Together, we can finish the job!

Campaign slogans, now and then

In 1984, an ad for President Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign declared “it’s morning again in America.” Under Reagan’s leadership, the ad continued, “our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

I wasn’t buying it. I was a teenager then, not yet old enough to vote, but I didn’t like Reagan one bit. I especially didn’t like his VP, George Bush, former head of the CIA, patently involved in skullduggery of all sorts. In the first election for which I was eligible to vote, in 1988, I voted for Jesse Jackson in the democratic primary. Months later, when Bush won the White House, I wore a pin that read “it’s mourning in America.” It felt like dark times. Little did I know.

I have never missed voting in a presidential election, although my enthusiasm and hope have waxed and waned. I always voted blue, except when I voted green. In 2020, I voted for neither of the decrepit clowns on offer.¹

But I still agree with some of what the Democratic Party stands for. I am still pro-choice (although the excitement that some democrats show for abortion has always been repellent to me). There are other policies on which I have changed my mind, but the Democrats have not. I no longer see the virtue or value in affirmative action, for instance. There are yet other positions that the Democrats have that seem to be incomplete and shallowly held, primarily there to polarize an angry base—gun control comes to mind. But mostly, in today’s Democratic Party, I see a dangerous suite of policies being thrust upon a loud and confused populace by an incompetent leadership.

Joe Biden is running for reelection. His campaign slogan, as found on both his official website and his twitter banner, is “Together, we can finish the job!”

What job is that, Joe?

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Is the job that you hope to finish the selling out of the American people to Big Pharma?

Oh, but you now claim that “we’re going to keep standing up to Big Pharma, and we’re not going to back down.”

Fascinating. Remember when you had the federal government spend north of 30 billion dollars on unsafe and ineffective new drug treatments that were marketed as vaccines, and then further helped Big Pharma with endless PR, throwing good money after bad, and mandates that reached nearly every corner of the economy? Do you know how many people lost their jobs, their families, their lives, as a result of those actions?

Do you care?

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Or is the job that you hope to finish that of reducing the size and influence of real science such that it can be drowned in a bathtub?²

Your NIH and CDC perpetrated hoax after scientific hoax on a scared and gullible American public, bureaucrats hiding their lies behind lab coats and advanced degrees.

Your FDA pretended that a drug that has long been designated an essential medicine by the WHO was only for horses, and its lawyers then tried to backtrack in court. They were—thankfully—roundly slapped by a judge this week.

Your Office of Nuclear Energy at the DOE hired a dude with kinks so public—including pup handling—that the crime for which he was ultimately fired seems tame by comparison. Sam Brinton, deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition, was fired after he was discovered to be in the habit of stealing women’s suitcases at airports and then parading around in their clothes.

But hey, what has science ever done for us?³

Let’s finish the job.

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Or is the job that you would like to finish that of confusing all Americans into believing that up is down, two plus two is five, and what they can see with their own eyes is less trustworthy than what the internet assures them is true?

You talked with and promoted a young man who had made several prior attempts at becoming famous, but the one that stuck, for which Dylan Mulvaney was invited to the White House, was cosplaying as a girl. You promoted a different man who is cosplaying as a woman to assistant secretary of health; Rachel Levine has since been celebrated by USA Today as one of their “Women of the Year.” In the world you are shepherding in, women aren’t even the best at being women anymore. You have denigrated women’s rights to single-sex spaces in locker rooms and bathrooms, domestic abuse shelters and prisons, while shaming those who resist. In your administration, ideology and platitudes matter, but women do not.

The schools are overrun by ideologues who are certain that parents need to sign waivers in advance if their children are to receive antibiotics, but if a girl declares that she’s a boy and chooses a whole new name and identity for herself, well, the parents don’t need to know that, do they.

To the steady drumbeat of claims of a healthy economy, the cost of living has skyrocketed. Everything from electricity to eggs has become wildly more expensive. And forget about buying a home—the prime rate has nearly doubled under your watch, putting mortgages out of reach for many. Every federal agency spends resources on “diversity equity and inclusion” while ignoring the working class, and most of the middle class, too.

Congratulations, Joe. You’ve managed a lot. There are many citizens in the canoe with you.⁴ But there are many—many—who would once have embraced your world, but now see it for what it is. It is a shell game, a farce, and it’s not at all clear who is in charge. We the people deserve a leader, not a puppet.

We deserve a country that privileges reality, democracy, and merit, over fantasy, authoritarianism, and equity. We could do without the influence peddling, too.

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In the run-up to 2024, we are being set up for another face-off between the same decrepit clowns as last time.⁵ Are we really to believe that this is the best that America has to offer? Even when, with our own eyes, we can see Bobby Kennedy Jr. standing right in front of us? And Vivek Ramaswamy? And so many more?

“Let’s finish this job,” you say in your campaign video. “I know we can. Because this is the United States of America, and there’s nothing, simply nothing, that we cannot do if we do it together.”

Gosh, Joe. It kind of seems like the job that you want to finish is the United States of America itself. In which case, I’m afraid you may be succeeding.

Compare Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan to that of Biden forty years later. It’s morning in America is hopeful, forward looking. Whether or not it actually felt like morning in America then—and I now believe that I was more cynical about Reagan’s leadership and legacy than was called for—the message was one of possibility. In comparison, Let’s finish the job seems resigned, plodding.

Let’s finish the job is a slogan for people at the end of their lives, for a party at the end of its reign, and for a country at the end of its glory.

Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail, 1980. Getty / MPI

1. Credit to Bret Weinstein for this apt description of Joe Biden and Donald Trump

2. With apologies to Grover Norquist.

3. Apart from the aqueduct and sanitation and roads that is. And irrigation. And medicine…Scientists are like Romans, I guess. Monty Python, as always, ahead of the curve:

4. Evergreen’s equity canoe lives on. See Mike Nayna’s three-part documentary for the story, and Benjamin Boyce’s 24-part catalogue of the insanity that took over a college that we both once loved.

5. The ferocity with which the democrats are going after Trump has to give a person pause, however. He may well be decrepit, and a clown, but he is also seriously under their skin, which might suggest that he is capable of revealing things about them that they cannot abide. The whole escapade makes it look like the democrats are far more concerned about themselves than they are about the American people. That said, I have seen nothing to suggest that Trump isn’t also primarily concerned about himself.