Joe Biden’s “low-key campaign style worries some Democrats,” reads the headline on an Associated Press story … before quoting criticism from the Texas Democratic Party chair and the acting president. Some is the chairwoman of the local African American Caucus in Charlotte who complains she received only one day’s notice of Biden’s Black economic summit there. She only heard about it on TV.
Biden fares better in another AP story focused on Biden leveraging his working-class roots in taking on an incumbent born with a golden spoon up his aspirations. This one begins:
“I’ve dealt with guys like Donald Trump my whole life, who would look down on us because we didn’t have a lot of money or your parents didn’t go to college,” Biden said, recalling his boyhood roots. “Guys who think they’re better than you. Guys who inherit everything they’ve ever gotten in their life and squander it.”
[…]
“The truth is,” Biden said, “he never really respected us.”
It’s at once a demonstration of Biden’s personal contempt for Trump and the Democratic challenger’s pride in his own family history as mostly working-class Irish Catholics. But, most importantly as voters begin casting early ballots, it’s a carefully tailored message aimed at voters who’ve abandoned Democrats in recent elections and helped Trump flip a band of Rust Belt states to fashion his own presidential victory map.
It seems to be working.
Even Ohio is a swing state again. Biden and Trump are in a dead heat in Iowa and Georgia and Biden is competitive even in Texas.
It cannot hurt that 489 members from National Security Leaders for Biden — former national security officials from both parties — signed a letter endorsing Biden on Thursday. Among them, “former Obama administration Defense Secretaries Ash Carter, Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, along with former Navy Secretary and NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe, who served under both former Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush. Among the retired senior officers is Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, who until last year was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump.”
Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution military analyst, said, “There is real concern among some of these folks that we’re living on borrowed time with this guy having his finger on the nuclear trigger.”
About nuclear arms. Inside the Kremlin, analysts are scrambling to game out how Russia’s fortunes might fare under a Biden presidency (Bloomberg):
Increasingly alarmed at the prospect of a White House without Donald Trump, Russia is trying to determine what that’ll mean for sensitive issues from nuclear arms to relations with China, energy exports, sanctions and far-flung global conflicts, according to people familiar with the efforts. Though few see much prospect for improved ties if Trump is re-elected, Biden would likely be bad news for Russia, people close to the leadership said.
This could mean Russian social media disinformation campaigns to undermine Biden may get more frenetic. But now, Russia has to hedge its bets.
“It’s not clear what kind of help they could offer Trump,” former Kremlin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky tells Bloomberg, “but they’d give it to him as long as it didn’t provoke a big scandal … They don’t want to trigger a boomerang effect.” Read: economic sanctions.
The prospect of new Western sanctions on Russia has helped drive the ruble to the lowest levels since April.
What a pity.
Speaking of economic sanctions, South Carolina Republican senator and top Trump bootlick, Lindsey Graham is sweating bullets. Two recent polls show him in a dead heat with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison. Graham appeared like a deer in the headlight of Harrison’s fundraising freight train Thursday night when he ran to Fox News to plead for help.
Incompetent as Trump is, he has people around him smart enough and unscrupulous enough to try delaying election certification long enough in a few key states to throw the election to the House of Representatives. But that requires an election outcome close enough to do so.
Right now, things are trending in Biden’s favor. And bad news for Graham, The Economist projects a 68% chance of Democrats gaining control of the U.S. Senate. Even if the publication and Cook’s Political Report show the race as “lean Republican,” the look in Graham’s eyes last night showed something else.
“Great, kid! Don’t get cocky,” said a starship pilot in a galaxy far, far away. And all y’all? Get to work this weekend, please. We’re not out of this yet.
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