The New Yorker interviews Biden
“Saturday Night Live” made mad fun over the weekend of comments that President Joe Biden is sharp as a tack “behind closed doors.”
The New Yorker this morning offers a peek behind those closed doors. John Harwood tweets that the interview, like his own last fall, “shows talk of his alleged mental decline as utter bullshit.”
Evan Osnos writes:
If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him. For as long as Biden has been in politics, he has thrived on a mercurial mix of confidence and insecurity. Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.” For Biden, the offense of the contested election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him. “I’d ask a rhetorical question,” Biden said. “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”
Trump tried to steal the presidency “from him.” That sense, that feeling, is how Republicans have sold imaginary voter fraud over decades to undermine the democratic process. They encourage conservatives to imagine how it would feel to have their vote stolen from them, to imagine it as a grotesque, personal violation like rape or assault. Perhaps Democrats should encourage their Bidenly serene base to conjure the same feelings. What the Trump GOP means to do this fall is exactly the personal violation of which they’ve accused the left for decades. If it motivates the right, could it motivate the left?
The rest of the piece is about Biden’s view of the upcoming election, about Trump’s weaknesses, and about polling on various policy stances and economic measures. And Biden’s age. Give it a rest. And stop giving column inches to David Axelrod.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, voiced a position that I encountered among many high-ranking Democrats. “He’s not the only option that we had,” he told me. “But, once he’d made the decision to go, he became the only option that we have.” In the months that remain, Whitehouse said, the best way to beat Trump is a strategy that he called “Biden plus offense.” When people are “frightened or angry, you need to convince them that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights,” he said. “If you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re waist-deep fighting alligators in the swamp, then nobody’s really thinking about your age.”
A Biden campaign staffer, Mike Donilon, opines on Biden’s “freedom agenda”:
It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “MAGA movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”
Bruce Reed, a close Biden aides, tells Osnos, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”
Remind normies just how crazy is crazy. Cut to the chase. Trump and his anti-Constitution, anti-rule-of-law, anti-democracy, royalist cult will sure as hell try to steal your vote this fall to install Trump as a monarch. Let the policy wonks quibble about polls and policies. Remind voters that it’s not just abstract democracy on the line this fall.
Republicans mean to fuck you over and gut your freedoms. What are you prepared to do about it? At a minimum, get off your ass.
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