Articles by Grady Means

The Republicans in Congress are on the verge of enacting a historic tax reform program that will lead to radical change in California politics. The law taking shape will eliminate much of the federal deductions for state taxes and mortgage interest. California voters initially will react with fury, but when the dust settles, they will then turn on state and local governments to ask how all this tax money is being spent and who approved these programs and taxes.

The year’s end is a time for reflecting on the past year and preparing for the new one. Most people are looking forward to moving past COVID-19 and its lockdowns and returning to “normal life.” But, for Joe Biden, still popping Champagne corks after the Electoral College vote, 2021 may be creeping up to become his worst nightmare. America was severely broken and fundamentally changed during 2020 and it will take a long time to fix it — a job that President-elect Biden is unprepared to handle.

What happened? Joe Biden finally got the big job. He’d get the great house, get to entertain in the front of the cool plane, (almost) everyone loved him, and he could set up a comfortable retirement. His close friends were gathered around his Christmas tree, expecting all kinds of great gifts, but all they found in their stockings were … lumps of coal. The Grinch had stolen his Christmas.

All of that is a long-winded way of saying that, by far, the most important job in the Biden administration will be director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Pity Joe Biden. He is the dog that finally caught the bus and he is soon to be political roadkill. While he celebrates his victory in the Electoral College, powerful forces already are engaged to doom him and his presidency. His two central problems are that he has set the wrong expectations and that his policies will not work in the current domestic and international political, economic and military environment.

Election results appear to be in, but any progressive triumphalism, or claims of a “mandate for radical change,” will hit a wall — radical insanity lost.

Joe Biden has a foreign policy plan that is so secret no one knows what it is, not even Joe.

The Biden/Harris public statement speaks, predictably, with election language, about rebuilding the world’s “trust” in and “respect” for America (read: not-Trump), a “middle class” foreign policy, and, of course, environmentalism.

This political year can be understood through the lens of a religious war. Both sides are doctrinal; neither will entertain the other’s arguments or points of view. Disagreements descend to personal invective. Heretics are rooted out. Rhetoric is extreme, and there is violence. It is a zero-sum game — neither side wins unless the other loses.

It is the worst of politics.

The Democrats appear to have achieved the near-impossible: They have wrecked their winning hand by making the election not about Donald Trump.

Had they remained calm and above the fray, the Democrats could have focused on the unlimited Trump excesses in character assassination, accompanied by his grating self-congratulation, and skated to a 60-40 electoral landslide. Statesmanship and political sophistication could have assured an overwhelming and sustained victory. But, in a party dominated by childlike impulse and shrill overstatement, largely devoid of political or economic balance, they may have engineered their own political suicide and shifted the electoral balance to Trump.

Poor Joe Biden. This is his third try, but the progressive wing of his party painted him into a narrow, no-win corner with the demand that his vice presidential pick be a woman of color. While it’s clear that most Americans would agree that it’s time for a female president or vice president, Biden found himself forced to pick from a pool of women who were either too radically progressive, too inexperienced to become president, or simply unable to help attract more votes to the Biden candidacy.

During the 2020 Democratic primary, the party was unable to produce a single strong, capable female national leader. Of the 3,979 delegates committed during the primaries, the Democrats voted to give only 60 of those delegates to the female candidates. After running a particularly disorganized and chaotic campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) dropped out, netting zero votes and zero delegates, and was neither popular nor considered politically viable.

America may be “exceptional,” but Americans are often fools. That is especially true when you feed them scraps of wildly wrong and useless data. Suddenly everyone is an instant expert on climate change, education or health care.

I cannot count the number of dinner parties I’ve disrupted by asking “committed environmentalists” a simple question: “Have you even read the IPCC reports?” Those are the U.N. Climate Change reports, often referred to as the “settled science.” They do not say the world will end in 10 years, 100 years or 1,000 years, and do not provide a compelling argument for the immediate destruction of the world economy, with endless misery for the poor, to achieve “zero emissions.” Ditto Stanford’s CREDO studies, which strongly support charter schools for the poor. Ditto the National Health Insurance Experiment, which suggests “Medicare for All” might lead to Medicare for None.

But the most egregious recent example of Americans swallowing scraps of nonsense data is COVID-19 “cases data.” Suddenly, everyone in the neighborhood is an epidemiologist with religious fervor. But, self-righteous though they may be, they are largely wrong.