A generational change is now sweeping America. All of a sudden -- even in the Deep South -- it is no longer politically acceptable -- even for Republicans -- to defend the Confederacy. Mississippi has now become the last state to remove the Confederate battle flag from their own state flag. The Republican Senate voted to force the Pentagon to remove Confederate generals' names from their bases. Even more astonishing, perhaps, was the news that NASCAR has banned the Confederate battle flag from being displayed at their events. But what's most astonishing about all this is that there seem to be few defenders of the Confederate flag left in the political sphere (on the national level, at least). Other than President Donald Trump, that is.

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The Trump campaign is setting itself up for a rather large tactical failure. Whether the campaign fails overall in November is a bigger question, of course, but they seem to already be failing in one crucial aspect of any successful presidential campaign, and that is to define your opponent early. This worked wonders for Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, and it also did the trick for George W. Bush against John Kerry. Throughout the spring and summer, the incumbent president successfully defined their challenger in a very negative way with the public.

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Instead, please enjoy the following column, which ran on the Fourth of July, 2008. Just to remind everyone, at that particular point in time Barack Obama had secured the Democratic presidential nomination, but the general election was still months away.

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In the best of times, Americans like to call our president by a rather grandiose title: "the leader of the free world." This is a holdover from the 1940s post-war era as well as the dichotomy of the Cold War era which followed it. Back then, we were indeed leading the free world -- in direct opposition to the Soviet Union's leadership of the communist world. Since America had not been directly devastated by the ravages of World War II, our economy bounced right back and we were able to get Europe and Japan back on their feet again with generous policies such as the Marshall Plan. From the 1950s through (arguably) the end of the century, American manufacturing dominated most industries. So our political leader was not just the de jure leader of the United States but, by extension, the de facto leader of the free world as well. But Donald Trump has now left this reputation in tatters. The only superlative left to call ourselves is now "the world's best bad example."

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The more time goes on, the more evidence stacks up that Donald Trump is simply incapable of performing the basic duties of a United States president. What is the president's job, boiled down? To process incoming problems and information, make policy decisions, and then implement those decisions. Trump fails spectacularly on all three legs of this stool on a regular basis. But this week has been really notable, due to Trump's utter failure to defend the Constitution of the United States (and the country at large, of course) against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

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Every so often I like to tempt fate by writing an article which could easily (and monumentally) be proven wrong within mere hours. Today is one of those days, because I feel pretty confident in predicting that Colorado and Utah will essentially show the rest of the country how a mail-in election should be done. I seriously doubt we'll see scenes of frustrated voters not being able to cast their ballots in a timely way, because with universal mail-in voting, that's not really a problem. No long lines, no machines that don't work right, no poll workers who don't know how to operate the machines, no voter-suppression efforts (both overt and covert) at all. And while Colorado is at the end of a long journey from being a purple state to a very blue one, Utah is still about as staunchly Republican as it gets -- proving that mail-in voting is not a partisan issue at all. Or it shouldn't be, at the very least.

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With President Donald Trump at the reins, Americans are always facing new and ever-more-frightening questions about how his administration works (as opposed to the way the federal government is supposed to work, of course). With the new reports of the Russians paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, we are all now faced with another such question. Was the president briefed about this situation and then refused to do anything about it, was the president not briefed about a situation involving Russia paying for American soldiers' deaths, or was the president briefed on paper -- but just never read it? None of those answers is very comforting, for different (but equally frightening) reasons.

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America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.

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What is the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic going to do right in the midst of an election season? That may sound like a rather crass question to be asking right now, so let me clearly state that this is undoubtedly going to involve a whole lot of deaths that probably could have been prevented -- which is an ongoing tragedy for all. We're already north of 120,000 deaths, and the total we eventually reach is going to depend in large part on how big the second wave turns out to be. That represents widespread human suffering on a massive scale. But it's also going to affect the politics of the 2020 election, one way or another, which is what I'm choosing to focus on today.

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This is going to be a meta-column, just to warn everyone in advance. It's going to be a column about columns. If you think this will bore the pants off you, then now is the time to seek other content, in other words.

Behind the scenes here, I've been gearing up to kick off my election-year "Electoral Math" series once again. Throughout the campaign, we'll take a look at the polling and try to predict how each state will vote, and thus what the Electoral College vote will be after the November presidential election. These columns will run right up until the day before the election, when I'll attempt to make my final prediction. This will be the fourth run of this column series. I previously wrote these articles for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 campaigns.

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