Memo urges Biden team to target president over ‘cronyism’
ALLIES of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are being told to sharpen attacks on President Donald Trump’s stimulus efforts as thinly veiled “cronyism”, according to a memo being sent to Democratic office holders and supporters yesterday.
The memo gives Mr Biden’s campaign representatives new language to use in their attacks on Mr Trump and shows a campaign honing an increasingly aggressive tone ahead of the November 3 election.
The strategy document says Mr Trump’s post-pandemic stimulus contains “the largest corporate bailout in American history”, a kind of “cronyism” that is “systematically rigged in favour of big businesses, the wealthy, and the financial sector – and against the working people and middle-class families who are enduring the worst economic losses the country has faced in modern memory.”
A spokesman for Mr Biden’s campaign declined to comment on the memo, which was written by two of the campaign’s top policy advisers, Stef Feldman and Jake Sullivan.
A spokesman for Mr Trump’s campaign, Tim Murtaugh, characterised the argument as “pathetic”.
“The president has been hard at work protecting the safety of Americans and also safeguarding the economy, while Joe Biden sits in his basement lobbing political hand grenades in a desperate plea for relevance,” Mr Murtaugh said.
Mr Biden and Mr Trump are both retooling economic plans after the coronavirus pandemic put more than 33 million Americans out of work and ended the longest recorded boom in US history.
Each candidate is also searching for a winning message on the economy for the election that political strategists increasingly see as a single-issue campaign – how to deal with the health and economic consequences of the pandemic.
The novel coronavirus has infected more than 1.25 million Americans and killed more than 75,000, the world’s highest number of cases and deaths.
With the new attacks, Mr Biden is attempting to court not just moderate and independent voters but also liberals in his own party, some of whom favoured the tough-on-corporations message of senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, his former nomination rivals.
Even though Mr Biden has strong union ties and touts working-class values, some left-wing voters feel his policies are not progressive enough, and also dislike his use of high-dollar fundraisers to finance his campaign.
While Democrats in Congress supported nearly $3tn (€2.7tn) compromise stimulus legislation, Mr Biden’s team is asking allies to attack various faults that have emerged in the programme, the memo shows.
The campaign cited media reports and research suggesting that small businesses with ties to the administration received aid, that banks may be prioritising wealthy clients when making loans under the emergency programme, and that Democratic-led states that did not support Mr Trump’s re-election might not be getting sufficient support.
Government officials have said they are prioritising oversight as they manage the programmes.