With the nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican Party's all but assured, we can expect the general election campaign to take shape swiftly. In interviews and speeches, we can see where Trump will focus. He is going to focus on Biden's immigration debacle and the breakdown of law and order. He's toned down his promises of vengeance, but you'd have to be daft to think that isn't on the table or that it isn't a popular idea. He's definitely going to point to current economic data and contrast it with his pre-COVID record. But what is Joe Biden going to do?
To read the fawning stories in the press, you'd think he would run on "peace and prosperity," on that fabled "return to normalcy," and to have "the adults in charge."
By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reelection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Instead, the 2024 Biden campaign will campaign on saving democracy from Donald Trump.
Donilon’s mild demeanor can be misleading. Like Biden, he has firm beliefs—about politics, the public, the press—and a contrarian side. In 2020, he and his campaign team had to decide whether to emphasize the economy or the more abstract idea that Trump imperilled the essence of America. “We bet on the latter,” Donilon said, even though “our own pollsters told us that talking about ‘the soul of the nation’ was nutty.” That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls “the freedom agenda.” By November, he predicted, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”
...The freedom campaign, Donilon said, is a story in three acts: “The first act was 2020. Trump represented a threat, and Biden won. 2022 was a second round. You had these election deniers, and all these folks around the country, and they were beaten back.” He added, “Round three is 2024. The thing is, you got to win all the rounds.”
The reason the Biden campaign will ignore its supposedly unmatched domestic policy achievements is that they are, as someone famous whose name escapes me at the moment, "whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean."
For instance, crime is down, but that's because a third of law enforcement agencies have stopped reporting data to the FBI. What data is lacking is more than made up for by visual evidence.
The 800-pound gorilla in the room, no offense intended to any of Biden's political appointees, is Biden himself.
David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief campaign strategist, told me that age was the crucial issue for Biden. “I don’t question his competence as President,” he said. “You give me Biden’s record and take fifteen years off of him, and this wouldn’t be a competitive race. This is the barrier he has to overcome, and it’s a hard one, because the march of time is immutable.”
The recent visit of both Biden and Trump to the Texas-Mexico border contrasted their relative vitality in a way that no essay can.
The side-by-side is even more damning.
BACKGROUND:
Democrats Are Asked About Joe Biden's Age, and the Red Lights Are Flashing
Doomsday Poll Part Two: The Times Releases the Results of the Age Question for Joe Biden
Desperate Libs Go Full Cross-Tab Truther After Major Poll Shows Disaster for Joe Biden
What makes me think this is legit and not some elaborate head-fake is that Biden believes it.
At one point, he pulled out a white notecard inscribed with some of Trump’s most alarming comments: his threat to terminate the Constitution, his casual talk of being a dictator on “Day One,” his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Biden tossed the list on his desk and gave a look of disbelief. “What the hell! ” he said. “If you and I had sat down ten years ago and I said a President is going to say those things, you would have looked at me like, ‘Biden, you’ve lost your senses.’ ”
Sane people don't act like that.
If anyone thinks Biden is going to be allowed to fight this campaign on issues of his choosing, they are deranged. But that seems to be the direction the White House is going.