San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Biden-Harris wisely focusing on the ‘ExhaustedMajority’
Back in February it seemed as if we were about to have one of the most ideologically polarized elections in American history. President Donald Trump was rushing ahead with his populist/ego-trip/authoritarian whatchamacallit. The Democrats were shifting left: “Medicare for All,” Green New Deal, Bernie Sandersstyle reimagining of capitalism.
The great political/culture war was at hand!
Instead, this has turned into the least ideological election in recent times. The campaign has largely shrunk down fromgrand ideological issues to two practical problems: How to get rid of Donald Trump. How to beat COVID-19.
The shrinkage happened in three stages. First, Democratic primary voters decided that beating Trump was more important than the revolution. Second, the pandemic hit. Candidates imagine that if elected they will be able to implement their grand vision. But as GeorgeW. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump all learned the hard way, governing is usually about responding to crises you didn’t choose or foresee.
Third, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decided to run a professional campaign. Instead of trying to please those of us who consume large amounts of media, they have ruthlessly and effectively focused their campaign on the Exhausted Majority — people who are disgusted by and semidetached from politics in working-class homes in the Midwest, in retirement communities in Florida, in suburban cul-de-sacs everywhere.
Harris’ debate performance was the perfect implementation of the strategy and the perfect illustration of why it is succeeding. A lot of the conversation about who “won” the debate misses the crucial question of who effectively implemented their campaign’s strategy. Harris did. The Republicans don’t have a strategy, so Mike Pence’s performance was beside the point.
If you can stretch yourmind back to the Democratic debates of last winter, youmay remember a different Harris. You might remember that she was held in suspicion by the left because of her record as a prosecutor but that she was working hard to shore up support on that flank.
In 2019 she was ranked as the most liberal person in the Senate, to the left of Sanders, by GovTrack. She supported the Green New Deal and, for a while, Medicare for All. She co-wrote an environmental bill with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and proposed spending plans that one analyst reckoned would cost $40 trillion over 10 years.
That’s not who we sawWednesday night. Her first answer on COVID-19 was the most ingenious of the evening, in that it hit
Trump fromthe right. She did not say that government should make the country safe withmandates. She said that in January, Trump denied self-reliant families the information they needed to keep themselves safe.
From there it was center-left all the way. She asserted her support for a woman’s right to have an abortion but turned questions about the Supreme Court fight into a conversation about protecting Obamacare.
The three supporters she name-checked were Colin Powell, Cindy McCain and John Kasich. When asked about racial justice, she didn’t talk expansively about systemic racism but focused more practically on what she did as a prosecutor.
When she was asked directly about the Green New Deal, she reminded voters that Biden wouldn’t ban fracking and then sketched out a set of policies much moremoderate than those she’d embraced in the primaries.
The policies she did embrace mostly came from the center-left Obama playbook: preserving and extending Obamacare, protecting those with preexisting conditions, investing in renewable energy and infrastructure projects, free community college, and preserving tax cuts for anybody making less than $400,000 a year.
The one plausible argument the Republicans had against
Biden was that he is a Trojan horse for the far-left. After the first few months of the campaign, it is simply hard to believe that.
How you campaign is how you govern. As people who have served in past administrations understand, once in office it is nearly impossible to rally support for issues and plans you didn’t take to the American people during the fall. That’s why it’s unlikely that Biden and Harris would switch sharply back to the left once elected.
Trump’s stated reluctance to accept the election resultsmeans that Biden has to run this way. He can’t run an ideological campaign that wins a baremajority. He has to inarguably crush Trump with the broadest possible coalition.
There’s a moment in many campaigns when the American people see chaos looming on the horizon. At those moments, Americans shift to the candidates who provide safety and order. Americans have seen chaos loom, and Biden and Harris seem like the safest and least exhausting pair of hands.