Highlight Fitness for the Office
A Slightly Different Take On Finding A New Democratic Nominee For President.
The Unique Republican Vulnerability
If we are going to stop Donald Trump from returning to office, I believe we have to highlight his main liability: he tried to overthrow the government, and returning him to office wouldempower him to take even more dictatorial actions. This is often called the Democracy Issue.
This fact about Trump should override all policy questions. It is important. If the nation elects someone whose policies you don’t like, you can try to get someone else elected next time. But if the nation elects someone who wants to be a dictator, it passes a point of no return that could enslave the country for generations. Ask the Germans and the Russians about that.
It is also non-partisan. What a politician believes about reducing carbon dioxide emissions or providing health insurance may seem good or bad to you depending on your ideology. We all supposedly agree that it is very, very wrong to use a violent mob to help you stay in power after losing an election. That is not a liberal belief or a conservative belief, it is an American belief.
Finally, it is easy to understand. Exactly how the government should deal with inflation or Russia or climate change are complicated questions. People who are not paying that much attention to politics will probably not take the time to understand your reasoning about these issues. But everyone can understand “Do not elect the guy who sent a mob to attack the Capitol.”
In this election, there are large groups of voters who will vote for either the Republican or the Democrat no matter what. In the case of Trump, it is clear that many will support him even if he were to “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody.” The election will be decided by a relatively small part of the electorate. Many of these voters do not pay much attention to politics or read the newspaper. Others are more tuned in, but hate both sides so much they are having trouble deciding which is worse.
I believe that these features of undecided voters makes the Democracy Issue the best way to reach them. If you want to reach people who are not paying attention or do not like your side, you want an issue that is important, non-partisan, and easy to understand.
Why has the Democracy Issue not already buried Trump? I believe because the issue itself has been buried. Readers of intellectual publications like The Atlantic are painfully aware of Trump’s threat to democracy, but to the public at large it is just another abstract political issue among many. It has not been put in front of them as vividly as other issues. But it could be.
If people think inflation is bad for the economy, how do they feel about vigilantes ruling the states, government ceasing to function, or civil war?
Biden Brings a Unique Vulnerability Too
OK, but what does all this have to do with which person is the Democratic nominee for president?
The connection is that nominating Biden hands Republicans their own issue that is important, non-partisan, and easy to understand: Biden’s mental fitness for office. The president’s physical and cognitive health is a bona fide issue that has the potential to neutralize the argument that Trump is a threat to democracy. Having a Commander in Chief who is mentally unfit is among the handful of problems that are up there with turning the country into a dictatorship as a dire threat.
I believe that Joe Biden is still able to do a good job performing his duties as president, and that even an impaired president of good character is better than a man who may wreck our democracy. In a comparison between malevolence and potential incompetence, malevolence is worse. But that is a comparison we really, really do not want to be making.
Why is Trump’s own mental state not an issue? He is often incoherent, practically illiterate, and acts in a way that is blatantly sociopathic. But his unfitness for office was shockingly clear back in 2016, and since then he lasted four years in office without destroying the country. The problem with Biden is that the trend is very negative. He was alert and coherent in his interview with George Stephanopoulos this week, but also older, slower, and weaker than he was in interviews four years ago. And of course his debate performance was an unprecedented disaster. It is reasonable to worry about what he will be like in 2 years or 4 years.
Trump is also old, and arguably showing signs of mental and physical decline as well. However, his speech and behavior have been so strange from the beginning that it is harder to see the difference.
While Trump’s bad behavior is nothing new, his threat to democracy has greatly intensified. Before the 2020 election, he behaved in a way that alarmed democracy experts, but he hadn’t actually acted in an anti-democratic way, perhaps in part because his staff would not let him. But his lies about the 2020 election, his attempts to overturn the result, his incitement of his supporters, and his approval of their attack on Congress were not hypothetical, he was actually trying to stay in office after losing an election.
Even worse, Trump appears to be very careful about only doing what he thinks he can get away with. If he is re-elected, he will learn that he can get away with blatantly undemocratic actions. Also, he is looking to fill his administration with staff that will agree to his every demand, no matter how illegal. And now the Supreme Court has declared a wide range of presidential actions immune to prosecution. The public, his staff, and the courts will all be telling him he can commit crimes with impunity.
Electing Trump again could accelerate the destruction of American democracy. It will be harder to talk about that if we have to defend Biden against charges of accelerating infirmity. With Biden, whatever we say will sound to swing voters like “Their candidate is more unfit for office than ours.” With several other possible Democratic nominees, we can say, “Our candidate is fit for office; theirs is not.”
Vulnerability of Other Democrats
I often wonder why Biden is so unpopular given that he presided over the end (more or less) of the Covid pandemic, a strong economy, some popular landmark bills, declining homicide rates, and no new wars involving American soldiers.
Inflation is painful, but it was curbed pretty painlessly. Last time we had an inflation spike, it took a horrible double-dip recession (1980-1982) to tame it. People also point to the embarrassing Afghanistan withdrawal, poor handling of the wave of people crossing the border, and foreign policy crises in Ukraine and Israel.
Obama, Bush, and Clinton all had various emergencies and policy failures, but they all had better popularity ratings than Biden (though not by as much as I remembered: 37% favorable for Biden versus 49% Obama, 46% Bush, 53% Clinton). It seems that people blame Biden for things that are mostly out of his control, such as global inflation and wars abroad, and do not give him credit for accomplishments like the infrastructure bill or lowering insulin prices.
I wonder if Biden’s age and health are part of the problem: people see him walking stiffly to the podium, conclude he is weak, and then blame any negative events on his weakness. This is pure speculation. Maybe a clever political scientist can design a poll to show whether people who see Biden as physically weak are more likely to blame him for events.
It’s guaranteed that any Democrat who replaces Biden as the nominee will have to contend with Republican attacks based on real and/or imagined vulnerabilities. Harris and Newsome will be targets of Republican vitriol about California, some of which could hit home. Harris has not managed to make much of a name for herself as Vice President, and will face the same criticism of the Biden administration’s stewardship as Biden.
But I doubt that any of the leading contenders (Kamala Harris, various swing-state governors, Gavin Newsom) have any vulnerability that is potentially disqualifying the way accusations of senility are. Republican attacks that the candidate is (for instance) a “left wing soft-on-crime DEI candidate who won’t back Israel” may resonate with their base, but for an average undecided voter, does that really beat “Your candidate made abortions illegal and tried to overthrow the government”?