CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--So far Joe Biden is doing pretty well by running as the non-Trump.
In fact, a car drove by me yesterday with the bumper sticker, “Any functioning adult, 2020.” Trump’s situation is actually a bit funny. As Joe Biden continued to stay under lockdown for month after month (the image was him as presidential candidate living in his basement), his poll numbers continued to stay well above Trump’s, particularly in the critical states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Most of us functioning adults remember that it was those three states that turned the tide for Donald Trump in 2016.
Earlier in the week, in response to a particularly silly argument by Trump that the Democrats didn’t create a mandatory mask policy, Biden tilted his head at the microphone and whispered, “I’m not the president.”
It was a good comeback and helped to cement his standing as a functioning adult, and hence worthy of being elected president.
Still, it is sometimes said by political analysts that a candidate ought to have more than negatives in his quiver. Those same analysts at least used to go through highly critical studies of every policy paper – would Cory Booker’s Medicare enlargement proposal pay for itself, and how many new ships would Amy Klobuchar support in her peacetime navy?
In other words, what are your policy proposals?
We might remember that Trump actually had such proposals when he ran in 2016. In particular, he proposed the Great Wall of America to run along our southern border and a stricter segregation of southern immigrants back to their countries of origin.
Joe Biden spent a lot of the primary debates fending off the more radical suggestions from the Bernie Sanders camp, if I recall correctly. And let me point out that like many of the rest of you, I really don’t recall all that correctly. I think I heard Biden say something about how Medicare for All would cost a lot of money (a truism, to be sure) but that’s about it. Most of us were, I suspect, not all that interested in either Joe Biden’s candidacy or what his proposals (if any) were. I think he said something about his plan for health care, but I don’t think that either he or any of the moderators actually explored it. He simply wasn’t a candidate who wanted to be out on the edge of the envelope.
But we have the presidential debates coming up in less than two weeks. (I should have put an exclamation point after that last sentence, but I think you understand.) The pundits are already explaining that the debates usually don’t affect the polls or how the election comes out – that is true, but kind of an irrelevancy, because candidates almost always come prepared – what everyone is nervously awaiting is whether Joe Biden can surpass the lowly image that Donald Trump has been trying to paint him with. It is possible that a poor Biden performance could turn a few of the states that are right on the edge (Florida, North Carolina) and result in electoral disaster.
And that, almost solely, is why Biden ought to have a few policy proposals stuck quietly in his back pocket, so that when the moderator from Fox News asks him some gotcha question about policy in South America or farm price supports, he will have a credible answer.
And parenthetically, the real danger of the debates is that once in a while, Trump will actually provide a cogent answer, with real data, the way that other candidates have done in past debates. Then the news media will be forced to admit that Trump seemed presidential for the first time in his life and his supporters will crow that “Trump won the debate.”
Still, that Trump could win one of the debates would seem highly unlikely unless Biden makes some terrible gaffe. And even then, that guy with the “Any functioning adult” sticker and myself will be voting against Trump anyway.
But considering all the risks, Biden ought to be studying hard on policy and history and practicing his debate style. He has a bit of a lead over Trump in preparation because the Democrats held a gazillion primary debates and the Republicans basically had a coronation. Biden has had more recent practice. The problem of course is that debating in front of Democrats is different than debating in front of all voters. It was more or less a given that a guaranteed right to health care (with protection against preexisting condition exclusions) was going to be policy. I don’t see how Biden could (or would want to) distance himself from that position, but it is a different argument to make in front of people who are not dyed in the wool Democrats.
And that leads to one other suggestion for candidate Joe. It’s not just having position papers in his back pocket (figuratively speaking). It’s being able to deal with Trump’s ability to lie.
It’s hard for me to explain this because lying doesn’t come easy to me. To Trump it does. Let’s take just the most recent – and one of the most infuriating – examples. Donald Trump visited California and met with state officials to talk about the fires. In that conversation, one of our state officers remarked on the increased level of fires being exacerbated by climate change. And our president, after all these years, polar ice melting, fires, massive hurricanes, and incontrovertible evidence of carbon dioxide concentrations and oceanic warming – Donald Trump actually looked up with a straight face and claimed that science doesn’t know about climate change.
Look, you expect the defendant in criminal court to deny that he took the money or killed the decedent or conspired to sell national secrets to a foreign country. But that’s different from a president denying the results of thousands of scientific measurements. The standards are different, but Trump really did break the mold when it comes to lying with a straight face.
So Joe Biden is going into a debate that is, in the most definitive sense of the word, rigged, because the moderators understand that Trump lies, and there is every reason to believe that they will not call him on his lies starting with the first one and continuing every single time. That’s what they should do, but they probably won’t.
So what is Biden to do when Trump – predictably – goes into mendacity modeÓ and lies like a rug? I’ve seen a suggestion that Biden should just smile and shake his head lightly. Knowing Trump, Biden will probably get lots of chances to do so.
And this, by itself, will move the storyline. Not only will it be the count – how many lies did Trump tell – but it will also be the Biden count – how many lies did Biden catch him on?
Getting the fact checkers to add that additional count – how many times can Biden catch Trump in an obvious lie? – will change the whole storyline of the first debate. Trump can brag about the vaccine coming out, peace in the Middle East, and the construction of the wall, and the front-page story will still be the count of lies.
Addendum
“I can’t stand Trump, but Democrats may force me to vote for him,” says Danielle Pletka in a Washington Post piece. It’s a remarkable stretch, although some of you may find it difficult to get to if you can’t get past the paywall. In brief, Pletka dusts off all the charges that (a) the Democratic Party is run by a hard core of far lefties and (b) Joe Biden is somehow under their control. It would be hard enough to make the first argument, considering that the centrist presidential candidates caved en masse, endorsing Biden within hours of each other and thereby signifying that they wanted more than anything else to present a centrist candidate who would beat Donald Trump. It is even more ridiculous to make the second argument for one simple reason. Joe Biden has been around presidents for a large part of his life. He knows what it means to be president, which means he knows that he, as president, would not be under anyone’s thumb.
The argument is forced. As somebody who does one or two columns a week, I understand the concept of writing to a deadline, but if an editor wanted to solicit an argument that even people who detest Trump should vote for him based on policy, this wasn’t that column.
Arresting a KPCC reporter
It’s common for police apologists to claim that there are “a few bad apples,” implying that the vast majority of police are honest and avoid excessive force. The problem with this argument is that the vast majority of police also looked the other way and protected those few bad apples. The counterargument is that the public needs to be protected from bad apples within the police department just like it needs to be protected from criminals.
The arrest of Josie Huang has inspired quite a bit of local and even national comment. There are two questions that are relevant. First, was the arrest justified? In other words, can a reporter cover an arrest as long as he or she does not interfere with the lawful activities of the sheriff’s deputies? Did she obey the law in this case?
Second, did the sheriff deputies lie about the arrest?
The above linked article from the Washington Post suggests that Huang’s video footage contradicts what the deputies claimed.
This incident is (allegedly) one more bit of evidence that times have changed in law enforcement, in that routine lying by the police is harder to get away with. What law enforcement is going to have to realize is that public trust of what you say is badly damaged every time any law enforcement agency (even one in a far off state) engages in obvious lying. It was interesting to see that the LAPD made clear that it did not excuse or condone the George Floyd killing (and we should give them great credit for joining demonstrations) yet the demonstrations continued.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
