WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Wednesday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes.
- The networks plodded on Wednesday night, with nothing much new to report, as talking heads artfully kept the ball rolling, even if it was in circles, waiting. President Trump was watching, likely clicking from channel to channel, willing the numbers to improve, calling governors to rant. In Georgia, a state so vital, the governor is a Republican, as is the governor of Arizona.Who messed up Arizona, such a reliably Republican state? Can the president be capable of regret over his pillorying of John McCain? Who gave Cindy McCain her mission?
- Margins that stay frozen for now while we wait, knowing that a secretary of state will walk out to waiting reporters with all the latest county totals that can abruptly alter the dials of history forever. Trump’s few – for him – angry tweets, four of which got zapped by Twitter, are the little puffs of steam jetted from a cauldron of grievance and blame. How are Hope Hicks and Kayleigh McEnany standing the heat, unable to do more than try to placate? Do Ivanka and Jared share the outrage at the grinding hours of anticipation inside the hothouse of power and impotence in the face of relentless vote counting machinery deciding your fate? Son Eric raging with Rudy Giuliani in Philly in the afternoon, talking of hurling legal thunderbolts at the system, probably knowing they’re likely to fizzle.
- What does it feel like as Trump and Biden see the prize so close, so hard won, shimmering almost within reach and seemingly out of reach? After so much work. And suddenly this suspended animation will collapse into a new reality.
- Hanging in midair are all those presences in our lives that will either be advanced or suppressed by the outcome. The coronavirus, congressional gridlock, Boris Johnson and hard Brexit, the birds imperiled by whooshing wind-powered generator blades, fracking. Advancing or suppressed? Stimulus, masks, China, Black Lives Matter, gun manufacturers, solar, wind, asylum seekers. How will they fare?
- Somehow the sight of a visibly anguished billionaire Democratic donor on the business channel, CNBC, was the most persistently moving image of the day after the voting. Barry Diller found it all to be a humbling experience. “It’s a failure on the part of the Democrats,” said Diller. “What we’ve tried to do obviously in these last years is to point out the reasons why we think Trump is a bad character, and I’m not talking about morals, I’m just talking about lying. … And yet at least half the people have said ‘no.’”
- Federal Reserve policymakers, staring into their Webex screens, using the guarded language of people who know that the transcripts eventually become public, ponder the Washington around them as the Federal Open Market Committee wonders what may be required of it someday. And such a contrast as the one voter who switched to paternity leave, posting a picture embracing his newborn son. So unFed-like and somehow wonderful in the midst of such profound uncertainty, the presidency just one part of it. The policy statement is at 2p ET and Chair Jay Powell’s answers amid the unknowables begins at 2:30.p.
- Otherwise the Challenger layoffs report will be at 7:30a, weekly fresh jobless claims at 8:30a along with the important and neglected report on third quarter productivity, from where prosperity is sustained.
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