The Democrats’ Appeal — "Elect Joe Biden. Hels a Nice Guy”

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“Elect Joe Biden President. He’s a nice guy.” That, in essence, was the message of the recently concluded Democratic National “Convention” August 17-20. I’m using the word “convention” in quotes because instead of occurring inside a big arena, the “convention” took place in isolated spaces — gyms, classrooms, homes, outdoor crossroads, forests and a Rhode Island beach where two of the delegates showed off their official state food, calamari — blended together electronically into a patchwork quilt we’ve become all too familiar with as the way virtually all TV news shows are broadcast these days.

Of course, this wasn’t a choice the Democratic National Committee made voluntarily. Like so much of how we live now, including how we work (or don’t work), spend our leisure time and consume entertainment, the 2020 Democratic National “Convention”’s virtual format was thrust on us by the Viral Dictator. A submicroscopic bundle of nucleic acid, proteins and a lipid coat has subjugated the entire human race with its demands — “Isolate yourselves from each other, or else I’ll spread and kill you all” — and, with a few exceptions (including President Trump), most Americans have more or less willingly acceded to the demands of SARS-CoV-2. (That, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, is the name of the virus causing the current pandemic; COVID-19 is the name of the disease it causes.)

In one respect, the “virtualization” of the Democratic “convention” this year was a good thing. It eliminated the last bit of pretense left that political conventions are news events, existing independently of the TV coverage they receive. Overall, the importance of political conventions has long since receded as the marathon primary campaign has taken over the process of actually deciding who the major-party Presidential candidates will be. The last time the Democrats held a convention at which the outcome was genuinely in doubt when the convention opened was 1972; the last time the Republicans did was 1976, and both the nominees from those conventions lost.

In 1972 it was considered shocking that Richard Nixon’s campaign had actually drafted a script for how each night of their convention should go. The BBC received a leaked copy and scandalized the world by publishing an excerpt from it. Today Presidential candidates are often judged by how well their conventions proceed according to script. If anything goes wrong, many voters will conclude, “If he can’t even run a convention, how does he expect to be able to run the country?”

Even the last bit of genuine suspense that remained at least through the 1980’s — the identity of the vice-presidential candidate — is long gone. Today a major-party Presidential candidate who didn’t announce his (or, in just one case, her) vice-presidential pick well in advance of the convention would be considered irresponsible. Former vice-president Joe Biden was actually criticized for not announcing his running mate, California Senator Kamala Harris, until a week before his convention was supposed to start.

So it’s probably a good thing that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic forced the Democratic Party (and, likely, the Republican Party as well — though we won’t know for sure until the Republican convention follows the lead of the Democrats and goes entirely virtual or it contains some of those big, transcendent public events President Trump loves so much) to eliminate any pretense that it was anything other than a TV show, a four-night infomercial for the party, its candidates and its causes. Indeed, I suspect this is how U.S. political “conventions” will be handled from now on: instead of mega-gatherings in arenas, they will be smaller, more intimate, not only shown on TV but produced for it.

Some of the speakers at the 2020 Democratic “Convention” benefited from its virtual nature. Joe Biden himself may have been the biggest beneficiary; without the need to appoear before a large audience, where he’s made some of his most embarrassing gaffes (like announcing his run for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina when he went there to campaign for the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, or mistaking his wife for his sister at his big rally in Los Angeles), he seemed visibly more comfortable speaking to a camera in an empty room. So did Michelle Obama, even though I thought her speech, though good, was nowhere near as triumphant a piece of historic oratory as the MS-NBC commentators said.

Though Michelle Obama’s speech was way too brown — and I mean that literally: her brown skin, her brown outfit and her brown room blended into a piece of almost sepulchral murk — she was clearly more comfortable speaking from her home than she would have been on the floor of a traditional convention. On the other hand, her husband seemed nervous without the support of the crowd. Forced into an attack mode that’s not congenial for him — Barack Obama is and always has been stronger at evoking the better angels of our nature than calling out America’s darkness — he stopped at every applause line and heard nothing but silence in return. Though almost totally different from Donald Trump in every other respect, Obama has one thing in common with him: they both need the energy from a crowd, the bigger the better, to come alive when they speak.

Like Me — and Vote for Me!

The Democratic “Convention” seemed designed to communicate two messages to prospective voters. One was the extensive showcasing of people of color, especially in the state-by-state roll call that actually nominated Joe Biden President. There were Black people, Latino/a people (upon my honor I will never use that ghastly, ugly, hateful example of linguistic political correctness run totally amok, “Latinx”!), a surprising number of Native Americans as well as Asian-Americans, Pacific Islander-Americans and Queer (another horrible piece of linguistic political correctness I will never use is “LGBTQ+” or whatever crazy set of initials it’s expanded to these days) Americans. “The Republicans are the party of white Americans; we’re the party of all Americans,” the Democrats seemed to be saying with their parade of Americans of color.

The other key selling point of the Democratic “Convention” was to present Joe Biden as a normal human being. We were told over and over again that Biden feels “empathy,” that he knows what pain and suffering are and he can identify with those who feel a deep and profound sense of loss. We heard so much about the two most tragic things that have happened to Biden personally — the deaths of his first wife and their infant daughter in a car crash in late 1972, after Biden had won an election for U.S. Senate from Delaware but before he had taken office; and the death of his 46-year-old son Beau from cancer in 2015 — at times the “convention” seemed like a story conference for the Hallmark Channel.

The organizers of the “convention” didn’t directly compare Biden’s compassion and empathy with Donald Trump’s conspicuous — and proud — lack of them. They didn’t have to. Every time Joe and Jill Biden talked about the loss of “our son” Beau — and it was telling that Jill said “our son” even though she wasn’t Beau’s biological mother — a reasonably informed viewer couldn’t help but compare the way the Bidens reacted to Beau’s death versus the way Donald Trump reacted to the death of his brother Fred Trump, Jr. in 1981, which was essentially to dismiss him as a weakling his family and the world were both better off rid of.

The Democrats know they have a problem with Joe Biden. He’s old — at 78 he’d be the oldest person ever sworn in as U.S. President if he wins the election (which makes the qualifications of running mate Kamala Harris to take over as President even more significant than usual for a vice-presidential pick) — and he’s prone to public gaffes that have led some people (including me) to wonder if he’s in the early stages of age-related dementia. He’s a quintessential part of the Washington establishment Trump railed against in his 2016 campaign.

Indeed, he’s so much the Establishment candidate that when he was asked a tough question by a voter at a CNN town-hall show in March — doesn’t the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic show that the U.S. needs to replace its profit-driven health care system with Medicare for all? — Biden hemmed and hawed, danced around the question and returned to his pre-pandemic position of offering “Medicare for All with COVID-19” plus a “public option” under the Affordable Care Act and expansion of access to private insurance. Of course, he couldn’t take any other position because one reason Biden and not Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee is a lot of people with a major stake in the current system pulled strings to make sure the U.S. was spared the “horror” of actually guaranteeing health care to all its citizens as a matter of right.

The biggest problem the Democrats have with Biden is that he’s boring. Ironically, that’s also his biggest asset: Biden promises a respite from Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride. Like Warren Harding in 1920, who ran to put his party back in the White House by promising a “return to normalcy” after the chaos of World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s presidency (he actually meant “return to normality,” but “normalcy” stuck so well it’s become part of American English and Biden himself has said it), Biden has run a campaign of such blandness his campaign slogan might as well be “Make America Boring Again.” That was already his approach before the pandemic, but SARS-CoV-2 has thrown Americans’ hopes for physical and economic well-being into such disarray, a lot of voters may well pick Biden simply in the hope that the pandemic is one more piece of Trump chaos Biden can bore into oblivion.

So the Democrats went all out for the tear ducts during the 2020 convention. They told story after story of Joe Biden giving out his personal cell-phone number to people in physical or emotional pain and spending a half-hour to an hour on the phone with them. They told the story of how Biden’s father came home one day and told his family that times were going to get a lot tougher for them because he had just lost his job — yet another contrast with Trump, the spoiled rich son of a rich man who’s never for a day in his life had to worry about where his next meal would come from, the Democrats could make without spelling it out. We heard the words “empathy” and “compassion” used so often to describe Biden that sometimes we got the impression they were about to show a video of him walking on water.

The whole point of the Democratic “convention” was to sell Joe Biden to the American people as a decent, normal human being. They didn’t have to mention Donald Trump’s name — about the only context in which they did was to call him temperamentally unfit for the office of President — but the unspoken contrast came through: “Our guy cares. Their guy doesn’t. Our guy has a heart. Their guy doesn’t. Our guy has a soul. Their guy doesn’t.”

Trump’s niece Mary, who also has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has confirmed in her tell-all book and the interviews she’s given to promote it that Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, raised his kids literally to be psychopaths. He taught them that empathy and compassion are vices, not virtues, and the qualities they should aspire to are strength, ruthlessness, cruelty and greed. According to Mary Trump, her father, Fred Jr., got read out of the family, fell into alcoholism and died at 42 because he had normal human instincts for which his father, and later his brothers, routinely and relentlessly punished him.

We really always knew that about Donald Trump. The thuggish braggadocio and the sheer meanness of his personality have been on public display since his bizarre emergence as a trash celebrity in the New York tabloids in the 1970’s. As early as 1987, when Trump’s alleged “autobiography” The Art of the Deal was published, the book’s real author, Tony Schwartz, realized it. In an interview with Jane Mayer in the July 25, 2016 issue of The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all), Schwartz said, ““More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

Trump’s capacity for telling himself that what is saying is true, sort of true, or ought to be true was given a more economical name by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Orwell called it doublethink. and described it as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” He added that by using doublethink, the ruling elite of his dystopia could “use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that comes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.”

We’ve seen Trump use doublethink again and again — as a businessman, as a TV star, as a candidate, as a President. He said he had the largest crowds ever at his 2017 inaugural ceremony, and continued to say that even after TV stations showed side-by-side photos of his inauguration with Obama’s in 2009 and Trump’s were visibly much smaller. Trump dismantled the offices Obama and his predecessors to warn us about viruses which might start pandemics, and then said “nobody could have seen this coming” when a pandemic actually occurred. Over and over again he’s asserted that only he can possibly solve the problems of America — and then whine, when America has real existential problems, that he takes no responsibility and certainly no blame.

The only advantage the rulers in 1984 had over Trump is that, as absolute dictators, they were able to maintain an infrastructure that physically destroyed any records of what the rulers said the past had been and substituted new, forged ones in line with what the ruling party was now saying the past had always been. (Ironically, given how much we’ve come to rely on computers to store our most basic information — and how easily computers can be hacked — this has become far more conceivable and possible, even likely, than it was in Orwell’s time.) No doubt Trump wishes he had that power — that he could make all those pesky bits of evidence that contradict his lies — but he does have the other side of the power Orwell attributed to his ruling “Inner Party.”

Trump has control over the memories of his supporters. For the hard-core 40 to 45 percent of the American electorate who constitute his base, he has them so brainwashed, hypnotized or just plain convinced of the rectitude of everything he does he has no real fear of losing them. And he doesn’t have to add that many more voters to be assured of victory. Indeed, from day one of the Trump administration he and Republican leaders have decided that the way to re-elect him is not by adding voters to his base, but quite the opposite: by subtracting voters from the other side’s base. Voter suppression is not just something Republican Congressmembers, Senators, state legislators and political appointees (including Louis DeJoy, Trump’s hatchet man to destroy the U.S. Postal Service so people can’t vote by mail against him) are practicing: it has become basic to their political strategy and, indeed, to their political survival as demographic trends in the U.S. produce fewer people likely to be Republicans and more likely to be Democrats.

Given that Biden and the Democrats are up against a strong and powerful Trump base that’s almost enough to win an election on its own — especially if, as I suspect, Trump has what I call the “reverse Bradley factor” going for him (i.e., he’ll always do 5 percent better than the polls say he will because 5 percent of poll respondents are really for Trump but say they aren’t because they don’t want the poll takers to think they’re racists) — “Vote for me: I’m the nice one” seems like a weak reed on which to hang the Democrats’ hope of getting this psycho out of the White House.

Another ominous sign for the Democrats is the enthusiasm gap: two-thirds of the people who tell pollsters they’re going to vote for Biden say they’re doing so only to get rid of Trump. Only one-third of Biden’s supporters in the polls say they’re genuinely enthusiastic about seeing Biden become President. The figures for Trump voters are exactly the opposite: two-thirds of his poll supporters are genuinely excited about continuing the Trump presidency. Only one-third of Trump supporters say they’re voting for him to keep Biden and the Democrats out of the White House.

On the eve of the Republican convention, as I’m writing these words, the big open question is how will the Republicans frame their counter to the Democrats’ nice-guy appeal. News stories I’ve seen suggest that a lot of Republicans want to hold a traditional incumbent-running-for-re-election convention, emphasizing the bright side of Trump’s record. That’s going to be a problem given that the biggest thing the Republicans had going for them this year — an economy that at least looked strong on paper — has collapsed under the lash of SARS-CoV-2 and an uncertain (to say the least!) policy response to it. But it’s still a safe, viable strategy for the Republicans to argue that they were doing just fine running the economy until the virus hit and they’ll be the right party to restore prosperity once the pandemic passes.

The problem is that’s not the campaign Trump wants to run. The campaign Trump wants to run is to present Biden’s election as an apocalypse for America. Biden, says Trump, is at best an ineffectual dolt who will let the radical-Left elements of his party take over, destroy the “free market,” institute socialism and turn America into Venezuela. Trump wants to win re-election with his own set of heart-rending stories — of innocent young women and men literally being torn to bits in the streets by weapon-wielding thugs turned loose by Democratic policies of “defunding the police” (which Biden doesn’t support, by the way) and of Trump and the kinds of paramilitary forces he sent into the streets of Portland, Oregon to quell Black Lives Matter protests as the only barrier between America and anarchy.

The irony is that both of America’s major parties are presenting the 2020 election in apocalyptic terms. The Democrats are portraying Trump — with quite a lot of evidence to back them up — as a would-be Führer, an authoritarian leader who doesn’t believe in democracy and who, if re-elected, will establish one-man rule in the U.S. that will last indefinitely. The Republicans are portraying Biden as at best a weakling and at worst a tool of those dark, satanic forces out to destroy the United States and the security and well-being of its people just for the hell of it. And with the election being presented as an apocalyptic vision on both sides, “Vote for Biden — he’s a nice guy” just doesn’t seem like a strong enough appeal to cut it.