Democrats make their case for Biden
What happened
Democrats formally nominated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as their presidential ticket this week at a virtual convention featuring a parade of both Democratic and Republican speakers praising Biden’s decency and empathy and calling President Trump unfit to lead. Having scrapped plans to gather in Milwaukee, Democrats pivoted to a heavily produced convention with rapid-fire appearances from dozens of participants, plus a colorful “roll call” panorama featuring delegates showing off distinctive scenery in 50 states and seven territories, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., fried calamari in Rhode Island, saguaro cacti in Arizona, and a field of cows in Montana. The speaker lineup showcased Biden’s broad coalition: Republicans such as former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Arizona Sen. John McCain’s widow, Cindy, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who said Trump’s reelection would be a terrible blow to the progressive movement and the country. “The future of our democracy is at stake,” Sanders said. “The price of failure is just too great to imagine.”
Biden maintains about an 8-point lead in aggregations of national polls, although a pre-convention CNN poll had his lead cut to 4. In convention speeches, Democrats highlighted Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the Covid-19 death toll—now over 170,000—and the pandemic’s economic fallout. But the central focus was on character, with videos of Biden greeting Amtrak conductors and an elevator operator, and grieving after family tragedies. The Week went to press before Harris and Biden made their addresses, but in early remarks, Biden criticized Trump’s pandemic response, saying, “I used to think it was because he was callous, but I think it’s because he’s just not smart enough.” Michelle Obama echoed the dig, saying Trump “is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment.”
What the columnists said
The Democrats’ urgency to remove Trump from the Oval Office has forged “a temporary truce” between centrists and progressives, said Eric Lach in NewYorker.com. In the run-up to the convention, progressives complained about the screen time awarded to party elders like Bill Clinton while rising star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) got just 60 seconds. But Democrats clearly fear a repeat of 2016, when Sanders’ embittered supporters failed to rally behind Hillary Clinton. To keep the disparate factions under one tent, the party went “light on policy talk” and focused on Trump.
It sure made for dull television, said David Harsanyi in NationalReview.com. The convention had a “1980s-telethon vibe,” with pre-recorded speeches, canned applause, actresses serving as emcees, and video packages “that could easily have been Budweiser Super Bowl commercials circa 2005.” Without a crowd cheering every line, the “vacuity of it all” was “even more conspicuous.” The Democrats’ convention message was clear: “Donald Trump bad,” said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. Viewers who sat through hours of tedious Obama administration nostalgia were left wondering, “What do Democrats stand for?”
For now, Democrats’ spirits are “buoyed” by the polls, said Scott Martelle in the Los Angeles Times, but they also point to a danger: a lack of passionate support for Biden. Pew found that 56 percent of voters cite opposition to Trump as their main reason for backing Biden, whereas just 19 percent of Trump supporters are driven by dislike for his opponent. With early voting just six weeks away in several states, “anti-Trump anger” might not be enough to sustain Biden’s lead when he comes under Republican attack.
Michelle Obama pinpointed exactly how Democrats feel right now, said Michelle Norris in WashingtonPost.com. As gifted an orator as her husband, Obama spoke with calm, confident intensity and offered a “master class” in flipping sexist and racist stereotypes about “angry black women” on their head. She catalogued Trump’s egregious failings, particularly in dealing with the pandemic, and then powerfully finished: “He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us,” pausing to sigh before adding, “It is what it is.” The line was an allusion to Trump’s grotesquely callous dismissal of soaring coronavirus deaths and summarized what’s at stake in November. Trump “is who he is,” and “he won’t change unless the fall election delivers him a change of address.”