Political Observer shares his thoughts!

What does Miss Haversham’s wedding cake have to do with Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay? Telling question? Miss Haversham was left at the alter, and her life ended is a moment of betrayal, that metastasized into a lifetime. The Reader need only look to Dickens literary motive, for this characters appearance of love’s betrayal and its costs to the victim.

I might argue that Ganesh exalts in the what Dickens used so tellingly in the character of Miss Haversham, as refracted through the eyes of Pip? Ganesh’s talent is to riff on themes, gathered from all and sundry sources, the first paragraphs of his essay trades on the literary/political talent of a master, of that usable past? It could have been borrowed from Balzac or Walter Scott ? Or The Reader can look to Ganesh’s literary enthusiasm for the American Silver-Fork novelist Tom Wolfe?

Editor: Question: a bit too showy?

A month has passed since the near-assassination of the 45th and, who knows, 47th US president. When did you last think or talk about it? When did you last see the photo of Donald Trump’s raised and defiant hand, which promised at the time to be one of those icons that cross so deep into mass culture that a Warholian silkscreen might be made of it?

I don’t mean to suggest that the world’s most famous outpatient has been somehow short-changed for his brush with death. The point is rather this: the transience and tenuousness of almost all political moments. Few excitements outlast the next batch of news stories. It is a warning the Democrats should hold on to in what is becoming, for them, a glorious but perhaps over-celebrated summer.

https://www.ft.com/content/74a9645c-bf47-4c99-8e30-829a93a9f0ba

Editor: the following quotations offers Ganesh Chatter, stripped to its near essentials. The Reader might pick and choose her own ‘favorites’!

How might their moment in the sun go wrong?

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A lead of one or two points in national polls-of-polls, a tad more in some Midwestern states, a deficit in the south-west: none of this warrants either Democratic giddiness or Republican moping.

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If the Democrats surge ahead after their upcoming convention in Chicago, this warning will age badly.

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Americans were pessimistic enough about the economy as it was. Trying to square this with GDP growth that is the envy of the high-income world, some liberals have resorted to a theory of partisan bias: that is, Republican voters, consciously or not, are hamming up their struggles with inflation.

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A consistent 70 per cent or so of respondents are negative about “economic conditions” in the FT-Michigan Ross survey, which tallies with a similar Gallup question. There just aren’t enough Republicans in America to sustain numbers of such comprehensive badness.

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But an incumbent party’s ideal campaign line — don’t entrust your prosperity to the opposition — is less and less of an option.

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Like her line on criminal justice and the Israeli-Palestinian question, the dilemma can be fudged in these vacation months, when voters are half-watching at best.

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…all of this is clever and effective, not to mention true. But it also reeks of, well, August. When politics resumes in earnest in the autumn, the fundamentals of this race should come through.

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Above all, after almost a decade of chasing or holding the White House, Trump’s oddities are priced-in. Harris remains ill-defined and only half-tested.

For a sense of the evanescence of politics, remember that Biden’s State of the Union address was hailed for showing the vigour of a prime-age man. That was March. As she contemplates the light speed with which things are liable to change, his successor should take heart, but also fright.

Editor: the final paragraphs of Ganesh’s essay represent a carefully massaged chatter!

Political Observer