Trump, Biden Both Lose
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I really felt sorry for Donald Trump after his three Presidential debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016. Before the debates, I had not only predicted on this blog that Trump would win the Presidency, I had even predicted how he would do it. I’d warned that Clinton would rack up big popular-vote margins in the big states on the West and East Coasts and would actually have won the election if America were truly a democracy instead of a republic (read James Madison in Federalist #10 for the best explanation I know of about the difference). But Trump would eke out small victories in Rust Belt and Sun Belt states and thereby become the second consecutive Republican President to win his first term in the electoral college while losing the popular vote.
Then Trump came out in the debates and almost literally went stark staring mad. As I wrote in October 2016, “At least when Adolf Hitler went crazy — sometime in 1942-43 Hitler switched from being a rational, cunning person pursuing an evil agenda to someone insane — he did it in the privacy of his various bunkers and only the highest officials in the Nazi government had to deal with it. Trump is doing it in the glare of national TV and on Twitter, where he stays up until the wee hours of the morning and shares with us the ravings previous generations of madmen either wrote down in incomprehensible journals or muttered to themselves in the hallways of asylums. When he first announced his campaign, a lot of people said, ‘He must be smart — he’s so rich!’ Now they’re wondering, ‘How did he get to be so rich when he’s so crazy?’”
By the time November 8, 2016 rolled around I was convinced Trump would lose the Presidential election because I didn’t think enough Americans would vote for him when he was so obviously bonkers. The insults, the stalking, the visceral contempt for Hillary Clinton that oozed from every pore of his bloated body, even the showmanship stunt of trying to get four of Bill Clinton’s old paramours (including Juanita Broaddrick, the one who had accused Bill Clinton of out-and-out rape) into the audience at one of the debates, all seemed like the desperate attempts of a man who couldn’t win a fair fight to unleash his own obsessions on the American people. Surely, I thought, whatever their level of contempt for Hillary Clinton -- bought and paid for by Richard Mellon Scaife and other super-rich Right-wingers who had paid a small fortune to collect (or invent) lies about her for over 25 years, the American people wouldn’t elect a President who was so obviously bat-shit crazy.
Well, I was right the first time. I was right in summer 2016 when I was urging the Democrats either to nominate Bernie Sanders or at least find a moderate who didn’t have Hillary’s hellacious political baggage (like Joe Biden, who’s going to have a hard time beating Trump in 2020 but would probably have had a better shot in 2016; alas, he bowed out of the race because he was still grieving the loss of his late son Beau … even though Beau himself had told his dad on his deathbed that he should run) because the huge level of hostility towards Hillary made her unelectable. She was still unelectable on November 8, 2016, and not just because she’s a woman (though sexism obviously had a lot to do with her defeat) but because years of Right-wing propaganda had turned the American people against her on a personal level and convinced them that she would not be able to serve out her term because she’d be convicted of a crime.
And, more to the point, Hillary Clinton epitomized the Washington elite. When her campaign started using the slogan that she was the “most prepared” candidate ever to have run for President in terms of the number of offices she’d held and the responsibilities she’d fulfilled, I wondered who on her staff had so totally misread the American electorate in 2016 that they’d came up with something so antithetical to the numbers of Americans who desperately wanted a major change -- and didn’t much care whether it came from Bernie Sanders on the Left or Donald Trump on the Right. Later I read Hillary’s campaign memoir What Happened and learned that stupid “most prepared” slogan had been the brainchild of Hillary herself.
In 2016 Trump was extraordinarily lucky in the opponents he drew -- self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Sanders running in a country of people who have been indoctrinated for decades to see “democracy” and “socialism” as antithetical terms, and the much-hated wife of one of America’s quirkiest politicians, whose private life in general and sex life in particular would forever tarnish his legacy. (Ironically, when Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the sexist hatred of his wife was one of the things that kept his poll ratings up; millions of American men said, “If I were married to that, I’d cheat on her, too.”)
This year Trump came on the debate stage in Ohio -- a state no Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying it -- on September 29 and was his typical boorish self: consistently interrupting, mocking his opponent with cutting asides, flagrantly misrepresenting both Joe Biden’s record and his own, He surprised some people -- including MS-NBC commentator Brian Williams -- by waiting until the 47th minute of a nearly two-hour debate (it was supposed to be just 90 minutes but, not surprisingly, it ran over) to bring up Biden’s scapegrace son Hunter. Biden launched into a full-throated defense of his son … unfortunately, his other son, Beau, who was clearly daddy’s favorite even before Beau’s tragic death from cancer and has become even more exalted in Joe Biden’s memory after his loss.
Hunter Biden seems to have lived his entire life in his late brother’s shadow. Joe Biden has almost certainly never said to him, “The wrong brother died,” as Dewey Cox’s father says to him over and over in Walk Hard, a marvelous parody of musical biopics, but I suspect he’s felt it. I suspect everything that’s gone wrong in Hunter’s life -- from his issues with drugs (Trump claimed during the debate that Hunter Biden had been dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military due to drug use; Biden denied it) to his attempts to monetize his relationship to the then-vice president by joining corporate boards in Ukraine and China with zero relevant experience in those companies’ businesses -- seems to me to have come about because when it comes to his one surviving child by his first wife, Joe Biden’s fabled gift for “empathy” seems to have failed him almost completely.
Not, of course, that Trump was willing to let his attacks on Hunter Biden stop there. Trump couldn’t just say that Hunter Biden had done the “swampy” thing of joining the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, that obviously wanted him just to exploit his family connections. He also had to say that Joe Biden had threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine unless they fired a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma -- which Biden did, though there were extenuating circumstances (both the European Union and anti-corruption activists in Ukraine itself wanted the guy out because they thought he was being too easy on corruption), and through much of the second half of the debate Trump was screaming over Biden that Hunter received $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow … and Biden was equally vehemently (and rudely) denying it.
For the most part, the September 29 debate looked more like a fight between two students in a kindergarten classroom. Moderator Chris Wallace, who for years has tried to convince people he’s every bit as legitimate a journalist as his late father, Mike Wallace, even though he works for Fox News, vainly tried his best to keep his two quarrelling candidates on message and get them at least to feint towards answering his questions. At times he seemed to wish he could break up the two candidates and send them to opposite corners of the room until they agreed to play nice with each other. Wallace pointed out that both candidates were interrupting each other, but Trump was interrupting more -- which will probably get his objectivity questioned from Trump partisans who will denounce him as “fake news” and demand that Fox owner Rupert Murdoch fire him.
Trump was certainly living up to his bull-in-the-china-shop reputation. He scored at least one legitimate point against Biden, pointing out that in 1994 Biden pushed a “tough-on-crime” bill through the U.S. Senate that, among other things, raised the mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug crimes; set the penalties for crack based on the amount of substance rather than the amount of active drug (a scheme cooked up by African-American Democratic Congressmember Charles Rangel, who thought penalizing crack more harshly than powder cocaine would stop the crack epidemic in the African-American community), and labeled large numbers of young African-American men as “super-predators” who would have to be locked up in prison for life because there was no way to rehabilitate them.
Biden, indeed, emerges as one of the principal villains in Radley Balko’s 2014 book Rise of the Military Cop, about how the federal “War on Drugs” led to the militarization of American law enforcement at all levels, the rise of SWAT teams, the use of no-knock warrants (like the one that got Breonna Taylor killed in Louisville, Kentucky) in drug cases, an overall erosion of the idea that one’s home is one’s castle, and the “qualified immunity” virtually all American police officers have that protects them from wrongful-death suits. According to Balko, throughout his tenure in the U.S. Senate Biden would respond to harsh anti-crime bills sponsored by Republicans by introducing even harsher measures and getting Democrats to sign onto them by declaring that if they didn’t, Republicans would say they were being “soft on crime.”
Trump can legitimately claim that Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, helped create the mass incarceration of African-Americans and the climate by which police officers think they can kill them at will and never suffer any consequences, while Trump signed the First Step Act at the end of 2019 which started rolling back the harsh minimum sentences and other provisions of Biden’s anti-crime bills. He tried doing that in the debate, but he also repeated his mantra that he’s the candidate of “law and order” and challenging Biden to use the words “law and order” to express something desirable. Biden’s rather awkward response that he’s for “law and order -- and justice” showed he was aware of the trap Trump was setting for him but wasn’t politically or rhetorically agile enough to avoid falling into it completely.
Indeed, throughout the debate one of Trump’s savviest moves was to tie Biden to the radical Left of the Democratic Party. Few people outside Trump’s hard-core base are likely to believe that Biden is a radical Leftist himself, but a lot of voters will be susceptible to Trump’s argument that Biden won’t be a strong enough leader to keep the radical Left from taking control of the Democratic Party, a Democratic Congress and ultimately the country. It was fascinating to watch Trump accuse Biden of wanting to destroy all private health insurance in the U.S. -- and Biden respond by moving even farther to the Right on health care than the position he staked out during the campaign.
Tonight Biden said that the much-vaunted “public option” he wants to add to the Affordable Care Act [ACA] (assuming it survives the Supreme Court challenge, scheduled to be heard only 11 days after the election -- which, with Amy Coney Barrett headed for a warp-speed party-line confirmation, it’s virtually certain that the Act will be dead and buried before the new President takes office) will be available only to people poor enough to qualify for Medicaid and who live in states that haven’t invoked the Medicaid expansion under the Act. It’s a far cry from what “the public option” meant when the Affordable Care Act was first debated in 2009-2010 and even when Biden proposed it in the Democratic campaign -- a chance for people unsatisfied with the available options for private health insurance to buy a government-sponsored single-payer plan as an alternative.
The health insurance industry moved heaven and earth to keep the “public option” out of the original Affordable Care Act out of fear that if it were available, millions of Americans would choose it over private insurance because it would provide better, more comprehensive coverage than private plans; ensure that people had free choice of doctors and other health-care providers instead of being locked into only the handful of providers under the “narrow networks” under ACA-subsidized private plans, and would cost less. But the rich donors and other powerful people in the Democratic Party establishment who ensured Biden’s nomination did so, among other reasons, to make sure America’s for-profit health insurance industry would never have to face public competition.
At one point, as Biden was backing away from support for the so-called “Green New Deal” and saying he wanted to eliminate fracking but not get rid of it completely, Trump talked over him and said, “You’ve just lost the Left.” It’s a reflection of the bind the Democratic Party in general, and its Presidential candidates in particular,, have been in ever since America’s current Right-leaning political alignment emerged in 1968. Since then the Republicans have won eight Presidential elections to the Democrats’ five, and one of the main reasons for that has been the ongoing split in the Democrats’ base between progressives who want radical social change and at least a partial challenge to capitalism and the rule of “The Market” that has become America’s secular religion, and moderates who venerate capitalism and just want to tweak it around the edges a little to make it slightly more fair.
One could watch Joe Biden in the September 29 debate and see him caught between anti-capitalist yin and pro-capitalist yang. He needed to sound progressive, but not too progressive, and precisely because of his long record in government service (which Trump kept taunting him about -- more than once Trump said, “I’ve done more in 47 months than you’ve done in 47 years”) he’s having a harder time pulling off that balancing act than the three Democrats who’ve actually won Presidential elections since 1968 (Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama) or the two other leading “moderate” candidates in this year’s primaries, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttegieg.
I’m still angry that the Democratic National Committee drove Klobuchar and Buttegieg out of the race and gave the dedazo to Biden on the strength of Biden’s primary victory in South Carolina -- South Carolina, the cradle of the Confederacy and a state the Democrats have zero chance of carrying this year. I’m amazed that the Democrats in South Carolina nominated an African-American, Jaime Harrison, to take on incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham -- a white candidate could presumably have had a shot at “flipping”: this seat, but the cradle of the Confederacy is not ready to elect a Black Senator no matter how well he’s doing in the polls.
Remember the “Bradley effect,” the pattern that Black candidates will always do five points worse than they do in the polls because a lot of voters are racist but don’t want to admit it to survey researchers? I’ve long felt Trump is the beneficiary of a “reverse Bradley effect” in which he will always do five points better than in the polls because of racist voters who won’t tell pollsters they’re voting for him. These are what Trump calls his “invisible voters” and claims they’ll win the election for him. One reason Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 was that the Democrats were lured into a false sense of security by the polls and didn’t realize they were really behind in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio -- and they may be making the same mistake again this year.
Joe Biden had two main tasks in the September 29 debate. He succeeded in one of them: he didn’t make any obvious gaffes. He stumbled over his own words a few times (as did Trump) but he didn’t say or do anything to support Trump’s repeated accusations that Biden is cognitively impaired or that he’s not up to the mental strain of being President. Unfortunately, he failed at the other task: he let Trump’s insults and interruptions get to him. Though he didn’t talk over Trump anywhere nearly as often as Trump talked over him, Biden talked over Trump enough times he did not seem like “the adult in the room.” Indeed, as I noted earlier, they sometimes came across like two kindergarteners fighting each other in class -- and Chris Wallace did not have the disciplinary options a kindergarten teacher has at his or her disposal to deal with unruly kids. He couldn’t declare a time-out or send them to their corners -- as much as I suspect he wanted to.
If the debate changed any minds or affected those legendary creatures, the “undecided voters,” it probably made them think, “A plague on both your houses,” and made it less likely that they’ll vote at all. And that’s going to hurt Biden more than Trump, since the Democrats need a huge turnout of voters to crush Trump, the Republican Party and the Right-wing media power of talk radio and Fox News that have created the Trump constituency and helped bring it to power. Trump and the Republicans have consciously pursued a strategy of not attempting to add to their base, but quite the opposite: subtracting from the other side’s base through outright voter suppression and psychological tactics to discourage people who’d vote against them from voting at all. In losing his cool so often and so dramatically in their first debate, Biden helped the Republicans and played right into Trump’s strategy.
