idiots; they are all incompetent; or they all thought this was a good approach.  

Puzzling times.