Every time I hear President Joe Biden speak, I wonder who in their right mind could support a candidate whose own right mind is hit-and-miss.
During a recent trip to New York, I found out. They live on New York’s Upper East Side and meet for lunch at a neighborhood restaurant to plan fundraisers to reelect our dotard in chief.
I know that because my husband and I were sitting at the next table, and when I heard someone say “Republican,” loudly, with a sneer, I tuned in to listen. That someone had mentioned New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz’s now famous directive for lefties: “If you know anyone who voted Republican — including friends and family — you should shun them.”
Our adjacent diners joked that Saltz did not target them because they had no friends or family who voted Republican — and would make an exception for their doorman Mario (laughter all around).
We soon learned that Southern Republicans are especially irksome because we mouth-breathing rednecks pose the biggest threat to Biden’s reelection. No surprise there because when George Bush was reelected in 2004, New York columnist Kurt Andersen reported that distraught New Yorkers had renamed the South “Dumb—-istan” and circulated a chart showing “an inverse correlation between a state’s average IQ and its vote for Bush.”
Five election cycles later, New York’s Upper East Siders sound confident that flipping Georgia in 2020 means that the red-state South is ripe for reform. We learned that Stacey Abrams will play a key role in our conversion, so we expect Abrams to expand her definition of Georgia as “Jim Crow redux” to include the whole South. The left’s faith in the Abrams effect made my husband joke that Biden may have had Abrams in mind when he ended his June 16 speech with “God save the Queen!”
The toffs also think that the “Floridiots” will come to their senses in 2024 — not because the NAACP has issued a “travel advisory,” declaring Florida “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals.” Rather, our would-be reformers are confident that Trump will do their work for them savaging “Ron DeSanctimonious” and that Florida’s new six-week ban on abortion will incite even Republican women to vote pro-choice.
When we got up to leave, my husband dared me to turn around and drawl “Y’all come,” but I decided not to invite dialogue with a squad of New York sophisticates. My braver self would have confessed to eavesdropping, asked why so many New Yorkers are moving to the South and mentioned the 14,000 “double dippers” who are registered to vote in both New York and Florida. Better yet, I would have quoted the late Florence King’s hilarious appraisal of the type that “will not be satisfied until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians.”
I do not know the location or date for their fundraiser, but during the subway ride back to Midtown, I pictured a penthouse where a circle of Gucci-clad swells write checks for $25,000 and discuss plans to redeem the redneck South. Writer and former CEO Roger L. Simon has said the type is afflicted with “moral narcissism,” but my husband’s analysis is better. Phil thinks that New York’s Upper East Siders just gave the term “deep-fake” a whole new meaning.
The hour we spent sitting next to a table of Biden fundraisers was more instructive than a New York Times editorial or a replay of a Joy Reid rant. I learned that if “Florida is the place where woke goes to die,” New York’s Upper East Side is the place where the plutocrats meet to plot the demise of the red-state South.
