Our next president, Joe Biden, “will restore a lot of rules,” promised Barack Obama in November. And the standards are exactly what America wants back. After the boy genius Bill Clinton, heir of the blue blood to the power of George W. Bush, the visionary trader of hope and change Barack Obama and the disturbing Donald Trump, Joe Biden promises to be America’s first normie president – a guy whose speech is: “I am average.”
On Wednesday, Joe Biden enters the bar that is America like the fat, rumpled man from the 80s comedy and everyone in attendance screams happily, “Norma (ie)!” After the upheavals of the First World War era, and a very abnormal presidency held by Woodrow Wilson, the next president, Warren G. Harding, promised the famous return to normalcy. Biden is taking over because he represents “Normality 2: Re-standardization”.
What people want from Washington is to relax control over our conscience so that we can go back to spending our days talking about normal things, not Washington, like what should happen in the restart of “Sex and the City”, with whom Kardashian Kanye West will be married next, and if Armie Hammer is a cannibal. If all goes well, instead of staying up late rolling the doomsday on our phones, let’s roll the rules: Hey, did you hear that Joe Biden is bringing two dogs with him to the White House? This is normal! Americans will have so little reason to stay up late looking at our phones that there will be a wave of sex: a bonk boom, a shagging tsunami, a loud national party like the end of “Return of the Jedi”, except this time with the naughty teddy bears. By the end of 2021, about 40 million babies will be born and everyone will be called Norm. Even the girls.
Accompanying this New Wave of Standards is a corollary: Biden cannot be Mr. Standards if he does a lot of things that make people angry. Transferring the policy to the Ocasio-Cortezitas of Alexandria would not be normal. Biden’s timid plans for a Green New Deal, a plethora of social justice programs and the opening of borders to anyone claiming to be a refugee would not be normal. They cause division, they make people fight and scream, they will take Americans back to party news channels and toxic social media sites.
Some Washington hands speculated that Biden would have been absolutely fine with a Senate controlled by Mitch McConnell – neither of them announces that, but the two are friends forever – because that would give him a perfect excuse to be a ceremonial president, the kind of guy that closes at 9 am and retires to the basement to talk about the good old days and watch reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show”.
As it stands, with the Democrats of Georgia making the double turnaround, giving Dems the minimum possible majority in the Senate to go with an almost equally anorexic majority in the House, the Donkey Party is shouting that “We unified government control for the first time time in a decade. ”Only technically. No one has ever hit anything with 50 senators. A 50-50 Senate is a sign that the country is divided equally. If the Senate is ordered not to go one way or the other, that is to say: Stay still.
Biden himself said, the day after the election, “the presidency itself is not a party institution. It is the only office in this country that represents everyone and requires a duty to care for all Americans. That is precisely what I am going to do. ”
Biden may be the most popular president since George W. Bush after 9/11 if he continues to think that he represents everyone, not just the small percentage that makes up the activist wing of the Democratic Party. And what does “everyone” want? Nothing, except the end of the COVID Era. With our first normie president, maybe we can all just go back to business as usual.
Kyle Smith is a general critic for the National Review.