... As clearly as any recent president, Biden proposed the standard for judging his performance. From the time he began running for office, he presented himself as democracy’s defender at the republic’s moment of greatest peril....I agree that it was a mistake for Biden to run again -- but I think the damage was done before he began to run. If Biden "created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return," it was by giving up on the effort to communicate with the American people as president.
By stubbornly setting off on his reelection campaign, by strapping his party to his shuffling frame, he doomed the nation to realizing the nightmare scenario that he’d promised to prevent. He created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return, and for his own spectacular failure....
The way that events unfolded—his catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state–-beggars belief. Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didn’t his aides stop him from running?
... The evidence that Biden wasn’t fit for a second term was abundantly clear in his public appearances—and in the public appearances that he studiously avoided. Advisers knew that Biden’s instinct was always to invest faith in his own capacities, but they never made a concerted effort to talk him back from his decision to run, until it was far too late. Donald Trump is their legacy too.
Biden struggles to speak, so he mostly gave up trying, and he also chose not to let surrogates -- his vice president, for instance -- be his voice. He governed as if public declarations of his administration's side of things weren't all that important anyway.
Previous Democratic presidents -- Bill Clinton, Barack Obama -- saw their popularity decline in their first terms, as Biden's did. But they could compellingly give their side of the story every day, and at least some of the public was undoubtedly swayed by their arguments on their own behalf. Both Clinton and Obama saw their first-term job-approval numbers drop to the low 40s, as Biden's did, but Biden's kept dropping into the 30s, while Clinton's and Obama's rebounded.
Into the gap left by Biden's poor public messaging came, first, video clips that depicted Biden as a doddering dementia case, then the bluster of Donald Trump. Trump sounds stupid to you and me, but he has an answer for everything. The sheer volume of his verbiage, and the vigor and confidence with which he makes his hateful, fact-challenged proclamations, stood in contrast to Biden's verbal clumsiness. Most Americans don't know enough to call Trump on his bullshit. To many of them, he sounds strong and powerful.
It appears that Biden has belatedly begun to recognize the importance of public communication. Last night, on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, he talked about his decision no to put his name on COVID stimulus checks, as Trump had done in 2020:
... Biden said the thought only crossed his mind because he kept hearing people say back to him they received a check from the president.Bad communication wasn't just a problem for Biden on COVID relief or infrastructure. It was a problem for him every day.
"'The president did that. Why aren't you helping me?'" Biden said he heard.
"It did cross my mind," he confessed. "The mistake we made was — I think I made — was not getting our allies to acknowledge that the Democrats did this. So for example, build a new billion-dollar bridge over a river. Well, call it the 'Democratic bridge' figuratively speaking. Talk about who put it together. Let people know that this is something that Democrats did. That it was done by the party."
Biden then added: "I'm not a very good huckster. That wasn't a stupid thing for [President-elect Donald Trump] to do. It helped him a lot and it undermined our ability to convince people that we were the ones that were getting this to them."
*****
But couldn't Biden have made up for this by announcing that he wouldn't run again, thus allowing Democrats to choose a fresh candidate in a series of primaries? Maybe -- but I think the conventional wisdom, that primaries would have been a cure-all for the party's problems, is not borne out by the evidence.
The primary process doesn't magically produce a very electable candidate. Sometimes it gives us Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Other times it gives us Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis (or, on the Republican side, Bob Dole or Mitt Romney).
All of the Democrats' intraparty conflicts -- progressives vs. moderates, Israel backers vs. supporters of the Palestinians, whites vs. people of color -- would have been a factor in these primaries. The party rallied around Kamala Harris when she became the candidate. There might have been some resistance to a primary winner.
And the winner probably would have been Harris in any case. As I've said before, she won every national 2024 Democratic primary poll I found at FiveThirtyEight that asked respondents to pick from a Biden-less field.
Maybe she wouldn't have survived a primary season. Maybe she would have been attacked for being part of an administration that didn't seem successful. That might have been enough to give the win to someone else. On the other hand, she might have won in spite of the attacks, and then the Trump campaign could have deployed clips from the primaries in which fellow Democrats described her as part of a failed presidency.
A candidate who seemed like a fresh start might have had a better chance of beating Trump, but as long as there was one picture of the primary winner with Biden, or one video clip of the winner defending Biden, the Trump campaign would have said the candidate was more of the same.
The way to defeat Trump in 2024 was to make a case for the Biden presidency in the preceding four years. Biden would have needed to seem like a strong, steady hand at the controls. He would have had to persuade voters that he felt their pain when they were dissatisfied, and that he had a plan when things seemed to be going wrong. When he couldn't manage any of that, he made it possible for Trump to win.
No comments:
Post a Comment