When underdogs fight back
“When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right,” President Bill Clinton advised Democratic leaders in 2002.
Enter Donald John Trump, the seven deadly sins on two legs. No way would Americans vote for that walking atrocity, I thought in 2016. Hoo-boy, did I call that wrong. So did Bill’s wife Hillary. Americans chose strong and wrong.
The pivot point in the Hero’s Journey comes when, after refusing the call to adventure, she/he crosses a threshold out of the ordinary world into one of challenge and quest. Young Luke Skywalker crosses that threshold early in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Did President Joe Biden reach one of those pivot points last week? Some think maybe.
Reflecting on the 2008 HBO film, Recount, about the 2000 presidential election, Joe Klein writes in The New York Times:
Democrats litigate; Republicans fight. Democrats float toward an almost helium-infused state of high-mindedness; Republicans see politics as a no-holds-barred cage match.
President Biden’s pugilistic State of the Union address last week may represent a new direction. But given the party’s recent history, the Democrats will probably need some CRISPR editing to their DNA.
Both Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were distressingly saintly in their presidential campaigns, failing to respond to Republican attack ads. Hillary Clinton endured a classic “Recount” moment in her second debate against Donald Trump. Mr. Trump stalked her around the stage. “He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled,” Mrs. Clinton later wrote. “Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on,” she wondered. “Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up, you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me.” Throwing the haymaker might not have won the election, but Mrs. Clinton would have instantly changed the impression that she was a hapless, patronizing, liberal elitist.
Throwing political left hooks is not Democrats’ nature, nor in Biden’s. But it’s time they find it in themselves. Perhaps Biden has crossed a threshold, and others will follow. (Okay, maybe not these people.) Americans cheer when the underdog fights back.
Klein continues:
Street fighting can be overdone, but it is where Mr. Trump lives. He is perhaps the most impolitic politician in American history. Joe Biden can, at times, wield a wicked sense of humor, and last week he demonstrated that he can be a merry Celtic warrior. But he’ll have to sustain his energy throughout the campaign, and he will need help.
Strong women fluster Trump. If Kamala Harris were Nixon’s VP, Klein suggests, “she’d be tasked with one job: Stomp Trump.” Maybe she will in 2024. That doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook.
Biden himself has been reluctant a reluctant warrior, writes E.J. Dionne. Working across the aisle is in his blood. But so is his “Irish.” Time for Joe to ball his fists, “because you can’t reconcile with those who have no interest in civility or dialogue,” Dionne advises:
So Biden the peacemaker gave way to Biden the scrapper on behalf of a threatened democracy. He reached for the most dramatic metaphor available to him in expressing just how irreconcilable our differences have become. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War,” he declared, “have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.”
[…]
A strategy of warfare requires tactical decisions. Rallying Democrats was the first priority of his speech, but Biden made two of his other top objectives obvious. He intends to fight hard for the kinds of Republicans and independents who rallied to Nikki Haley’s candidacy by making clear that he will stand up for Ukraine’s survival and stand strong against Vladimir Putin’s threats. His pointed contrast of Trump with Ronald Reagan reminded many Republicans of a heritage their soon-to-be nominee would squander by “bowing down to a Russian leader.”
“The assertion that hyper-partisanship, chaos and nihilism (e.g., threatening to shut down the government, egging on a default and refusing to even vote on Ukraine aide) is equally divided amounts to an outright fabrication — or utter cluelessness,” insists Jennifer Rubin while praising Democrats who won primaries on March 5 as comparative moderates.
“Responsible reporting should not cover for Republicans. The MAGA Republican Party has become shockingly irrational and radicalized, fully embracing totalitarianism, white nationalism and radical isolationism.”
Mainstream false-equivalence reporting about political polarization is nonsense. The radicalized Republican Party, like the Confederacy, has become an authoritarian movement bent on overturning our constitutional order. There’s no way back to normal without first stomping it soundly.
But not just for stomping’s sake. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) observed famously, “I think we’ve just shown that we have an ability to not only walk and chew gum at the same time, but to run, chew gum, do cartwheels at the same time on behalf of the American people.”
Democrats must not only find their Irish but do their fighting while making sure Americans know what they are fighting for, not just against. Lincoln may not have intended to free the slaves at the beginning of the war the South started, but he made sure to finish it, and to make the sacrifices mean more than just preserving the union. He made it more perfect.
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