Look, this is supposed to be a weekly Substack. I’m really not trying to clog your inbox everyday. But… I mean… sometimes things happen.
For a couple of months now, I’ve had a running half-joke on Twitter that “this is simply NOT THE RIGHT TIME to decriminalize marijuana. October is the right time to legalize pot.”
What Biden has just announced isn’t quite decriminalization. He’s pardoning everyone in federal prison for simple marijuana possession, and asking governors to pardon everyone in state prison for simple possession, and ordering his cabinet secretary to initiate the process for rescheduling marijuana as a non-schedule 1 narcotic. To completely legalize it, I’m pretty sure Congress would need to (puff, puff,) pass legislation.
This is a substantively good, politically popular decision. It is the result of decades of serious organizing by a political constituency that struggled for a long time to be taken seriously.
…And, also, it is excellent political timing. And that’s a point worth dwelling on for a moment.
The great sin of the 2016 Comey Letter wasn’t the letter’s substance; it was the letter’s timing. James Comey decided two weeks before the Presidential election to announce he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. He announced on the weekend before the election that his investigation had yielded nothing new. The New York Times ran wall-to-wall coverage of the investigation, including process stories and horserace stories. Even though the story was a nothingburger, it still impacted the shape of the race. Both Comey and the NYT have obstinately refused to take responsibility for this. Comey claims that he had to alert Congress, to avoid accusations that the FBI had been politicized. The NYT leadership asserts that they had to give it wall-to-wall coverage, because it was news!
Without the Comey letter, the headlines in the final weeks of the 2016 election would have been focused on the Trump campaign running damage control on the Access Hollywood tape. Solid Republican voters still would’ve turned out for Trump, just as solid Democrats still turned out for Clinton (hell, she still received a majority of the total votes…). But for the subset of voters who disliked both candidates, the active question was which consideration would’ve been top-of-mind on Election Day. Those voters tend to be low-information voters (why devote a ton of attention to political drama if you hate all the characters), so their recency bias is pretty strong. If the Comey letter had come in August or September, it would’ve faded from memory by November. The timing was everything.
Contemporary American politics has become incredibly sclerotic. Candidates are neither heavily rewarded for popular policies nor heavily punished for incompetence. (This is bad. It’s all bad. And it’s going to be difficult to fix. Let’s not kid ourselves, the outlook is grim.)
For political communicators, the timing of political episodes is one of the few things that they can actively plan for and affect. This was one of the main themes I discussed in my bretbug writeup nearly a year ago. Contentious politics isn’t about finding magic words that convince the electorate, or about framing specific issues to reveal your opponent as a hypocrite. The persuasive effect of most political campaigns is so small that it approaches zero. But what you can often do is make choices that shorten contentious episodes that play to your disadvantage and lengthen contentious episodes that play to your strength. Call it “Clock Management.” It’s an underrated skill.
August was the wrong time to announce marijuana decriminalization. That would’ve shortened the post-Inflation Reduction Act “Dark Brandon” news cycle.
September was the wrong time to announce decriminalization. That would’ve faded from public attention in the months before the election.
But early October… Yeah, that’s just right. We’re going to have a week or so with this dominating the political headlines. It’ll remind people that this is a government that does popular, sensible things. A government that tries to do right by people. Then we’ll have a week of headlines about Trump being ridiculous (probably), and then Democrats will spend the last couple weeks reminding people of what’s really at stake on Election Day — the conservative Court majority has put Roe on the ballot, and if want to return to a status quo where women are presumed to have bodily autonomy, then we have to vote like women’s rights matter.
I don’t know if it’ll be enough. I am, instinctively, a pessimist about such things.
But it’s heartening to see this administration combining good policy substance with smart political timing.
It’s the best that can be done with the circumstances we find ourselves in. Here’s hoping it makes a difference.
Biden's superpower is that he truly has no fucks left to give. After a long, long, fight he has achieved his life's goal, and knows this is his last rodeo, whether he runs in 2024 or not. He is a Bizzaro Trump in a way, in that the limits and constraints pounded into professional politicians through decades of begging for money and votes no longer apply to him, just as they have never applied to Trump. He's looking at tactics to build a coalition without worrying about which donors or interest groups he's going to piss off. It's like living in a Frank Capra movie.
I'm sure that you have a year's worth of article topics, but I've yet to find anyone that will tackle the concept of how the US would look under 1-party (GOP, theocratic) control. People toss around words: post-democracy, post-truth, fascist, but how will people's daily lives be impacted? I honestly think that most people are either in denial or believe (wrongly) that they won't be impacted. People should be prepared for what's in store. I hope you'll consider tackling this potential future.