Everyone has lots of advice for Joe Biden about the State of the Union speech tonight. I suspect it will be like most of them — forgettable. The wing nuts can make it a little bit more memorable by acting like juvenile delinquents and maybe Biden can get off a few memorable lines. Generally, these things just engender a lot of breathless anticipation only to land with a whimper not a bang.
However, we are in the middle of the most high stakes presidential campaign in my lifetime so it would be very good if Biden did well tonight and begin to change the trajectory of this race. There are as many ideas about what he should do about that as there are talking heads. But I like this from Brian Beutler:
I like to point out that Donald Trump is a shitty person along multiple axes, and I believe his shittiness, which makes him unlikable, is his biggest political liability.
There are others liberals who believe complaining about corruption and poor character falls flat if it seems disconnected from regular workaday concerns. Donald Trump accepted millions of dollars in payments from China while he was president? Well what do I care, so long as he doesn’t make things worse for me, personally?
It’s not a crazy idea, but I don’t think appealing to selfishness is strictly necessary in Trump’s case. Most people hate crooks and liars, and Trump is more crooked and dishonest than any American politician in 250 years. That’s why most people hate him! And, roughly speaking, the people who like him either aren’t aware that he’s a crook and a liar or have chosen to forgive him—not because he did anything especially good for Americans, but because he makes liberals so upset.
However! I don’t object to connecting dots between Trump’s corruption and the direct harm he’s done and threatens to do to Americans—particularly when the dots are easy to connect. And if that’ll persuade Democrats to make a greater issue of his corruption, there’s no better case-in-point than his decision to leave 330 million Americans vulnerable to a pandemic disease he knew to be airborne and deadly because he feared that leveling with us would be bad for him personally.
CLASH IN THE PANDEMIC
When Ronald Reagan coined the canonical question in American presidential politics—Are you better off than you were four years ago?—he was challenging an incumbent. But the rhetorical pitch works just as well the other way around, when an incumbent seeking re-election has made the country he inherited better off than it was.
We kicked the Reagan question around on this week’s Politix podcast, with an eye toward being as generous as possible to Trump. Whatever his failings and failures, coronavirus could not help but disrupt any presidency, and not every harm the coronavirus caused was Trump’s fault per se. But things got as bad as they did because of Trump, and Biden proved very quickly when he took office that we’d have been better off if he’d been president in late 2019 and early 2020.
If Biden wants to remind people of this in the service of asking “are you better off…,” he and Democrats will have to play catchup. The pandemic has receded in the public’s mind, and on the closely related issue of handling the economy, Trump (who presided over depression levels of unemployment) enjoys a double-digit advantage over Biden.
But it shouldn’t be that hard. Remember this?
Unemployment, as we measure it, was going to go up sharply after COVID escaped China, and many people were going to die. But many more people died, or were thrust abruptly into unemployment, because Trump chose not to take COVID seriously. And he chose not to take COVID seriously because he was worried about his political and personal fortunes:
-He didn’t want the stock market to crash;
-Relatedly, he didn’t want his poll numbers to sink;
-He didn’t want to imperil an empty trade deal with China (which, don’t forget, was paying him money under the table right up until COVID hit).
If he’d begun preparing the country in November or December or January or even February:
-People would’ve begun to take precautions earlier, so fewer would have died or become disabled.
-Mass testing would’ve limited both infections and job losses.
-Congress would’ve had more time to craft thoughtful legislation, potentially limiting job losses further.
Instead, calamity.
Trump really did screw all of us over. Every American’s life was made significantly worse by his venality. But plenty of people, enough perhaps to return him to power, have decided in retrospect that he didn’t do such a bad job—and, thus, that Biden hasn’t been a more responsible steward of the economy than Trump was.
BEHIND THE COUNTERARGUMENT
There’s a school of analysis that ascribes this shift in opinion to rational thinking and historical proximity. Pandemic life under Biden was still not great. People soured on him for it. And when they realized Biden wasn’t an immaculate COVID savior, perhaps they decided they’d been too hard on Trump.
Again, not a crazy idea, but one that strains credulity. We’re asked to believe Trump staged a political comeback because memories are short, but that Biden is behind because memories (of inflation or school closures or whatever else) are long.
Even apart from its logical shortcomings, I just don’t buy this conception of public opinion.
It’s simpler to view the mulligan Trump’s enjoying as the consequence of an information fight Democrats lost, because they never really joined. Trump refused to admit error; he simply insists ad nauseam that he built the strongest economy in the world (fact check: he coasted on Obama’s economy for three years, but it was legitimately strong) and was only thwarted by the “China virus.” Message: 2020 doesn’t count, not my fault. (Fact check: Donald Trump was president in 2020.)
Biden, by contrast, largely dropped the issue. Perhaps he’ll revive it in this four-year anniversary window—he does have a big speech coming up after all. But sometime in 2021 or early 2022, Democrats stopped seeing political value in mentioning the pandemic at all. They buried their coronavirus after-action investigation in a sleepy house subcommittee, which released its final report in December 2022. After the midterms.
With that kind of energy, the only thing that might help Biden narrow the economy-trust gap with Trump will be the passage of time. But even if that works, it’ll only work on one channel. People might begrudgingly acknowledge that Biden really has been a good steward of the economy, but they won’t start to believe Trump was a poor steward if Democrats don’t tell them he was.
A counterargument is the only way to get people to refocus their residual pandemic anger on Trump instead of Biden. To the extent people really do hold a grudge against Biden for inflation, he has two main options: He can chalk it up, in dry policy terms, to the inherent herky jerky of reopening the global economy. Or he can remind voters that Trump bequeathed him a world in shambles and it took some time to fix things.
To some extent Biden was politically damaged by the economic consequences of COVID more than Trump was, even though he’s clearly more blameless.
Indeed, most democratically elected leaders who presided through the reopening and attendant inflation are deeply unpopular. Biden mitigated and then whipped inflation more effectively than they did, and he’s (thus?) a bit less unpopular. But the thing that makes him unique—his special advantage over all of them—is that none of them took the reins from a derelict like Trump.
There’s much more at his great newsletter Off Message, which you can subscribe to here. But I think you get the gist.
I’m hearing that the inside advice is to ignore the past and talk about the future. How … depressing. Yes, they need to talk about the future, every politician has to do that. But Trump has convinced a whole lot of people, and not just Republicans, that his administration was the golden age of America until the pandemic came along and that was totally not his fault (and anyway Biden was worse.) They truly believe this now despite mountain of evidence that his economy was only moderately successful (and riding on the Obama recovery) while Biden was left with a massive crisis and has brought the country back from the brink. That is the reality that people don’t know anymore because all they hear is “Trump’s economy was the best the world has ever known” and “Biden is old and inflation is bad.”
Here’s a little reality check:
Those are just a few of the statistics that put the lie to the idea that Trump’s administration was historically successful before the pandemic came along and ruined it all. It wasn’t and Biden has exceeded his numbers on every measure even if you take out the pandemic.
And none of that accounts for the monumental shitshow that his administration actually was with the crime, the drama, the chaos and the overwhelming embarrassment on the world stage. And then there was that little matter of having a five year old’s temper tantrum when he lost the election and staging an attempted coup.
It is true that all leaders around the world are suffering from the pandemic hangover being laid at their feet. But Biden is running against the most notorious sore loser in world history who is also a criminal and a traitor and yes, a very shitty person. One of the worst. And in order to make that case apparently you have to remind people of what he did because it was so awful many people have chosen to forget it.
You can’t make the case for Morning In America by pretending we didn’t go through one of the darkest nights in our history.