We pundits occasionally make predictions that fool us into believing we’re blessed with uncommon insight. One, for me, was forecasting Republican gains in the 2002 midterm congressional elections against the historical grain. I had a hunch the nation would rally to George W. Bush in the first election after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The GOP duly gained two Senate seats, recapturing the majority snatched from it the previous year by Sen. Jim Jeffords’s defection, and also gained eight seats in the House.
But for every bull’s-eye, there’s an offsetting clunker — a dart aimed poorly that wobbles in flight, then bounces off an outer ring and falls clattering to the floor. That’s what has just happened to my confident January forecast that Sen. Kamala Harris would win the Democratic presidential nomination. Fluently acerbic in debate, of mixed race, Californian (and so backed by a mother lode of votes), she seemed a potent force. Now, she is out and reduced to news stories about whether Joe Biden might pick her as his running mate.
Speaking of Biden, since I’m in the mood for fessing up, I must admit he’s showing more resilience than I expected. Still, I cling to my view that national polls, which he tops, are irrelevant, and Iowa and New Hampshire will prove fatal to his presidential pretensions — pretensions that show signs of stretching on to the crack of doom.
It’s hard to see any serious Democratic contenders appealing to rural America. They subscribe to an increasingly radical, secular agenda born and bred in coastal states. These seem alien in such towns as Imogene, Iowa, which the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney visited for our cover story, “Eroding America.” Like so many towns dotted across the continent, Imogene is losing inhabitants. But it hasn’t lost hope, and it’s a place — there are still many of them, thank God — that prizes community, neighborliness, and self-reliance rather than government intervention.
America loves the automobile, and it used to have good reason. Think of road movies. I bet you picture a crimson Cadillac convertible or some other glorious machine from the past. What I bet you don’t see with your mind’s eye is one of the featureless blobs that make driving so dreary these days. Nicholas Clairmont explains that cars have become boring and all alike because they are designed by government regulations, by gray bureaucrats rather than by people who care about style and driving oomph.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Daniel Ross Goodman reviews Martin Scorsese’s new film, The Irishman, Eric Felten can’t get no satisfaction with his Christmas lights, Kyle Sammin reviews Amity Shlaes’s incisive history of the Great Society, and Thane Rosenbaum argues that revenge is a legitimate motive for action, as is shown by so many movies about the courage, fixity of purpose, and moral clarity of vengeful heroes delivering justice to bad guys.
