Biden’s mission clear following convention
Ex-VP accepts party’s nod as attention now turns to halting Trump.
As the newly minted leader of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden used his acceptance speech Thursday night to lay out an unusually personal message for the fall campaign, linking his heart-rending biography of setback and recovery to the lives of Americans hoping for their own rebound in a season of hardships.
But looming over Biden’s longsought presidential nomination was the ever-present shadow of another man who’s poised to dominate the final 10 weeks of the campaign and use his considerable megaphone to drown out Biden’s pitch: Donald Trump.
The president, who spent the day attacking Biden in the swing state of Pennsylvania, was the greatest unifying force at the Democratic convention, given that loathing him is the one thing that everyone in the fractious party can agree on.
Biden and the Democrats spent the week prosecuting arguments against him on COVID-19, unem
ployment, health care, child care, climate change, foreign policy and his fundamental fitness for the presidency — attacks that only presaged a fall campaign that, even when it features Biden, will be aimed entirely at drawing contrasts with Trump.
“He’ll wake up every day believing the job is all about him, never about you,” Biden said Thursday night. “Is that the America you want for you, your family, your children? I see a different America.”
Biden directly addressed those who have lost fam- ily and friends to the pan- demic, speaking knowingly of the “deep black hole that opens up in the middle of your chest” after a loss.
“You feel like you’re being sucked into it. I know how mean, cruel and unfair life can be sometimes,” he said.
In a sign of both confidence and prudence, Biden and his new running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, will not leave Delaware to embark on the traditional boat, bus or train tour of swing states as presidential tickets usually do, in part because they want to model safer behavior than Trump has in response to the coronavirus.
Yet there’s another sort of safety consideration that the Democrats have in mind, too — the same one that has char- acterized Biden’s cautious candidacy, vice-presidential selection and virtual convention. He wants to keep voters focused on Trump, avoid unforced errors and confine 2020 to a referendum on the unpopular incumbent.
For his part, Trump has not hesitated to try to bend parts of the federal govern- ment to serve his political interests, and such attempts could make for a turbulent final two months on the trail.
Next week, during the Republican convention, Biden’s aides hope to capitalize on all the focus on Trump by sharpening their criticism of the president.
They want to elevate more stories from people whose lives have been adversely affected by his decision-making in the fashion they did at the convention with one speaker in particular, Kristin Urquiza, whose father had put his trust in Trump and died of COVID-19.
Framing their attacks on Trump around real-life stories of regular people, they hope, will prove more effec- tive than Hillary Clinton’s warnings four years ago about him as a theoretical threat and malign character.
“I’m not asking you to vote against Donald Trump because he’s a bad guy. I’m urging you to vote against him because he’s done a bad job,” said Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and presidential candidate, said at the convention, making explicit the different approach Dem- ocrats are taking this year.
Ceding the spotlight to an incumbent glad to bask in it isn’t entirely without risk, however. Some Dem- ocrats are bracing for an onslaught from the president aimed at Biden’s surviving son, Hunter, that they fear could rattle the former vice president.
Trump, who appeared near Bid e n’s child h ood hometown o f Scra nton, Pennsylvania, on Thurs- day to divert attention from the Democrat, has already steered his campaign in an overwhelmingly negative direction: Since mid-June, only 1% of Trump’s television ads were rated as positive by Advertising Analytics, a media tracking firm.
So far, the former vice president’s advisers have been pleased that Trump’s barrage of advertising — including booking the widely seen banner of YouTube this week that featured ads questioning Biden’s mental agility — has yet to sharply drive up Biden’s unfavorability ratings.
Democrats have good reason to keep the focus on Trump. Since 2016, his political standing has dipped when the focus is on him rather than on his rivals. Both Biden and Harris are prone to missteps when they are off-script. Perhaps most important, the president is the strongest adhesive holding together an ungainly Biden voter coalition that ranges from democratic socialists to four-star generals.
The Biden campaign hopes the former vice president’s more moderate image is suited to lure those turned off by Trump’s tweets and tone, and the convention was designed to provide them something of a permission slip to switch sides.
With interest piqued in Harris as the new face of the ticket, the plan is for Biden’s running mate to do a spate of appearances, media interviews and fundraisers as Biden keeps a lower profile during next week’s Republican convention.