Biden’s operation seems to be leaning into dangers that should be obvious.
Biden’s operation seems to be leaning into dangers that should be obvious.
W hat the hell is going on with Joe Biden?
It feels rude bringing it up (again). It’s always difficult to talk about the afflictions attending to old age. And Donald Trump has started talking about Joe Biden in a rude way, suggesting that Biden is getting drugged “in the ass” before he has to do an appearance. It also feels like falling into a political trap.
Some Republicans made it sound like Biden couldn’t get a clear sentence out, and then he delivered a fine convention speech. Some have tried to show that he always works with a teleprompter, but he did fine at a CNN Town Hall. He probably will do fine at the debates.
But the distress signals are coming from the New York Times now. It’s not exactly about his health, but about the tortoise-like pace and manner of the campaign. In those pages, Mark Leibovich compared the Biden campaign to pandemic-era NFL games: “quiet, eerie and almost entirely fan-free.”
Leibovich gives ample space to the Biden campaign’s rationalization: The minimal event schedule is a sign that Joe Biden cares about his supporters, whereas we’re to suppose Trump rallies are nihilistic festivals of death, in which the MAGA-freaks aspirate and palpate each other in the hopes of joining Herman Cain in the Trump Taj Mahal in the skies.
But then Leibovich adds this:
Still, Mr. Biden’s minimal footprint on the ground tends to stoke anxiety among Democrats that their vehicle for defeating the president has a deficit in effort and enthusiasm, especially compared with an opponent whose big-splash approach (boat flotillas, fully resumed campaign events) is anything but reluctant.
By the tentative prose standards of the New York Times, this is a Civil Defense Siren blaring through a bonfire sending smoke signals, “S.O.S.” With polls tightening in Arizona and Florida you can feel nerves starting to jangle.
If Biden blows it, the basement-campaign strategy will look like an obvious culprit in his defeat. Usually, a party tries to avoid making the same mistakes that recent losing campaigns made. But Biden’s operation seems to be leaning into dangers that should be obvious. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was dogged by conspiracy theories about her health, ones that were dismissed by her cheerleading journalists until the very moment she seemed to collapse at a public event, and was thrown into the side of a van by her handlers. This surely hurt Clinton. Furthermore, she was criticized in the aftermath of the campaign for not campaigning enough in Wisconsin and for not putting in the work. Compared to Biden, she looks like a workaholic. Biden only visited Wisconsin after the riots in Kenosha.
What if the campaign should be, uh, campaigning more? Why isn’t it? Close Biden watchers have started tracking how many times and how early the Biden campaign calls a “full lid” on their day, signaling to the press that there will be no more public events, or questions answered. The day after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, the “full lid” was called before 9 a.m. On about a quarter of the days in September — real campaign season — the lid was on before noon.
The presidency can be a very demanding job, and one shouldn’t (and often can’t) just call the day over before noon every other day or so. Donald Trump is notorious for his long bouts of “executive time” and even revealing how many hours he watches Fox News consecutively. This level of distractedness has not served his administration well.
In another part of the New York Times, Thomas Edsall finds in voter registration data some evidence indicating that Republican-leaning groups are more enthusiastic to vote than some Democratic-leaning groups. Whites without college degrees (a Trump special) are registering to vote at disproportionate rates.
Maybe this is all some great rope-a-dope strategy. By fading away all the time Biden will tempt the media and Trump into making this a big issue once again, and old man Biden will land clean, hard blows throughout the debates, impressing everyone like Jack Palance doing one-handed pushups at the Oscars.
But if I were a Democrat, I’d look at all those solidly Democratic demographic groups that were unenthusiastic in 2016, and I’d worry that Joe Biden’s unwillingness to show up for 2020 is contagious.