Trump and Biden during their first presidential debate in Cleveland, pictured on a television screen during the live broadcast in New York on Sept 29, 2020. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
HAVE you met anyone truly excited about Joe Biden running for re-election? And by that, I mean downright Obama-circa-2008 energised – brimming with enthusiasm about what four more years of Biden would bring to the body politic, the economy, the national mood, our culture?
Let’s be more realistic. Is there a single one among us who can muster even a quiet “Yay!”? And no, we’re not counting the guy who sounds like he’s performing elaborate mental dance moves to persuade himself nor anyone who is paid to say so.
According to a recent report in The New York Times, Biden’s fundraising thus far doesn’t exactly reveal a groundswell of grassroots excitement.
Instead, most Democrats seem to view what looks like an inexorable rematch between Biden and Donald Trump with a sense of impending doom.
My personal metaphor comes from Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, in which a rogue planet makes its way through space toward an inevitable collision with Earth.
In that film, the looming disaster symbolised the all-encompassing nature of depression; here, the feel is more dispiritedness and terror, as if we’re barrelling toward either certain catastrophe or possibly-not-a-catastrophe. Or it’s barrelling toward us.
A Biden-Trump rematch would mean a choice between two candidates who, for very different reasons, don’t seem 100% there or necessarily likely to be there – physically, mentally and/or not in prison – for the duration of another four-year term.
To take, momentarily, a slightly more optimistic view, here is the best case for Biden: his presidency has thus far meant a re-establishment of norms, a return to government function and the restoration of long-held international alliances. He has presided over a slow-churning economy that has turned roughly in his favour. He’s been a decent human being.
But really, wasn’t the bar for all these things set abysmally low during the Trump administration (if we can even use that word given its relentless mismanagement)?
We continue to have a deeply divided Congress and electorate, a good chunk of which is still maniacally in Trump’s corner.
American faith in institutions continues to erode, not helped by Biden’s mutter about the Supreme Court’s most recent term, “This is not a normal court.”
The 2020 protests led to few meaningfully changed policies favouring the poor or disempowered.
A Biden-Trump rematch feels like a concession, as if we couldn’t do any better or have given up trying.
It wasn’t as if there was huge passion for Biden the first time around. The 2020 election should have been much more of a blowout victory for Democrats. Yet compared with his election in 2016, Trump in 2020 made inroads with nearly every major demographic group, including Blacks, Latinos and women, except for white men.
The sentiment most Democrats seemed to muster in Biden’s favour while he was running was that he was inoffensive. The animating sentiment once he scraped by into office was relief.
This time, we don’t even have the luxury of relief.
In the two other branches of government, Democrats have been shown the perils of holding people in positions of power for too long – Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the judiciary and Dianne Feinstein in the legislature.
Democrats and the media seem to have become more vocal in pointing out the hazards of Biden’s advancing age. In an April poll, of the 70% of Americans who said Biden shouldn’t run again, 69% said it’s because of his old age.
That old age is showing. Never an incantatory speaker or a sparkling wit, Biden seems to have altogether thrown in the oratorical towel.
Several weeks ago, he appeared to actually wander off a set on MSNBC after figuratively wandering through 20 minutes of host Nicolle Wallace’s gentle questions.
In another recent interview, with Fareed Zakaria, when asked specific questions about US-China policy, Biden waded into a muddle of vague bromides and personal anecdotes about his travels as vice-president with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
When asked point blank whether it’s time for him to step aside, Biden said, almost tangentially, “I just want to finish the job.”
But what if he can’t? Kamala Harris, briefly a promising figure during the previous primary season, has proved lackluster at best in office.
Like Biden, she seems at perpetual war with words, grasping to articulate whatever loose thought might be struggling to get out. The thought of her in the Oval Office is far from encouraging.
One clear sign of America’s deepening hopelessness is the weird welcoming of loony-tune candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr, who has polled as high as a disturbing 20% among Democratic voters.
Among never-Trumpian Republicans, there is an unseemly enthusiasm for bridge troll Chris Christie, despite his early capitulation to Trump, for the sole reason that among Republican primary candidates, he’s the one who most vociferously denounces his former leader.
And a Washington non-profit, No Labels, is gearing up for a third-party run with a platform that threatens to leach support from a Democratic candidate who is saddled with a favourable rating of a limp 41%.
Trump, of course, remains the formidable threat underlying the malaise. Though he blundered into office in 2016 without a whit of past experience or the faintest clue about the future, this time he and his team of madmen are far better equipped to inflict their agenda.
As a recent editorial in The Economist put it, “a professional corps of America First populists are dedicating themselves to ensuring that Trump Two will be disciplined and focused on getting things done”.
The idea that Trump – and worse, a competent Trump – might win a second term makes our passive embrace of Biden even more nerve-wracking. Will we look back and have only ourselves to blame?
It is hard to imagine Democrats, or most Americans, eager to relive any aspect of the annus horribilis that was 2020. Yet it’s as if we’re collectively paralysed, less complacent than utterly bewildered, waiting for “something” to happen – say, a health crisis or an arrest or a supernatural event – before 2024.
While we wait, we lurch ever closer to something of a historical re-enactment, our actual history hanging perilously in the balance. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
