Messaging is generally the most overrated aspect of electoral politics. But it’s not nothing. And Democrats need to do better at it. I just wrote a way too long post on this. But it really comes down to this. President Biden has to learn a lesson from President Trump and brag more about the economy. A lot more. And do it consistently. In every public setting. And about COVID too.

Job reports have been up and down this year. But they’ve actually been consistently revised upward after the fact. That’s happened every month for the last six months for a total of 625,000 additional new jobs. In August the number doubled. But this gets drowned out. Revisions of earlier months don’t make headlines. That’s life. But the power of the presidency is to push these things to the front of the conversation.

The far-right’s push to make America the Wild West again continues.

Over the last half dozen years the rightist-populist (shorthand: Trumpist) war on expertise has created a highly polarized conversation about the role of expertise in democratic public life. But the debate about booster shots shows how those of us who are on Team Expertise have perhaps slightly overshot in this contentious public conversation. Or perhaps ‘overshot’ isn’t the right word. It shows how once we set aside conversations with idiots and bullshit artists there are real nuances, as there always has been, in the balance between expertise and democratic self-governance.

Let’s start by making a few points clear. Especially in the hard sciences we really should defer to people with professional expertise. Not sign off all decision-making, mind you, but really show great deference to the organized and systematic accumulation of knowledge which is a centerpiece – perhaps the centerpiece – of our civilization. The question is often on what questions specifically is the expertise relevant?

Here’s where you get to the booster question.

The latest from the jury deliberations in Kenosha.