The problem with outrage and hysteria is that it obscures the real news and the most important stories. Mobs are mobs, even in good causes. I can’t really bear them. And the raging mobs on both sides have been unleashed.

Here are two critically important stories you might have missed, as the media is too busy with its newest political bullfight to make much noise about them.

The presidential contest turns out to be much more stable than anyone thought, and Joseph Biden has shown in a bold and brilliant move that Democrats and liberals can learn after all.

Joseph Biden Jr. is the first prominent Democrat to figure Trump out and beat him at his own game by not taking the bait and sticking to his own narrative and agenda.

First, I should say that Nate Cohn, perhaps the nation’s most respected pollster, reported in the New York Times today that Joseph Biden Jr’s lead has solidified in recent weeks and is stronger than believed. I think it is the most important polling piece I’ve read so far.

The good news for Biden is simple, reports Cohn: “On Thursday he led in every poll in North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona – five polls in all. President Trump carried all these states four years ago. Together, winning those states would probably put Mr. Biden well over 300 electoral votes.”

Then there is Biden’s brave but wise weekend move:

Sunday,  while giving a speech in Pennsylvania, Biden confounded the media and his own party by refusing to be drawn into Donald Trump’s preferred distraction by showing discipline and calm.

This when every Democrat under the sun was howling foul and pledging vengeance.

Biden spoke eloquently of a real President’s most urgent and wanted (by voters) priority: bringing the country together and not just tearing it apart. His is the voice many Americans are desperate to hear: let’s slow down, listen,  and try to work it out.

He didn’t even mention the Supreme Court fight. And you know why? Because the people who will decide the November election don’t care about it nearly as much as you do.

We are in the red zone now when it comes to taking bites out of our democracy. Biden didn’t do what every opponent of Trump has been doing for four years: permitting him to set the agenda and also lie at random, all the while exploiting liberal people as a means of arousing his followers.

Perhaps Trump’s real genius is manipulating people into doing what he wants them to do. Democrats and progressives have been railing at Trump for four years.

How is that working out for you?

Trump’s Supreme Court power play is his biggest Culture War Initiative yet. Culture wars are always the default tactic of the Republican Party. Pitting us one against the other usually works.

And it was beginning to work again until the Biden campaign huddled for a few days and thought about it. Let’s do something different, was the idea. Something that might actually work.

During a speech in Philadelphia on Sunday, Biden refused to do what every other Democrat was doing,  which is setting himself on fire with more outrage, more grievance.

Rather than threatening retaliation for Trump’s decision to choose a conservative supreme court justice, Biden took a different path.

He chose to be the grown-up Americans yearn to come and rescue them from the middle school playground our politics have become.

Biden offered himself as the voice of calm between two increasingly divisive factions locked in a dangerous procedural and cultural conflict that could really damage our system of government.

Our two most potent political parties no longer speak to one another, let alone work together.

“Action and reaction, anger and more anger, sorrow and frustration at the way things are in this country now politically,” he said. “That’s the cycle that Republican senators will continue to perpetuate if they go down this dangerous path that they put us on. We need to de-escalate, not escalate.”

This is such an important idea, the elephant in the room for so many people. Biden is the first person in this election to talk about the real cancer ripping up the country, even more than the virus: our growing and deepening divisions.

He is the first person in this campaign to use the term “de-escalate.” It’s a very important word right now.

Biden’s speech was about the coronavirus, which is now causing rising infection rates in half of the country. I admit to not taking him seriously at first. I am taking him seriously now.

His vision of a President is one who worries about the health and safety of his people, not on who harms people and the country every day with his almost sociopathic divisiveness.

Some points worth mentioning:

It turns out that liberals and progressives are no better than Trump at gauging the public’s mood and responding in a thoughtful and meaningful way.

The hysteria and hand-wringing of the weekend would be funny if it weren’t also  serious, disturbing, and misguided. Trump has managed to turn every governmental decision into another hysterical pitched battle between the left and the right.

In so doing, he draws unprecedented attention to himself and sets the country up for one battle or another.

It is clear by now that Trump and the Republicans will succeed in replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U. S. Supreme Court. Democrats can rail and threaten and fume all they want, but it is as close to a done deal as there can be.

The Supreme Court is very important in the political life of America. It is not nearly as important as controlling the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

As Trump has proven for the past four years, a U.S. President has more power than any other branch of government or political party. He has literally been running amok, blowing off Congress, ignorant precedent, misusing federal workers and agencies, he went even to the point of impeachment with barely a scar.

Everything that progressive people value in a government depends on Biden winning the presidency and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress. It would be wonderful to have real judges on the Supreme Court. It would be a disaster to lose the election.

And pause a bit before seeing this as a great Trump victory.

Trump is heading for a pyrrhic victory, not a real one. Another one. Remember Tulsa!

As usual, he is impulsive, self-serving, one dimensional, and short-sighted.   Every decision Trump makes is about him looking good right now, which doesn’t always jibe with smart politics.

He is like a three-year-old with an attention span of five seconds in his rapacious need for love and praise, he can’t wait.

At a campaign rally yesterday, he told his cheering MAGA supporters that the “Covoid-19 virus affects nobody.”

I remember reading a George Washington note to his wife Martha during the hight of the Revolutionary War. What he was learning, he said, was to not fight unless he had to.

The British, he said, were defeating themselves. I’m going to let them. Maybe Biden read the letter.

Trump is forever feeding his supporters; he absolutely never expands his base. He’s the momma crow, they are the babies in the next with their mouths forever open.

You can always count on him to shoot himself in the foot while appearing to be powerful and savvy. Even Fox New’s favorite  conservative pollster Scott Rasmussen warned Republicans  that rushing this appointment would be a bad idea:

“I hear all this talk that Republicans are ready to go and vote right away, I think that’s a big mistake,” Rasmussen said.

“I think the president should come out and say, ‘I want the American people to decide this, I’m going to nominate someone after I’m re-elected, here’s who I’m thinking of nominating and by the way, I want to specifically hear from Joe Biden who he’s going to nominate.’ And the reason I think he should do that is that puts the focus on the choice for the court, not on this side argument of whether or not the confirmation battle should go ahead right now,” he explained.

But the didn’t take Rasmussen’s good advice, he just couldn’t wait, and the focus is on timing, not substance. The Republicans don’t look good.

Neither do many Democrats and their supporters.

The hysteria brought on by the possible appointment of the very conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett is distasteful and so far, unwarranted.

Trump has turned the most progressive elements of the country into different versions of himself.

If Barrett goes to the court, she is likely to restrict or try to eliminate Roe vs. Wade, but she will not have the power to set policy in the Congress or government.

A savvy President would have many options for making abortions or abortion medications available to the women who want them. The Democrats could pass laws, not just offer arguments.

The Supreme Court’s power is vast but limited, and justices have a habit of thinking independently and surprising us once they drink in the rarified air of the Supreme Court; look at Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice Robers. Except for Justice Thomas, it seems to actually change people.

No one thought either one of them would ever protect transgender rights.

Barrett is an intelligent and accomplished jurist in many ways.

It isn’t necessarily a crime to be deeply religious. It would be so much wiser for Democrats to just shut up about the court now and focus on beating Trump, which Biden is in a very strong position to do.

The replacement fight is over, fought, and lost. The election is still before us.

Speaking of which, it’s also important to note that a biased court could make mail-in voting more difficult if it wished.

Still, it does not have the power or perhaps even the will to overturn an election victory that appears to be as strong as Biden’s appears to be with little time left.

The court has a long history of staying out of election fights when the election is close. And John Roberts appears quite sensitive about the court’s image. He seems to grasp the dangers of the Supreme Court becoming just another partisan fighting point.

Trump has gotten his October surprise just as the pandemic is starting to grow again. Many more Americans  – more than twice as many – worry about the pandemic than about the next Supreme Court Justice. That’s too bad, but it’s the truth.

It was genius on Biden’s part to keep the heat on Trump’s well documented and catastrophic bungling of the pandemic, just as the infection numbers are on the rise. And just as Trump thinks he has found a way to change the subject. He hasn’t.

Biden decided to not add to the rancor and the din.

Justices are political animals by nature of their positions. If they acted as radically and extremely as liberals fear, they would also be sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

There is lots of talk now about expanding the court and stacking it with more progressive justices.

To Biden’s credit, he isn’t supporting that idea. It’s not the right time.

More and more Americans are focusing on the anti-democratic elements of the Republican Party all by themselves.  The first surveys over the weekend found that most voters didn’t want President Trump to appoint a new Supreme Court justice before the 2021 presidential inauguration.

And if he didn’t appoint a justice before them, they did not want the Senate to seat him or her.

America is a country in which the minority controls the majority. People don’t like it, and they don’t like the gerrymandering that is making it possible. Two presidents in recent years have won the election while still losing the popular vote.

More than 90 percent of Americans support some form of gun control.  More than half do not wish to see Roe vs. Wade overturned. Nearly 70 percent want the next President to pick the next Supreme Court justice.

We all thought a majority ruled.

Democrats should absolutely not spend the next weeks before the election raging about judges, Mitch McConnell, and the Supreme court.

More and more, we see majority rule being thwarted by political extremism and procedural maneuvering in Congress.  The independents and moderates who will decide the outcome of the election are worried about health care, the pandemic, the economy, and Trump’s racism and divisiveness.

The most critical issue for Democrats, liberals, and progressives is not the hopeless battle to keep a conservative justice off the court.

The most important issue is electing a President who shares more empathetic and compassionate values.

Biden has just made that point, loudly and clearly.

Trump’s culture wars are not working everywhere anymore.

When those undecided voters were thinking about jobs and health care in 2018, they were more than ready to vote for Democrats.

The same dynamic is even truer now; the pandemic and its consequences are still the biggest stories of the year for most voters, by far.

And they bring health care sharply into focus.

Democrats can use the death of Ginsburg to great effect. They are raking in record donations and focusing on the endangered Senate Republicans who are about to vote to take away the voting rights of many Americans.

Most pollsters see evidence already that Trump’s Court power play could award Democrats, not Republicans, with control of the Senate. The nomination of a conservative justice to the court is not the Apocalypse.

The Apocalypse is four years of this angry and broken man chewing up our democracy, piece by piece.

Think about it.

Biden has wisely chosen to let Trump defeat himself, which he is almost guaranteed to do when left alone. He can’t stand a news cycle he isn’t starring in. His ego and insecurity drive him to blunder after blunder. Let him do it.

Trump has to be adored, every minute.  This is a man who thought he could sweet-talk Bob Woodard into being his pal by saying things that would hurt him badly.

Think about it. Trump is pressing for a confirmation vote before the election because he believes it will flush out millions of grateful Evangelicals and devout Catholics to vote for him. But once his nominee has been nominated and approved, why should these people rush out to vote for him in the midst of a pandemic and crowded polling stations?

They will have gotten what they wanted.

Interestingly, Biden got more than $100 million in donations over the weekend; there was no comparable rush of funds for the Republicans. One of Trump’s most powerful arguments for re-election was his pledge to place a conservative on the Supreme Court.

He even published a list of 40 names, each one of them a progressive horror show.

Now, he wants to give that argument away in exchange for some favorable election rulings on mail-in balloting, which could affect Republicans as much as Democrats. Let him do it.

The Republican power grab is outrageous, but it’s nowhere near the only issue or even the biggest issue. And it’s a long cause. The louder Democrats scream the more aroused Trump’s followers will be, more anger versus anger, tit for tat, more paralysis, and fear.

Trump badly wants a vicious and no-holds-barred fight because it will distract attention from his growing list of failures, especially the virus, now close to 200,000 deaths. (Trump told Woodward he deserves an A + for those deaths.)

Culture wars have been the favorite strategy of Republicans for years, and Trump has embraced them with a dreadful passion.

Don’t take the bait, writes author and commentator Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic this week in an essay titled “If You Care About the Court, Don’t Talk about it.”

“Democrats shouldn’t fall into the same trap,” wrote Applebaum, “It’s not going to be easy, but Democratic politicians and activists, and even ordinary voters who use social media, should concentrate as much as they can on the tangible issues that people grapple with every day—why their children aren’t in school, why their business has shut down, why their health-care plan is insufficient, why 200,000 people have died—and why the choice of president affects those issues so profoundly.

Wise advice.

Donald Trump believes he is on the cusp of a mighty victory. He underestimated foxy and folksy Joseph Biden Jr. who just impressed the hell out of me.

I can’t call myself a progressive because I am allergic to drama, whining, and hysteria, the progressive moment’s official music.

This is just not a time for despair and lament – over the weekend I felt as if I were at an Italian or Jewish funeral – garments were being rendered all over the nation.

That is not what Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have done, it is not what the country needs. Biden got it right.

Sometimes in politics, you win by doing less and staying quiet.

Every day Biden is reminding us what Presidents are supposed to do, almost as if he is running a mystical shadow government, one that is already haunting Donald Trump, as no one has done before.

Trump is never good when it comes to changing strategy. He seems almost pathetically drawn to the wrong decision at the wrong time.

Trump is missing the point, so are the Republicans, so are most liberals and progressives. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (I am an admirer) couldn’t wait to jump out of the gate and call for stacking the Supreme Court, precisely the argument that will flush the most rabid Evangelicals out of their gorgeous temples and out to the ballot box.

Biden did a brilliant thing yesterday. He makes Republicans pay for their arrogance usurpation of judicial independence in the right way: at the ballot box, not cable news.

There is bad news out there, but there is also quite a bit of good news. We see every day in which one gets lost in all of the shoutings.