Nathan Robinson, Stop Saying Biden Is the ‘Most Electable.’ Trump Will Run Rings Round Him
By Nathan Robinson
Did we learn nothing from 2016? Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians – and Biden would lose.
upporters
of Joe Biden are unlikely to be persuaded by most of the common
criticisms. They know he can be rambling and unintelligible. They know
his record is unimpressive and that he doesn’t really have “policy
proposals”. None of this matters, though, because to them he has the
most important quality of all: he can beat Donald Trump. Nothing you can
say about the former vice-president’s record, platform or mental state
matters next to the argument that he is the best hope Democrats have of getting Trump out of office.
There’s just one problem: it’s a myth. It is a myth
just as it was a myth that Hillary Clinton was a good candidate against
Trump. Biden is not, in fact, the pragmatic choice. He would not beat
Trump. He would lose. And we must say this over and over again. Forget
his flubs. Forget his finger-nibbling. Biden would be crushed by Trump. If you want Trump out of office, don’t support Biden.
Last time round, Clinton supporters lived in a strange
kind of denial. Anyone could see she had unique vulnerabilities Trump
could exploit. She was a Wall Street candidate, and he was running to
“drain the swamp”. She was under investigation by the FBI, and his pitch
was that Washington was corrupt. She had supported the catastrophic
Iraq war, and he portrayed himself as an outsider opponent of those
wars. Trump could “run to her left” and make criticisms she would be
unable to respond to, because they were accurate. Clinton’s attempts to
attack Trump as an out-of-touch, reckless billionaire sex criminal would
fail, because Trump would point out that she herself was out of touch,
bought by billionaires and had an unrepentant alleged sex criminal as
her husband and chief campaign surrogate.
Joe Biden will face many of the same problems. He has
been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the
“capital of corporate America”. He is infamous for his connections to
the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war. Even Matthew Yglesias of Vox calls Biden the “Hillary Clinton of 2020”
for his corporate ties and war support. It is worth remembering what
being the “Hillary Clinton” of anything means in an election against
Trump.
Consider the Ukraine scandal, which is far worse for
Biden electorally than usually acknowledged. Democrats have made this
the centerpiece of their impeachment case against Trump, setting aside Trump’s
most consequential crimes in order to focus on the charge that Trump
tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe and Hunter
Biden. For Democrats, the scandal is clear-cut: Trump was abusing the
power of his office to “damage a political rival”. And they believe that
the American people will agree, and will be disturbed by Trump’s
unethical behavior. They insist there was “no evidence” that Joe Biden
did anything wrong, and that Trump and his associates have been unfairly
trying to smear Biden.
Democrats who think this way are walking into a
buzzsaw. Let us recall: Hunter Biden was paid up to $50,000 a month by a
Ukrainian oil company. Officially, the chief Ukrainian prosecutor had
an open investigation into that company. Joe Biden bragged about
pressuring Ukraine to fire that prosecutor, which they did. Hunter Biden
says he told his father about his position in Ukraine, and Joe Biden
did not ask him to step down. Joe Biden contradicts his son’s story,
saying they never discussed Hunter Biden’s “work” in Ukraine. One of
them is not telling the truth.
Defenders of the Bidens like to point out that the
prosecutor was fired for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with
Hunter Biden. In fact, there was widespread pressure to fire the
prosecutor because he wasn’t doing enough on corruption
investigations, and there was a consensus among experts that this was
the case. Biden’s actions had absolutely nothing to do with his son and
it is ridiculous to suggest that they did.
All this is true. But the important question is: does it sound good? And the answer is: no. It sounds terrible.
One reason Democrats are bad at politics is that they
concern themselves too much with facts and not enough with impressions.
With Clinton’s “emails scandal”, they tried to show Clinton had not technically violated the law, but having Barack Obama’s FBI actively investigating Clinton for possible criminal wrongdoing looked terrible regardless of the facts.
Left-leaning journalists and pundits love to
“fact-check” Trump, as if proving that he has lied is in itself
persuasive. But 2016 should have showed us how powerless “debunking” is
next to “optics”. If you have a Democratic candidate who looks really corrupt, it doesn’t matter if they’re not. People don’t trust the press and they don’t trust politicians.
Imagine Biden running against Trump. Trump will run ads like this,
over and over. Good luck responding. Remember that time you have to
spend defending yourself against Trump’s accusations is time not spent
talking about issues that affect people’s lives. And Biden has already
shown little interest in drawing people’s attention to the areas where
Democrats should run strong against Trump, such as healthcare, taxation,
working conditions and the climate crisis.
His slogan is “no malarkey”, but since Biden himself
is a longtime spewer of malarkey, Trump will successfully paint Biden as
a hypocrite. Biden’s central case is that he is “not Trump”, that he
will return the country to virtuousness and decency. But if Biden
doesn’t actually look virtuous and decent – because he isn’t – the
argument that he has made for himself collapses completely.
Biden does have some strengths against Trump that
Clinton did not. We mock his rambling and tendency for “gaffes”, but
these do mean he never sounds like a “scripted politician”. Clinton was
criticized as robotic and focus-grouped. Biden is anything but
focus-grouped; whatever pops into his head comes out his mouth.
At the same time, compared to Trump, Biden has:
No money
No voter enthusiasm
No organization
No agenda
No real argument for himself
Ask yourself: how likely is such a candidate to win?
Is such a person really the one you want to run against Trump? Look at
the enthusiasm Trump gets at his rallies. It is real. Trump has fans,
and they’re highly motivated. How motivated are Biden’s “fans”? Is Biden
going to fill stadiums? Are people going to crisscross the country
knocking on doors for him? Say what you want about Clinton, but there
were some truly committed Clinton fans, and she had a powerful
base of support. By comparison, Biden looks weak, and Trump is savagely
effective at preying on and destroying establishment politicians.
Complicated factchecks that attempt to explain the
nuances of the Ukrainian criminal prosecution system will not help
Biden. People’s already limited enthusiasm for Biden will further wane,
and Trump will point to his “strong economy” and “job creation” as
evidence Obama and Biden were weak failures. Biden will look tired and
irrelevant, and possibly forget why he is even running in the first
place. Trump will be re-elected comfortably.
If there are Biden supporters in your life, you need
to have serious conversations with them. Do not dwell on things that do
not matter to them, like Biden’s record on bussing, or his latest
nonsensical comment. Instead, keep the focus on the main argument that
is sustaining his campaign: the idea that he is the best candidate to
beat Trump. He isn’t. His electability is a myth, and when we look
honestly at the facts we can see that Biden is actually a dangerously
poor candidate to run.
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