San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Outbreak upends presidential race
While President Trump commands the coronavirus stage, Joe Biden is playing a bit part as primary contest enters viruscaused deep freeze.
Joe Biden has both an opportunity and a big problem, and the reason for both is the same — the coronaviruscaused deep freeze that the Democratic presidential primary has entered.
Biden is en route to being the party’s presumptive nominee after a string of primary victories, while the pandemic has robbed Bernie Sanders’ campaign of its impact. But there are also no campaign rallies, no victory speeches and little free media for Biden at a time when President Trump appears on TV every day to talk about what his administration is doing to make Americans safe.
“Now Trump can do what he does best — hold a daily reality show where he introduces doctors and the surgeon general and other experts,” said Matt Barreto, a professor of political science and Chicano studies at UCLA and cofounder of the Latino Decisions polling firm. “He can control the narrative that he is leading the response.
“It’s no longer the case that Democrats can ride this wave of panic and blame Trump, which was the case last week,” Barreto said. “This should be a message to Democrats that they need an organized response. They are ceding the national spotlight, for better or worse.”
But Trump has bungled much of his time in the daily spotlight, said Democratic strategist Ben LaBolt. Trump misled Americans for weeks, downplaying the oncoming pandemic even as it spread across China.
Democrats should pounce on how “President Trump has completely mismanaged this,” said LaBolt, top aide to former President Barack Obama and the national spokesman for his 2012 reelection campaign. “Biden can act as an accountability mechanism,” making the case that Trump’s early scoffing at the scope of the pandemic put Americans at risk.
“Politics is personal,” said LaBolt, who is unaffiliated with any 2020 campaign. “If people don’t feel secure — economically secure, that their health is secure — then they won’t trust you.”
Just 37% of Americans surveyed for the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll on March 13 and 14 said they trusted what they were hearing from Trump about the coronavirus. That was toward the end of a string of Trump comments about the pandemic such as his Jan. 22 boast on CNBC that “we have it totally under control . ... It’s going to be just fine.”
But midMarch was also the time Trump’s tone shifted toward treating the disease as a crisis, and he began appearing at his coronavirus task force’s daily news briefings. By Friday, an ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that respondents approved of how he was handling the outbreak by 55% to 43%.
GOP strategist John Thomas said voters will forget about Trump’s performance in the early days of the crisis if he handles the rest well.
“The president is doing what he did in 2016 — dominating the coverage — and he’s answering a main critique of his presidency, that he doesn’t act presidential,” Thomas said.
“He’s boxing out Joe Biden,” Thomas said. “Who cares what Joe Biden has to say right now? If he were a sitting senator, he could say, ‘I propose X,Y and Z.’ Or stand next to a giant crate of masks and open it up and say, ‘Look what I brought home to our state.’ But what can he do right now?
“Biden has to figure out a way to inject himself into the process,” Thomas said.
Biden is trying. He released proposals on what he’d do to combat the pandemic. He told reporters Friday that he expects to have the capability to start holding news briefings and to livestream events from his Wilmington, Del., home starting Monday.
Biden also criticized Trump’s response at that Friday news conference. The former vice president railed on Trump for telling governors to obtain critically needed medical supplies on their own instead of asking the federal government because, as the president put it, “we’re not a shipping clerk.”
“In times of crisis, the American people deserve a president who tells them the truth,” Biden said. “Unfortunately, President Trump has not been that president.”
But top Democrats are divided on whether this is the right time to pound Trump.
Pacronym, a super PAC affiliated with the group Acronym that has Obama campaign manager David Plouffe on its board, is spending $5 million on digital ads criticizing Trump’s response to the virus. But David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief campaign strategist, tweeted that “now doesn’t seem the moment for negative ads.”
“These are not normal times,” Axelrod said. “What and how people receive these messages at this moment is a real question. You have a very stressed nation.”
Plouffe replied that “using Trump’s own words and actions to remind people of his failures while he tries to rewrite history is essential. And his campaign will spend whatever it takes to create their own reality of his ‘perfect’ response. Can’t disarm.”
Biden’s dilemma about how hard to hit Trump may be irrelevant, however, if he has no public platform to gain attention. States that haven’t voted in the primaries are pushing back their elections, so Biden won’t be giving victory speeches that get him free TV, with or without a crowd.
And with the pandemic keeping him out of the public eye, fundraising may soon dry up, GOP strategist Thomas said.
“Biden will be able to raise money” when fears have eased, Thomas said. “But time is ticking right now.”
In one way, the suspended campaign may be “a blessing in disguise” for Biden, said presidential historian Barbara Perry. He should take advantage of the lull to rest and work on building up his fundraising network, she said.
“The problem is if people just take their eye off of him completely, if all the primary contests are postponed or Bernie drops out,” said Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “There goes your free media.”
With Biden sidelined, said Thomas, the election may be decided by how Trump handles this moment.
“Biden could win by default, but this is a miserable position for a campaign to be in — to have no control,” Thomas said. “He has to hope that Trump bungles it — which is terrible for the fate of the country and the world.”
Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli