I never once thought of Joe Biden as a revolutionary.

But it turns out some of his increasingly hysterical critics were right. He is a radical. And those of us who seek a kinder and gentler and more honest country have some reasons to smile, honest.

President Biden, to the surprise of many, including me,  is attempting radical changes in American government, policy, and politics that, if successful, would be revolutionary.

Everyone who is paying attention understands that this is a long, bloody, and difficult path. There are no guarantees. Biden has some rough days ahead.

Meanwhile, down in La-La land, Biden’s processor was supposed to be a holy terror making our new President’s life miserable.

But it seems that Donald Trump’s greatest gift is just being miserable., and making other people miserable. Nobody really knows what the hell he is doing.

You, sir, are no Godzilla.

Biden is onto something very important. He is a monument to the danger of underestimating people.

He has confounded a media structure that has been enriched by an obsessive focus on controversy and extremism – Trump and the media were a perfect storm.

And Trump seemed to be a lot more interesting than plain ol’ Joe Biden.

Not so fast. Not this week.

Maria and I got our Covid-19 relief checks today, the money was in our bank account when we woke up. Whatever else that is, it is very good politics.

Biden is moving quickly to redefine the government’s role in 22nd century America.

From the first, Biden has chosen to avoid and ignore the culture wars that have characterized the political conflict in the past generation and divided so many of us.

He is disciplined and focused.

He doesn’t talk about Dr. Seuss or the “cancel culture.”

He doesn’t respond every time Tucker Carlson says something calculated to be stupid and offensive. I think he understands something Trump understood – the media is not as important as we think it is.

He mourns the dead, asks citizens for help, sends a couple of trillion dollars out to a discouraged and embattled country to help kick off a celebration and recovery.

The focus of the Biden administration has never wavered, not from the first day: it is locked onto pandemic recovery and economic issues.

In so doing, Biden is gambling he can bring white working-class voters – ignored by the party for decades –  back into the fold.

In 2022 and 2024, these voters will be asking Democrats and Republicans just what they have done for them.

Biden can say he gave them all a lot of money and saved the small businesses at which many people work and ordered and distributed enough vaccines for everyone and gave the schools billions of dollars so they can open up quickly and safely.

That’s a lot to campaign on, especially if you’re running against Dr. Seuss.

What are the Republicans going to do? Read more from Green Eggs N’ Ham? This isn’t brain surgery.

Biden is very different from Donald Trump or  Barack Obama. While the Republicans are almost desperately trying to crank up racial and other issues in the culture wars, he talks about vaccines and wages.

Biden and the Democrats are becoming more popular by the week by refusing to play by those hoary old games and by actually – and finally – trying to make the lives of Americans better – that is a radical idea in 2021.

The pundits are still struggling to grasp the significance and potential of this new and surprising administration. Biden’s adroit passage of the massive covid-19 relief belief stunned all of them.

For democracies to survive, leaders must find a way to rebuild the legitimate authority of liberal democracy while fending off the wealthy and well-organized movements that promote the rise of non-democratic ideas as central to government.

Ever since Trump lost the election, the ratings of Fox News began to decline. They are no longer number one, they are number three, behind arch-rival CNN.

Fox and the Republican Party are now partners, fused together with the  TAOWM party – The Angry Old White Men. That is no blueprint for the future.

The Republican Party is setting itself up – foolishly and unnecessarily – as a non-democratic force both in government and politics. Democratic institutions don’t work to overturn legitimate elections and restrict access to voting. Democratic institutions accept the fact sometimes, one side or the other loses.

You win elections by attracting votes, not suppressing them.

Every person of color in America now has the best possible reason to vote – to safeguard their rights and their freedom. And they will vote, whatever it takes. The GOP has awakened yet another Army to march against them.

Economists are increasingly optimistic that Biden’s American Rescue Plan may cause a supercharged economic rebound that brings down unemployment, drives up wages and may foster years and years of stronger economic growth.

Things, wrote Neil Irwin in the New York Times on March 13 are primed for a boom time for large corporations.

C.E.O.’s confidence is at an all-time high, and near-record stock market valuations suggest that companies have almost unlimited access to cheap capital.

Things to watch for:

-Think Big. Biden reached out to the Republicans for help with his massive coronavirus relief package. He got bit on the hand. Not a single one supported him.

As a result, he is already making noises about changing the Senate’s filibuster rules so he can speed through legislation rather than see it choked to death by the GOP, who have made it clear they will undermine him at every possible turn.

Look for more “big” bills, especially in Infrastructure, Voting Rights, and possibly even immigration.

-Donald Trump is fading from the public mind. “Trump was supposed to be a political Godzilla in exile. Instead, he’s adrift,” reported Politico on March 14.

He seems confused, he’s lost his Tweety voice,  and in future months is likely to be distracted and challenged by a series of legal and possibly criminal challenges. He is not the force people thought he would be just a couple of months out of office.

Apart from promoting himself, I’ve never seen any evidence that Trump is a hard worker. Running the country from Palm Beach doesn’t seem a viable path to me. It would take too much planning and thought. He doesn’t do that.

-In the next few months, it seems likely that the vast majority of Americans will be vaccinated, and life should start returning to normal. That should fire up the economy for a good long time.

Robert Putnam, a widely respected public policy scholar, argues that “the curve is ripe for change in the United States.” He believes Joe Biden is just the President to bring it about.

The Biden Administration, he said in an interview with Salon, “is proving to be just what the doctor ordered for a shaken country, focused explicitly on “we, not “I.” It’s not just Biden’s well-known empathy for people in pain, nor his equally well-known propensity to work across the aisle, but also his ability to adapt to changed political circumstances.”

Unlike Trump and his Republican followers, Biden is razor-focused on doing things for people. I don’t know if he is sincere or just savvy, nor does it really matter.

He wants everybody to have a vaccine.

He wants everybody to get their kids back in school.

He wants everybody to keep their houses and get some money. He wants every small business to stay solvent.

He wants to lower student debt.

He wants to jump a powerhouse economy so everybody will have a job. He even wants to raise the salaries of the working class for the first time in a generation.

He doesn’t care about cancel culture. He doesn’t care about Dr. Seuess or kneeling football players.

He won’t play that game. He doesn’t even consider the immigration surge at the border to be a real crisis.

In a sense, Trump and some of his very supportive governors were smart to sense that much younger, whiter Americans didn’t really care that older adults and black people and yellow people were the ones the most at risk from the coronavirus.

They weren’t at high risk themselves.

People were happy to hear a leader say the virus wasn’t all that important, you didn’t need to wear a mask,  and you know what? For White Christian Nationalists, it really wasn’t important.

The mob that stormed the capitol in Trump’s name didn’t bother for the most part to wear masks, and very few of them got sick.

In a sense, the border crisis is to Biden what the virus lockdowns were to Trump – an issue that isn’t very important to people at the moment.  Voters are fickle and distractable, especially when it comes to having enough money to live on.

While Americans are coping with a pandemic and a wobbly economy, the Republicans are seeking to undermine Biden’s American Rescue Act., which is immensely popular, the most popular single legislation in American history.

Fighting this relief sounds like TrumpThink to me. There is no hole too big for him to walk into.

The cultural assaults on Biden aren’t working anymore. The raving about Dr. Seuss just makes the Republicans look stupid;  The raging over the covid-relief package attacks make them look callous and cold.

What exactly are they offering voters in 2022?

Americans want a new reality show, this is a new season. The Trump and Cuomo reality shows are both in big trouble. They want their lives back, that is their drama.

Getting back to normal, having money in the bank, getting to work again, getting their kids back to school – this is all a much better reality show that Donald Trump or the Republicans are offering.

Celina Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, a Democratic firm, says she isn’t worried about the ability of Republicans to raise immigration as a wedge issue once again.

“Immigration is way down on visitors lists of concerns,” she wrote. “With Covid and the economy, voters didn’t think (in a recent poll her firm conducted) that immigration is a serious concern.”

Once again Biden isn’t taking the bait.

The greatest threat to Biden would come from a Republican Party offering concrete, clearly reasoned policy positions that would actually help people during a difficult time.

With  Trump in command, that is not likely.

Lake and others argue that the most important strategy for Democrats is to keep focused on vaccines, jobs, wages, and small businesses.

Voters, she says, will measure success by how much their families and communities are helped. Voters will ask in 2022 what did Democrats deliver?

They will ask Republicans the same thing.

Political partisanship and the bitter rural-urban, black-white, red and blue, working-class-elite conflicts in America are powerful. They are not likely to go away for a long time.

Biden has a lot of serious roadblocks in front of his revolution.

But there are several signs that there may be cause for some optimism after long and hard years of fear and rage.

Joe Biden is popular, especially by harsh partisan standards.

A Pew Research poll found that a decisive majority of voters, at 70-28 percent, have a positive opinion of the Covid stimulus bill.

The bill could be transformative, as Social Security turned out to be.

According to a study by the Center for American Progress of the bill’s startlingly generous provisions, the bill would cut child poverty in America in half, and a middle-income family of four with one child under age 6 and one child age 6 or above will receive $8,200 at minimum.

A family of four with the same age breakdown, earning $75,000 and spending $5,000 on child care, will receive the $8,200 plus a $1,500 child and dependent care tax credit for a total benefit of $9,700.

Most importantly, those benefits are universal; in some cases, families making $150,000 annually will qualify for substantial payments and tax credits.

Besides, a plurality of the beneficiaries will be white, not people of color. That means a lot of Trump voters and supporters.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, of the 39.4 million people at or below poverty in 2019 who qualify for the largest benefits, 17.3 million were white, 8.2 million were Black, and 10.2 million were Hispanic.

Biden’s concurrent and somewhat radical second strategy is to ignore and walk away from the culture wars, to lower the ear-shattering volume of the culture wars during the Trump years.

Biden doesn’t care what football players do before a game and pretends Trump left the country years ago. He won’t take the bait, not from Trump or his followers in the Republican Party. The two have become synonymous with one another.

Biden’s theory is that in politics, silence is death.

Trump has lost his Twitter Feed, refused to hold a news conference for months, and is obsessed with cleansing the Republican Party of anyone who might think independently or differently from him.

That is his agenda.

This time, Trump will take a lot of Republicans with him. But his playbook has not changed a bit; other than that, he gets to play golf every day of the week, not just on every weekend day.

Aside from the obviously disturbing implications of the GOP’s anti-democratic pseudo-fascist behavior, their addiction to cultural conflicts is just not a winning formula, especially now, when a government has never seemed more powerful or important to people.

People’s relationship with their government is transactional, as Trump recognized. They act in their own self-interests.

Trump ran a colossally inept Presidential campaign that he should have walked away with. He is running an equally stupid campaign to be the leader of the Republican Party.

Biden could not possibly be luckier in his opponent.

All he has to do is ignore him.

I laughed when people kept calling Biden a radical and a socialist; he is the farthest thing, I thought, from either. And he is clearly not a socialist for sure.

But it turns out he is a radical, just not in the ways people thought. He’s nothing like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In fact, he was using the very foundation of capitalism – (an economic system in which trade and money are controlled by private owners for profit) – to determine who gets talked about and who gets elected.

Add to this the end of the pandemic, and there are good reasons to smile once in a while. Maybe every other day.