04-24-2020, 09:18 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-24-2020, 09:39 AM by Genuine Realist.)
(04-24-2020, 09:10 AM)BostonCard Wrote: Well, based on their respective perfomences:The problem is that I don't think you are voting for anyone anywhere in the world.
At the next Italian election, I will certainly not vote for the M5S or the PD (the Italian governing coalition)
At the next German election, I will not vote for Angela Merkel's CSU party
At the next Spanish election, I will not vote for Pedro Sanchez' PSOE party
At the next UK election, I will not vote for Boris Johnson's Torries
Unfortunately, not being a citizen of those countries, I will not have an opportunity to hold them to account for their missteps. The one leader who I will have an opportunity to hold to account is Donald Trump.
There is no doubt that facing a global pandemic is a much harder task as a leader than, say, jawboning Canada and Mexico into updating their trade agreement with the US or getting a corporate tax cut passed through a congress controlled by your own party (two pick two things that the President accomplished). Maybe 90% of leaders would or are failing at that task. Unfortunately, we only get to evaluate our leaders based on the job they do against the challenges they face; we don't get to see the alternative universe where we have a different President in office. We don't get to find out if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or John Kasich or one of the dozen other Republican candidates running for office would have done better under the circumstances. All we know is that facing the biggest and most important challenge of his Presidency, the response by this administration was, well, you know my opinion of it.
Now, maybe you believe that under the difficult circumstances presented that this administration did as well as it could have and was more proactive, responsive, and effective than any other leader would have been. Since there is no way to prove the alternative scenario, it is not an invalid point of view. I think it betrays the tyrany of low expectations in leadership,
I intend to vote for Biden, but not because I believe he'd have managed this one jot better than Trump. It's because he's more decent.
And no matter how you vote, you might roll your eyes at columnists and pundits who suggest that somewhere, somehow someone actually implemented better solutions to this mess. That does not appear to be the case.
That was the point of the post.
I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness - yeah, and a little looking out for the other fella, too.
