How the U.S. got a Biden-Trump rematch
If you are despairing and despondent about the decline of U.S. politics, still pining for the good old days of Barack Obama, here’s more bad news.
The former president likely wouldn’t win today, according to one of his former White House speech writers, Sarada Peri.
I’d asked Peri why voters are stuck with two old, outdated, unpopular presidential candidates — Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Why are we facing a leadership crisis in so many democracies, where the wrong people are running and the right people are running away?
Where, I wanted to know, is the next Obama?
Peri’s blunt, bleak assessment startled me and the Empire Club audience listening in on our conversation onstage at the TIFF Lightbox about Decoding Democracy in an American election year.
“Barack Obama was, of course, a generational political talent (but) could he win an election in America today?” Peri asked rhetorically. “No,” she said flatly.
“I think he’d be the first person to say that — because where we are now is dramatically different from where we were in 2004, when he set foot on the national stage in Boston (at a Democratic convention), where we were in 2007 when he declared his candidacy and in 2008 when he won. It’s a really different time.”
The time of Trump versus Biden. The third time, in fact, that Trump is running for the presidency. A time when even a strong economy, post-pandemic, isn’t enough to quash the misguided perception of recession and the perennial fantasy of MAGA — Make America Great Again.
How did we get here? Where do we go from here?
Peri points out that there’s no turning back. No matter how much progressives might want Biden to make way for a younger successor, that train has left the station.
Democrats must accept the reality that he’s the only one who can bankroll a $1-billion campaign to run against Trump, with the required name recognition and broad reach as a retail politician. Others might look more attractive, but remain untested.
“There’s a ton of talent, young talent, on the Democratic side,” argued Peri, who has emerged as an influential political and communications consultant since her speech-writing stint in the White House. “It’s just that, between now and November, is that going to happen? No.”
So how can the Democratic ticket prevail when it is weighed down by not one but two seemingly unpopular politicians, given the inability of Vice-President Kamala Harris to gain traction in the media or the polls?
“Baked in, there’s a certain amount of racism and sexism in the way that they cover her. We’ve never before had a woman vice-president, let alone a woman of colour as vice-president,” Peri reminded me, so “she’s not going to get covered in the same way had she been a tall white man.”
Harris has been hitting her stride of late, with a college speaking tour to shore up Biden’s left flank, where many progressives on campus are frustrated by his handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the nature of American television coverage favours Trump’s flamboyance versus Harris’s formality and Biden’s frailty.
The fragmentation of mainstream media, along with the rise (and fall) of rival social media platforms, means fewer filters, less fact-checking, more so-called fake news — and the spectre of deep fakes as artificial intelligence intrudes. We face a future of machine learning powering the electoral machines of the past.
Peri sees early signs of AI disrupting America’s democratic discourse, but believes the bigger threat comes from the steady decline of human engagement in the electoral process. False cries of electoral fraud can wreak more havoc than AI fakery, especially when so many disengaged voters are distrustful of traditional media.
“There’s just a general decline of trust in institutions, and the media is one of those institutions,” she told our audience. “What social media has done is allowed people to take in the information that they want, it’s allowed people to bypass traditional news outlets … We tell our candidates, you’ve got to bypass earned (mainstream) media and you just have to go straight to people yourselves, you have to use those social media channels.”
Whether on social or mass media, I asked Peri about crafting words as a speech writer and honing the message. For even if Obama couldn’t win today, he had a winning message in his day.
Peri described the former commander-in-chief as America’s foremost communicator-in-chief, disciplined in the delivery but also the design of presidential speeches.
“He was such a disciplined communicator and … disciplined speaker, it was rare that he’d just blow up a speech at the last minute,” Peri recalled. “You didn’t see him waver off script because he respected his audiences enough to think hard about every word he was saying, and to not just go off the cuff …
“I think that’s a lesson for everybody who thinks they can speak extemporaneously. You probably can’t. So prepare and maybe write down what you’re going to say, because even Barack Obama does that.”
Tough talk from a speech writer on the front lines of politics as it once was, and where it’s going next.