[This is the third (and final) installment in my three-part series, conceived in the immediate aftermath of the conventions, attempting to provide useful ideas to the Biden campaign.
- The first said that Biden should “Grab His Rightful Share of Attention,” which I’m glad to say he is doing and doing well.
- The second installment used a famous piece of 20th century history to illustrate how Biden should “Inspire the People to Fight and Win the Frightening Battle.” (Which Biden is not yet putting at the center of his campaign (which may be a good choice, what with all that is going on and all the Trumpian outrages that need to be blunted, turned against him, defused.)
- And now the third installment, which proposes a potential overall framework for presenting the American people with the reality of the choice they face in November’s election.
******************************
The choice facing Americans in this presidential election is more stark – the paths before us more divergent – than probably in any election in our history. (No one’s going to be even tempted to claim, as was falsely claimed in 2000, that there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two candidates.)
The question arises: how would it be best for the Biden campaign to characterize this stark choice?
Ultimately, because people tend to tune in to the human level more readily than into the level of policy, the most important contrast might well be in terms of character. Biden’s supporters have been doing this for months: in contrast to Donald Trump’s utter lack of human decency, Joe Biden is a manifestly decent person.
But I would like to propose an additional approach: one that focuses on the substantive issues, which constitute together the several major crises that face America in these times. All of these crises are matters of concern for Americans, worried about their futures.
And all of them also implicitly bring into sharp relief that stark difference in the men’s character. Although Biden himself cannot gracefully make for himself the case for his being the more decent man, he can nonetheless use the starkly divergent paths on these crises to illustrate implicitly the different moral and spiritual natures of the two leaders who are the main combatants in this battle for “the Soul of America.”
(And I would suggest that the following framework on the crises might be valuable for Biden in his upcoming debate confrontations with Trump, supplying ready arrows in Biden’s quiver.)
*********************
For every crisis, Trump represents the clearly wrong choice, the destructive choice, while Biden offers a constructive path forward:
- The crisis of the pandemic.
For some reason, Trump simply refuses to do what the pandemic requires of national leadership.
Trump continually insists on getting in the way of our doing what should be done—re testing and tracking and equipping and manufacturing and coordinating on a national basis. He keeps undercutting and muzzling the scientists and pushing things to reopen dangerously fast, with the result that the United States continues to suffer the death of a thousand Americans a day, to have much of the economy shut down, and to suffer the failure of many thousands of small businesses. “It didn’t need to be this bad.”
If Trump had handled the pandemic with the same effectiveness – and with the same sense of responsibility – as pretty much every other leader of advanced nations (such as the leaders in Germany and New Zealand and South Korea and Canada), a lot fewer Americans would have died, and a lot more of the economy would be safely opened.
“Make America Great”? Hardly. The United States has gone from the world’s leader in public health to the object of the world’s shock and pity and sometimes contempt.
Trump’s persistence in making things worse means that getting out of this pandemic is going to require removing Trump from office and installing a new President who has already committed himself to a sensible plan to bring the Covid-19 virus under good control.
Biden is already wisely hammering the pandemic issue. It would be good to put the emphasis on that point: the election of Joe Bidenis the necessary means of escaping from the hole that Trump has continuously dug America into.
2. The Crisis of Climate Change.
Just as Trump made the United State extraordinary in his dealing with the pandemic – and not in a good way – he’s made this nation extraordinary – an embarrassment, a pariah -- in how he’s dealt with the challenge of climate change.
Trump distinguished the United States – not in a good way – by making the United States the only nation in the world not still signatory to the Paris Accord on Climate Change.
Once again, Trump has denied the science calling climate change a “Chinese hoax” (just like the pandemic was a “hoax”).
Once again, he’s used the powers of the presidency to hobble America’s ability to address a most serious challenge – a challenge that science is telling us is the greatest humankind has faced (as the unintended consequences of what our technology does to earth’s atmosphere).
(And the Republican Party as a whole is the only party anywhere among the democracies to deny the science, and make that denial party dogma.)
The evidence is all around us now—we are at the very early stages, but the evidence of wildfires and hurricanes and extinctions is already visible. As a result of this mounting evidence, the polls show, the majority of the American people recognize the need for our government to take action to minimize the damage to the world our children and grandchildren will be living in.
It should be possible, therefore, for Biden to benefit politically from portraying the different paths that he and Trump represent on this historically vital challenge: Trump represents the path of science-denial and damage to our children’s future; Biden has committed himself to a path of wise and responsible actions designed to move us toward an achievable goal of a clean-energy future.
Once again, Trump’s failure of leadership has achieved the opposite of “Make America Great Again. He’s made us no longer a leader in the world on critical issues, but the opposite. The opposite of admired. The opposite of “great.”
3. The Crisis Around Racial Justice.
Biden’s speech in Pittsburgh on August 31 hit the right notes on this crisis: attacking Trump for fanning the flames of racial conflict while also condemning rioters and looters for their lawlessness and their distraction from the important task that peaceful protestors are calling attention to.
The contrast between Trump and himself should continue to be drawn in terms of the very different paths:
“This election gives the American people a choice between a President who consistently provokes confrontation and conflict between America’s racial groups, and a President who will work to seize the opportunity this moment gives us to achieve real progress and healing around our racial divisions.
Biden’s path is also the path of patriotism: we’ve all now witnessed that there’s a problem of policing that doles out worse treatment to blacks than to whites, and so we need a path forward that enables us to be the America to which we pledge allegiance (with “Justice for All”) and the America our Constitution requires (with “equal protection of the laws”).
(See also on this issue my piece, “My Latest Challenge to the Conservatives: "Incontrovertible Truth on the 'Systemic Racism' Question".)
4. The Crisis of American Democracy/the Rule of Law/the Constitutional Order.
In some fundamental ways, this is the most urgent of these crises: for if we lose the system of government our founders gave us – government not only of but also for and by the people – we will lose the ability to choose our paths on all the other crises/issues that face the nation now and in the time to come.
Certainly there are a whole host of ways of illustrating the divergent paths -- regarding the preservation and restoration of American democracy, vs. its destruction -- that are represented in the choice between Trump and Biden. One that might be featured could be the contrast between the Trump/Barr corruption of justice (using the apparatus of “law” as a means to punish opponents and protect allies) and Biden’s promise to restore the independence of American Justice, its insulation from partisan politics, its representing the interests of the nation as a whole in making sure the rule of law prevails and that justice is done without fear or favor.
Each crisis stands as a major issue. But what I think would work most powerfully for Biden is highlighting what the contrasting paths have in common among all these crises: Trump is consistently making things more broken, and Biden would work to make them more whole.