Opinion

“Be afraid. Be very afraid. It’s dangerous out there.”

Do you remember your first after-school job?

Florida’s supervisors of elections, a bipartisan group of professional public servants who keep their personal politics out of their offices, have issued a strong and timely statement in response to the most serious danger our nation has faced since the Civil War.

The U.S. economy was weaker than expected in the third quarter, which is bad news for any American whose livelihood depends on strong economic growth and especially disappointing for the White House, which is struggling to reassure voters about the state of the economy amid rising prices and a historic supply crunch. Overall growth in the third quarter was 2%, a fair step down from rates of 4.5% and 6.7% the U.S. economy logged in the first and second quarters.

Political commentator and journalist Abdul-Hakim Shabazz was denied access to a recent news conference by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, which is troubling when no valid reason is given.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg received a great deal of criticism lately for taking paternity leave. It is a time of snarled port traffic, understocked grocery shelves and growing worry about supply chains. I think these critiques are in bad faith and unworthy of an intellectually confident political movement. But, that’s where we are now. Congress could spend serious effort to ease logistics problems in any number of ways; the private sector is already at work. Outside of complaints about Mr. Buttigieg, Congress has been silent on the matter. Let me make three points.

Somehow we learned that Caesar wrote “Gaul is divided into three parts.” So too the United States is divided by the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) into three classes of counties.

Under pressure of successive self-imposed deadlines, with a befuddled country looking on, Democrats in Congress continue to wrestle with a supposedly transformative spending plan and the means to pay for it. On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced yet another version of what this might involve. The eventual outcome is still anybody’s guess.

Now we know.

So often these days I find myself wishing we could find a way to make our politics and our public life reflect who we Americans really are.