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Democrats’ Best Candidate is Also Their Weakest Against Trump
With the impeachment raging, Democrats seem unaware of just how damaging the entire show is going to be for their most likely candidate going head-to-head against Trump.
In 2020, Trump’s record of accomplishments is far more impressive than most undecided and moderate voters could have imagined; candidate Trump in 2016 didn’t seem capable of moving the embassy to Jerusalem while maintaining peace, of enacting massive tax-cuts, or of passing bipartisan criminal justice reform.
In 2020, President Trump’s biggest liabilities are his shady dealings that led to his impeachment over Ukraine, a questionable character and a Twitter feed that doesn’t take much-needed vacations. In a matchup against Joe Biden, those massive liabilities are immediately eviscerated. The impeachment hearings don’t just expose Trump’s bad behavior, but spotlight the ethical rot in Joe Biden’s own household, that took place under his nose with his blessing. With a Biden Presidency, we’d be trading in a Trump family soap opera for a Biden version. Many would willing to ignore a Twitter feed in exchange for more of the results of the years under Trump.
This headline should win an award.
A DNA test revealed Hunter Biden fathered a baby with another woman while he was dating his brother's widow https://t.co/44hAo4KBBW
— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) November 20, 2019
How effective will continued attacks against Trump’s record with women be when Biden’s “tactile politics” is uncomfortable for the New York Times? Choosing Trump over Biden feels a lot like trading all of the same problems, with none of the proven benefits.
As the impeachment rages and headlines like this break a year before the election, one has to wonder if Democrats are thinking about the long-game for their probable nominee.
Published in General
Is he, though? I suspect the reason everyone from Bloomberg to Hillary are musing about throwing their hats into the ring at this late stage is because they sense blood in the water: Biden is vulnerable, there’s no clear front runner, and the nomination is up for grabs.
As others have noted, Biden’s firewall is his ties to Obama, and the support he’s getting from African-American voters because of that. Which may explain the arrival of Deval Patrick in the race, as he could be seen by some as driving in the same moderate-left lane as Biden, but with the ability to take the African-American vote away from wacky-but-loveable Uncle Joe (and if you want to be really cynical, you can posit that among those thinking that might be Barack Obama, who’s been more openly hinting in the past two weeks that the Democrats do not need to nominate a hardcore progressive candidate … but still hasn’t given his support to his former vice-president).
Of course, Patrick’s campaign stop today apparently was canceled when only two people showed up, so getting this late-departing Spruce Goose up in the air may not be all that easy (and part of Obama’s ‘magic’ in 2008 was the ability for people to believe electing the first African-American president would produce all of that racial healing Jon Gabirel tweeted about. A Patrick candidacy would have no such ability for voters to delude themselves, and many progressives, who were given their Pavlovian training to hate Bain Capital seven years ago, haven’t lost that memory, and will be more hostile to a Patrick candidacy than they would be to Biden).
When I saw that headline, I was laughing too hard to click on the link. Were the two people his wife and campaign manager? Hehe . . .
Back in 1998 I happened to be out in El Paso at the Speaking Rock Casino when Texas Land Commission (and Bill Clinton buddy) Garry Mauro showed up for a campaign stop about two weeks before election day in his run against George W. Bush. If you took away the people like us who were either going in or out of the casino and paused for a moment just to see what was going on, there was nobody at that rally but Mauro, the media and Mauro’s handlers. Which was why Bush’s 49 percent victory margin (not winning with 49 percent — winning by 49 percent) was no big shock a few weeks later. Any Democratic Party establishment or media types overtly or secretly backing Patrick are really going to have to step up their promotion game if they want him to be a Biden alternative by Iowa.
So far he’s the only one who occasionally sounds like a traditional Democrat. I think the scary ones like Liz or Bernie would be best for the nation. A good trouncing might move the Democrats back to mere lack of understanding.
For the past half-century, the Democrats have, in the election cycle after losing control of the White House to Republicans, reflexively moved left, based on the idea that their progressive ideas weren’t rejected by voters, it was just the bumbling, incompetent idiot who was at the top of the ticket last time who cost them the presidency.
That pattern looks to be trying to continue in the 2020 cycle, and the sane Democrats can see the McGovern-Mondale-Kerry pattern just as much as anyone else and are trying to avoid it (they sort of thought they had dodged the Howard Dean bullet in ’04 with Kerry, but his Vietnam-era baggage was too much of a tie to the McGovern Democrats of 30 years earlier to avoid). That’s likely why Biden still has a lot of his support, hy Buttigieg has been trying to reposition himself as a moderate, and why Deval Patrick is entering the race. But any of those candidates only gets through if the progressive wing of the party remains divided between Liz and Bernie — the left side of the party still thinks Hillary lost to Trump because she wasn’t progressive enough, and united, they still make up a majority in the primaries.
Watch for Winfrey/Obama (Michelle) 2020. Or Obama/Winfrey 2020.