Politics is much like marketing: the clearer the message, the more likely the sale. Based on the opening of the (virtually held) Democratic National Convention, the presidential campaign of the former vice president and six-term senator Joe Biden can be summed up in two words\u2014not Trump.<\/p>\n
In a normal presidential race, incumbency might be an advantage. But \u201cnormal\u201d is not a word that Americans are likely to associate with the year 2020 when they look back on this year\u2019s presidential race. Like the rest of us, our transatlantic cousins are attempting to cope with the ongoing coronavirus crisis. So far, the pandemic has claimed over 170,000 American lives, with 5.46 million more confirmed cases and a staggering 20 per cent of US workers now reliant on unemployment benefits. Moreover, borders remain shut; businesses are closed; schools are torn over whether and how to reopen; and crime in cities is trending upwards. No country has responded perfectly to the challenges presented by the pandemic. Nevertheless, American leadership\u2014at both the state and federal level\u2014has, in many respects, been singularly indecisive, inconsistent, and corrosively partisan.<\/p>\n
Like the ostensibly conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Biden\u2019s economic recovery plan is modelled on the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s legislative response to the Great Depression. With the slogan \u201cBuild Back Better\u201d, Biden promises to prioritise economic recovery through massive structural change and economic redistribution\u2014investing trillions of dollars into clean energy, child support, and industries in Middle America. Intriguingly, though, at the DNC\u2019s opening night, Biden\u2019s economic agenda was scarcely mentioned. What ensued instead was a careful framing of the November election as an urgent battle for \u201cthe soul of the nation\u201d.<\/p>\n
The message was clear: Trump is a threat to democracy and to the lives and livelihoods of the American public. Of course, the urgency of this struggle conveniently renders all of Biden\u2019s faults and foibles temporarily irrelevant. Biden is \u201cnot perfect\u201d, Michelle Obama admitted in her speech. (Which might refer to any number of progressive shibboleths he has violated in the past: his tough-on-crime stance in the 1980s and \u201990s tends to taint him with the failures of mass incarceration, now widely perceived to be evidence of \u201csystemic racism\u201d, and his past support of the Hyde Amendment, which blocked the use of federal funds for abortions, is unlikely to sit well with pro-choice Democrats.) But voters just have to worry about that later. He is a \u201cdecent man\u201d, at least.<\/p>\n
Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist senator from Vermont, made a similarly desperate plea for party unity. He might not see eye to eye with Biden on everything (e.g. Medicare for All), but Trump is literally killing<\/i> people with his incompetence. The ideological diversity of those making this argument was striking. From the opposite end of the ideological aisle, Sanders was followed by Republican John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, who urged other conservatives to pick Biden over Trump. Paul Maslin\u2014described by Politico<\/i> as \u201ca top Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean\u201d\u2014told a reporter: \u201cI was sceptical. But I think this is working. On message, that\u2019s for sure. We the people. All of us. Including Republicans!\u201d<\/p>\n
The benefit of this \u201cnot Trump\u201d strategy is that it provides endless cover for any and all Democratic shortcomings. The evidence of Democrats\u2019 bright ideas and proven competence may not be readily available, but who needs it when the evidence of Trump\u2019s failures is everywhere. And they really do mean everywhere<\/i>. \u201cIn many ways, Covid is just a metaphor,\u201d Andrew Cuomo told his virtual DNC audience. \u201cA virus attacks when the body is weak and when it cannot defend itself.\u201d (Never mind the mistakes that Cuomo made, putting infected patients back into nursing homes, or New York\u2019s soaring crime rate.) When everything from racism to the coronavirus are reduced to symbolic rather than concrete errors, those on the \u201cright\u201d side are absolved from action. Marketing works best with contrasts. Trump is erratic, chaotic, and degrading, whereas Biden is steady, reliable and decent.<\/p>\n
\u201cNero fiddled as Rome burned,\u201d as Biden puts it, \u201cTrump plays golf.\u201d<\/p>\n
The week before the Democratic convention, Joe Biden named Kamala Harris, the former attorney general of California, as his Vice President. The pick was not surprising. Biden had said in March he would pick \u201ca woman\u201d (if he was a conservative this would have been rightly criticised as patronising tokenism) and after the George Floyd riots, he came under pressure from within the party to pick a \u201cwoman of colour\u201d. From the coverage, you would have thought that Harris was an entirely different politician from the woman who flamed out of the presidential race.<\/p>\n
But if Biden has been shrouded in \u201cnot-Trump\u201d soul-of-the-nation symbolism, Harris has been protected by the veil of identity. Shortly before her nomination was announced, Planned Parenthood, TimesUp and various women\u2019s groups sent letters to the editors of major publications inducing them to be sufficiently \u201canti-racist and anti-misogynist\u201d in their coverage. Subsequently CNN ran a whole segment on Tucker Carlson\u2019s mispronunciation of Harris\u2019s first name (phonetically, it\u2019s comma-la<\/i>), making no mention of the fact Biden himself has mis-pronounced it.<\/p>\n
The squeamishness in covering Harris appears to have translated into a lack of scrutiny. The New York Times <\/i>called her a \u201cpragmatic moderate\u201d. ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos described her as coming from the \u201cmiddle of the road, moderate wing\u201d of the Democratic Party. But her\u00a0 track record tells a different story. Yes, Harris has the backing of Wall Street and major tech tycoons, but her policy positions on social issues are much farther to the left than Biden. And, more notably, she has demonstrated disrespect for due process and the sacred American Constitution. For instance, when Joe Biden said during the primaries that gun confiscation would not be permitted under the United States\u2019 constitutional framework, Harris laughed in his face. She has also promised an overhaul to qualified immunity while being a beneficiary of qualified immunity (which a federal judge granted her in a 2017 lawsuit). This is cause for concern for more than just conservatives, as evidenced by Tulsi Gabbard\u2019s infamous takedown during the second Democratic primary debate:<\/p>\n
Senator Harris says she\u2019s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she\u2019ll be a prosecutor president, but I\u2019m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labour for the state of California, and she fought to keep cash bail system in place, that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.<\/p>\n
Progressive journalists can cry misogyny and racism all they like, but polling tells a different story. One such poll, by the Economist<\/i>\/YouGov, found that only half of African American voters viewed Harris favourably, while only 26 per cent of liberals did. Another survey conducted by the Bernie Delegates Network (a coalition of left-wing groups) found that one third of delegates \u201cstrongly disapprove\u201d of a Biden-Harris ticket, 19 per cent \u201csomewhat disapprove\u201d, and 24 per cent are \u201cambivalent\u201d. Which isn\u2019t exactly the mobilisation Biden had in mind.<\/p>\n
In truth, the single biggest advantage to the \u201cnot Trump\u201d campaign is the man himself. To pick just a few examples, when Axios\u2019s Jonathan Swan (accurately) told Trump that the US\u2019s coronavirus \u201cdeath [rate] as a proportion of the population\u201d is \u201creally bad\u201d, the President\u2019s response was to take this as a personal insult. \u201cYou can\u2019t do that,\u201d he told Swan, telling him to \u201cgo by the cases\u201d instead. Elsewhere, Trump gave airtime to an ugly and unnecessary conspiracy theory about Kamala Harris, telling a reporter he had \u201cheard\u201d she \u201cdoesn\u2019t meet the requirements\u201d as vice president, citing an article by a \u201chighly qualified, very talented lawyer\u201d which questioned the immigration status of her parents at the time of her birth (Trump has made similar remarks about Barack Obama). And the latest completely pointless Trump-instigated controversy is the United States Postal Service, which the President has said ought not to receive emergency funding because it might favour the Democrats.<\/p>\n
The race is likely to tighten as we get closer to November but, so far, Biden is leading by almost nine points nationally while Trump\u2019s approval rating has just stabilised in the low 40s. Of course, in US elections, the popular vote does not always translate into the ultimately decisive Electoral College vote. (In the US, it\u2019s usually up to the swing states.) But things don\u2019t look good for the President given that, with less than three months to go until Election Day, key swing states, such as Florida and Pennsylvania, are now flashing blue. It is difficult to determine with any accuracy how prevalent are the Biden Republicans, but from the data available it would appear there are significantly more of them than there are Trump Democrats.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s support base is certainly more enthusiastic\u2014they\u2019re voting for Trump more than they\u2019re voting against Biden. But in the end, if there are less of them in the decisive states, what does it matter? In normal times the lack of voter enthusiasm for Biden would be encouraging for Trump. Today, though, there\u2019s not a lot to be enthusiastic about. The Trump campaign has barely even cobbled together a second-term agenda. If they don\u2019t do so soon then \u201cnot Trump\u201d may be enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Politics is much like marketing: the clearer the message, the more likely the sale. Based on the opening of the (virtually held) Democratic National Convention, the presidential campaign of the former vice president and six-term senator Joe Biden can be summed up in two words\u2014not Trump. In a normal presidential<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[662],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dispatches"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=571"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9355,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/571\/revisions\/9355"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}