USA TODAY International Edition
Dems on Biden: Decent. Empathetic. Not Trump.
Convention deliberately has done more to extol who Biden is than what he would do as president
It’s impossible to miss the message from the Democratic National Convention this week in describing – and for some voters, introducing – Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee. Decent. Empathetic. Trustworthy. Also this: not Donald Trump.
With disciplined consistency, speaker after speaker at this week’s virtual convention has focused on the humanity of the former vice president, drawing sharp contrasts with the bombastic personality of the Republican incumbent. President Trump has underscored the point, presumably not deliberately, by hurling insults at some of the speakers and warning darkly at an Arizona stop Tuesday that Biden wanted to open the nation’s borders to criminals and disease.
The convention has done more to extol who candidate Biden is than to explain what a President Biden would do. That’s a deliberate campaign strategy, one that bridges for now significant ideological divides among the voters the party hopes to attract.
But it carries risks for someone who would enter the Oval Office facing the most serious national challenges of any new president since Franklin Roosevelt nearly nine decades ago.
Talking about policy in a campaign, from how to overhaul health care to whether to get out of a war, can help build a national consensus and lay the groundwork for taking action in office.
Biden has a chance to outline his priorities and detail his solutions to the nation’s problems in his acceptance address Thursday night, speaking to TV cameras from a largely empty event center in Wilmington, Delaware. Except for the presidential debates in the fall, he is likely to be reaching the largest audience he will command before Election Day.
Don’t expect a State of the Union- like list of particulars, though.
Biden needs to forge a broad coalition with a variety of political views, from big- city progressives to moderate working- class whites, from seniors to young people. What’s more, voters often don’t reward candidates who purport to tell them hard truths. At the 1984 Democratic convention, nominee Walter Mondale famously declared that he would raise taxes if elected and argued that President Ronald Reagan would be forced to do the same. “He won’t tell you,” Mondale said. “I just did.”
That didn’t nothing to help Mondale’s campaign, which ended up on the losing side of a 49- state landslide.
During this convention, Democratic delegates passed with little dissent a 92- page party platform, negotiated by a task force representing Biden and the more liberal Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who finished second for the nomination. But the platform skirts the progressives’ causes that animated divisions among Democrats during the primaries – passing a Green New Deal, banning fracking, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
In her one- minute speech nominating Sanders on Tuesday, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez made it clear those debates would be back. A rising voice for the party’s progressives, she called for “a mass people’s movement” that would “recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny and homophobia.”
That work comes after Election Day, though. She didn’t mention Biden in her speech, but she has already endorsed him for November. “For now, an uneasy peace reigns,” says political analyst and demographer Ruy Teixeira, though he adds, “It isn’t hard to see the potential fault lines.”
The decision by the Biden campaign to promise competence and leadership in general – more than spotlighting his policy proposals in particular – has made it more difficult for Republican attacks on him to stick. Trump has called Democrats “radical and beyond socialism” and portrayed Biden as a captive of his party’s left wing.
That picture has been hard to square with the convention endorsements this week from such senior Republicans as former Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The voices of regular folks from across the country embracing “Joe” as someone who understands their lives have been interspersed through the program. Trump worked four years ago to make Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton seem unlikable; Biden has made it harder to do the same to him.
That said, Biden has vulnerabilities of his own. Although he has been on the national scene for nearly a half- century as a Delaware senator and then vice president, Biden “remains well known, but not known well,” says Democratic pollster Peter Hart. In an NBC- Wall Street Journal poll just before the convention, only 33% of those surveyed reported positive feelings about Biden; 59% expressed reservations about a Biden presidency.
In the most intimate testimonial of the week, Jill Biden described her husband’s life story and family tragedies as preparation for the task the next president will face after the disruptions and divisions of the last four years.
“I know that if we entrust this nation to Joe, he will do for your family what he did for ours: bring us together and make us whole,” she said in Tuesday’s featured address, speaking from Room 232 of Brandywine High School in Wilmington, Delaware, where she once taught English. “That’s the soul of America Joe Biden is fighting for now.”
Details to follow.