In today’s NORTHERN VIRGINIA DAILY, there appeared the piece I posted here earlier this week, as XXX.
(This is an overwhelmingly Republican rural Virginia district, and my messages are often intended to challenge my Trump-supporting neighbors.)
It elicited a comment from the Republican gentleman with whom I have regular public exchanges, and about whom I’ve written here previously. He wrote to question my saying that the Democrats have the “wind at their back” for these upcoming Elections (because of the disastrous course the Republicans have put themselves on).
His point was: Biden doesn’t look like a winner. Just look at his low poll numbers.
That elicited from me this response:
Yes, you're right, [NAME], that Biden's standing in the polls is weak. And I don't imagine that will change a whole lot between now and the 2024 Election.
But I think the extraordinary nature of this historic political moment will make that almost irrelevant.
Biden was similarly uncharismatic, and the hatred toward him of the chunk of the electorate called the Republican Base, were already true before the 2020 Election, and Biden nonetheless beat Trump.
Why? Because on the one hand the great majority of Americans could see that Biden was basically a decent person with some competence that could enable America to take a somewhat normal course.
And because, on the other hand, they saw that Trump represented a degree of craziness and destructiveness that threatened fundamental things about how the nation would function in the present and what kind of country this will be in the future.
That will seem even truer in 2024, after the more that Americans have seen about Trump (with all the crimes that are being exposed), and about the Republican Party, with the crazy and whole broken way they are using the two branches of government that they control: the House and the Supreme Court.
While there is maybe a third of Americans who want the crazy and destructive, there is a substantial majority that want normal. And so that majority will vote for Biden because the alternative is Trump, and enough people now recognize that putting the powers of the Presidency in the hands of Donald Trump is like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and clutching it to your chest.
That exchange led a Democratic leader in this area to come on with a comment in praise of Biden, in which he declared, “The Biden Administration has accomplished more good for America in two years than any previous Administration in the history of this great nation.”
Which led me to say this about how it comes to pass that both those things are true: i.e. that Joe Biden has functioned as President very impressively, in a great many ways, and that Biden’s poll numbers are low.
Thanks, [NAME]. I appreciate that you point out the really exceptional accomplishments of the Biden Presidency. He's not been handling the political battle the way I would like, but I think that in terms of trying to get good things done, his administration has been as competent as any I recall (and my recollection goes back to the Eisenhower administration). Somehow, Biden pulled out of his hat some achievements that made his first two years quite stunningly productive. But what I have appreciated the most is the masterful job he has done of making the United States truly once again "the leader of the free world" in the extraordinary job he did in rallying NATO and fighting Putin regarding the huge crisis of that fascist dictator's wholly unjustified invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine.
Here are the reasons I think Biden can be both exceptionally accomplished and be low in the polls:
1) He is barely of passing grade in terms of the rhetorical abilities that can enable a President to use the Bully Pulpit. I can only listen to him a little. I always feel bad that he's such an uncharismatic speaker.
And Americans, in this TV age (and, with FDR, also the Radio age), look to their Presidents for that kind of leadership. (In earlier ages, the electorate hardly had any direct exposure to their Presidents.) The people are disappointed to have a President whose speaking inabilities would prevent his ever being cast by Hollywood to play the President of the United States.
2) The poisoned minds of the right. Polls showed that 3/4 of the Republican base believed the Big Lie that the Election was stolen from Trump. So of course those fifty million Americans are going to hate Biden because of their believing falsely that he stole something precious from them. And if those millions believed something so obviously false the Republicans told them about Biden, they'd believe all the other crap the Republicans put out about Biden.
When you're dealing with something that crazy, there's no way that even the most obviously caring President, bending over backwards to represent the best of values and to take only completely defensible positions, has any chance to enjoy very good poll numbers. The demonization of Democrats has made it impossible for Democrats to win over Republicans even when that is what the country urgently needs, like now when the Republicans are assaulting even American democracy itself.
3) The situation is America doesn't FEEL good. And why should it, when we've got a political situation in which one of our political parties has zero interest in working with the other elected representatives of the American people to get good things done.
It would be good if Americans would respond to this ugly dysfunction by blaming the force that is insisting on ugliness. But that takes a level of political understanding that is not widespread enough in today's America. The easier thing is to do what Americans do with their Presidents: they blame them for things not feeling good, when the President doesn't deserve the blame, just as they give the President credit for good conditions the President had no hand in creating.
4) Biden not only lacks the ability to move people the way and FDR, or a Reagan, or an Obama could. But he also is ill-equipped to fight the kind of fight a Democratic President is called upon to fight when the Republican Party has become what it has become over the past generation. Biden seems neither particularly able to see just how dark it is, nor able to call it out for what it is, and fight against it the way it needs to be fought against.
Biden is a Good Man who is ill-equipped to fight against something that is thoroughly wed to acting destructively. And I define “the opposite of Good” as "a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse."
That's why I opposed Biden being the Democratic nominee back in 2015, until it became clear that if getting Trump out of the Presidency was the absolute necessity of the moment, nominating and electing Joe Biden was the necessary course to take.
Biden was not my choice in 2015 because I saw in him the same blindness and weakness that Obama disastrously embodied as President in the face of an opposition that decided, even before he took office, to make his failure their top priority.
Ever since 2004, I've wanted the Democrats to put up a FIGHTER. FDR and Churchill are the models for the kind of leader I thought Liberal America needed to raise up to meet the challenge of this era. When they were attacked, they made sure they came out on top. When they confronted Evil, they roused the people to the side of the Good to fight and defeat that Evil.
6) Biden is not that leader. And as I've written here before, I think the American people can smell the weakness in the failure to confront enemies as enemies. We have been trained to chafe when Shane in the movie doesn't fight back, and to yearn for that climax where our hero takes the bad guys down.
A President can be "the leader of the free world," and gain stature in the eyes of many Americans in that way. But if a political party is insisting on treating him as an enemy, and particularly if that opposing political party is assaulting the Constitution the President took an oath to defend, Americans will not be happy with a President who refuses to fight like all our heroes from John Wayne on would fight.
More than competent President. We Americans absolutely have to re-elect him if the alternative is Donald Trump (or anyone else the Republicans could conceivably nominate), given that the problems with Trump are rife throughout the Party. The survival of American democracy manifestly depends on it.
And we will prey that Biden will be one of those people who can get from 80 to 86 with no significant loss of capacity to run a good and competent administration.
Not like Diane Feinstein these days. One hopes not even like Ronald Reagan at the end of his presidency.
My own gut-level assessment, from observing him, is that he will get physically frailer, but he'll be able to serve the nation well as President.
In any event, any American who understands what’s at stake in the 2024 election, and is the least bit an American patriot who cares about the nation’s future, will emphatically choose Biden over Trump when that’s the choice (which it almost certainly will be).
Not only the American future, but perhaps even the World future, depends on it.