IN OUR MEDIA ENVIRONMENT, NO DEMOCRAT HAS A BIG ENOUGH PERSONALITY TO BE DOMINANT

Ezra Klein suggests that we might have been rid of Donald Trump by now if Joe Biden had a bigger personality:

... Biden has ... run a relatively quiet administration. He gives comparatively few interviews, news conferences and speeches. He has filled the office Trump vacated but not the space Trump took up in the national conversation.... this strategy runs deep risks. Biden’s low-drama approach to leadership leaves room for Trump’s high-drama antics.

Politics has not moved on from Trump, in ways that it might have under a president who created new political cleavages and alignments. Biden has not been a strong enough communicator or presence to make Trump seem irrelevant. To make this more concrete: I wonder whether Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could have won in 2020. But if one of them had, I suspect politics would have reorganized around their concerns and conflicts and Trump would seem a more passé figure. I worry that Biden thinks too much about America’s soul and not enough about its attention.

This is nonsense.

Who was a stronger communicator than Barack Obama in 2008? Who commanded more of America's (and the world's) attention? Yet by the end of Obama's first year, the Tea Party had muscled its way to the forefront of American political discourse, challenging Obama for dominance. The same thing happened to Bill Clinton after the 1992 election, when he was a big personality and a great communicator: Politics began to be dominated by opponents of his health care plan, by people accusing him of financial and sexual misconduct, and, eventually, by Newt Gingrich.

It's possible to imagine a Democrat dominating the political conversation, but it never happens. The Republican Party and the right-wing media declare any Democrat who gains power the sworn enemy of decency and freedom and the greatest threat to our way of life in living memory, while the mainstream media demonstrates its independence by attacking the Democrat with nearly as much vehemence as right-wingers do, and by amplifying the voices of the opposition.

If all this happened to the three left-centrist Democrats who've reached the White House in the past thirty years, then of course it would happen to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who are already too far to the left and too skeptical of the established financial order for the mainstream media's tastes. (I don't think most mainstream journalists are right-wing exactly -- they tend to be socially liberal, but on economic issues they're corporatist.) Sanders and Warren draw big crowds and generate a great deal of energy, but if the energy level of Obama's 2008 campaign wasn't enough to prevent this reversion toward the mean, I don't see how Sanders or Warren could do better. That's just not the way our political world is built.