If the Biden Management Team Had Only Listened to Me!
As even the Trump-hating New York Times admitted earlier this week, Donald Trump is leading in five of the “crucial battleground” states, according to a new poll conducted by the NYT, Siena College, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The race was closer “among likely voters.” But it is the swing states, and the undecided voters, that will determine the outcome of the election.
This is not good news for the Democrats.
When Biden announced that he was going to run again in 2024, he did so because the Democratic leadership felt that his saying so would give the party the sense of stability it needed to do well in the midterm elections. And they did do well. But that doesn’t mean they wanted him to run in 2024. As I said more than a year ago – in January 2023 – I don’t believe the party leaders had any intention of getting him reelected. I don’t believe they thought he had a chance in hell of beating Trump.
I suggested that if they would allow (or force) Biden to resign, it would give them the opportunity to install someone like Gavin Newsom as their candidate instead of facing the impossible task of trying to get Kamala elected.
But instead of listening to me, the Clinton and Obama teams (the teams with the most influence in the Democrat party) launched what they thought was going to be a cleaner and easier way to keep Trump from becoming president again in 2024. It was a three-pronged strategy:
* Take advantage of the economic rebound that took place after the COVID shutdown by attributing it to “Bidenomics.”
* Promote the idea that if Trump is reelected, he will become a “dictator” and put an end to democracy in America.
* Engage in what is now being called “lawfare.”
Bidenomics
In a recent interview with Biden, CNN’s Erin Burnett noted that the cost of buying a home in the United States has doubled and “real income… is actually down since you took office.” She then asked him, “Why should people believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?”
“I’ve never failed!” Biden replied. “I’ve created over 15 million jobs!”
Of course, he didn’t “create” 15 million jobs. Twelve million of them were already there until the government impetuously and recklessly shut down the economy in response to the claims about the virality and lethality of COVID, which were unsupported by the facts then and have since been disproven.
Biden can, however, fairly claim to have “created” 2.9 million jobs through his catch-and-release southern border policy. According to an analysis of data collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.9 million immigrants (the vast majority of whom are illegal) have found employment since Biden came to office, while 1.2 million native-born Americans lost their jobs.
The Bidenomics strategy was based on a blatant falsehood. And it was shown to be false time and time again on conservative media channels. But the mainstream media didn’t bother reporting on it, thinking, probably correctly, that most Americans wouldn’t be persuaded by it one way or the other, since most Americans know nothing about supply and demand in the labor markets.
What has hurt Biden economically is inflation. The inflation that was the inevitable response to the billions of dollars spent (by Trump initially and then Biden) on shuttering the economy and then marketing and mandating the vaccines, and the other billions spent on our proxy wars with Russia in Ukraine and Israel. The reaction to it among voters generally, and even more so among independent voters, has been to blame Biden. The most recent poll I saw had his approval rating on the economy at 34%.
Trump as Dictator
This strategy, if it can be called a strategy, seemed to make its way into the mainstream media at the beginning of this year. Suddenly, Hillary Clinton and the ladies of The View, as well as other celebrities, were ringing the alarm. If Trump gets back into the Oval Office, they predicted, he will become a “dictator” and put an end to “democracy.” And the world as we know it now will be gone.
Like Bidenomics, this was not a strong idea. It certainly wasn’t going to change the minds of any pro-Trump voters. And as for the undecideds, the voters that are going to determine the winner in November, it doesn’t seem to have had any effect – which makes sense if you think about it.
To the undecided voters, I think the dictator threat came across as desperate and ingenuous. After all, these voters had lived through four years of Trump. If they felt that what he did then was dictatorial and anti-democratic, they would no longer be among the undecided.
Bad News After Bad News
The people that got Biden elected in 2020 are the same people that are behind him now. They know politics. They understand how elections are won and lost. They are smart. They are ruthless. And they are shrewd.
Their strategy worked in 2020 because they recognized that the election was going to depend on fear: the fear of BLM riots, which Trump was promoting, or the fear of COVID, which they took as their cause. By limiting Biden’s exposure to the public to scripted statements (so he wouldn’t have to answer questions spontaneously) and having him and his team in masks whenever they appeared, they were able to take full advantage of the fear of COVID. They played that right.
But the strategies they had in place for 2024 were weaker, and they knew it. And then two things happened that they had not anticipated. Inflation climbed higher than they expected. And on October 7, Hamas began a war with Israel.
The reaction to the Israeli-Hamas war was shocking to many, including me. The instant and enormous support for the Palestinians along with the condemnation of Israel radicalized millions of college students and put the Biden administration in a difficult position. The US commitment to Israel as our primary ally in the Mideast had to be upheld. And yet, all these college students were outraged and, before long, were calling on Biden to withdraw all support from Israel.
To keep the youth vote, Biden would have had to take a strong anti-Israel stance. I haven’t researched this idea, but my guess is that it wouldn’t have had a negative effect on his other constituencies. But it would have hurt him with the 5.8 million Jewish voters, not to mention several million fundamental Christians that have always been strongly pro-Israel.
And that, I think, and only that, is why Biden’s advisors have been having him take this middle path – continuing to provide military aid as one of Israel’s historically strongest allies, while gently urging ceasefires that everyone knows Israel will not listen to and cranking up support for humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.
This strategy seemed to be working until the riots and occupations at US universities and the consequential removal of the protesters turned a good percentage of young voters against him.
That, I believe, is why Biden recently announced that the US would no longer be sending Israel the bigger bombs that it claims are too indiscriminate in their lethality. But this tactic risks upsetting Jewish voters as well as other voters that are committed to the preservation of Israel as a Jewish state.
And if that weren’t bad enough, recent polls have shown that two other “in-the-pocket” voting groups – Blacks and Latinos – are moving away from Biden and the Democrats, largely due to, in my option, the growing influence of conservative Black and Latino “influencers” on social media.
Lawfare
As I said, the people that have been planning and implementing the Biden campaign for 2024 are smart and shrewd and ruthless – as most successful politicians are. In this case, they were prescient enough to develop a Plan B early on, while they were working on Bidenomics and Trump as Dictator and long before the Hamas-Israel war.
Plan B was what conservative commentators have been calling “lawfare” – all the criminal and civil cases that Trump is facing right now. If we can’t get Americans to vote him out of office, they figured, maybe we could put him in jail before the elections or at least keep him in courtrooms all over the country so he can’t campaign properly.
That was the nuclear option. Ignore the Constitution. Give the greenlight to any AG and/or judge interesting in putting Trump on trial and maybe, just maybe, put him in jail.
The process began in earnest about a year ago, with great expectations. But alas, that too seems to be failing. The summary judgement against Trump for overestimating the value of his properties in applying for bank loans – which was meant to empty his campaign war chest – was reduced considerably, and the case itself will almost certainly be reversed on appeal. The case against him for mishandling classified documents – which was meant to start this month (and therefore keep him in court for several more months) – was postponed indefinitely when it was revealed that Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted to tampering with evidence. And the case in NYC by DA Alvin Bragg has so far presented no evidence supporting the charge against Trump. Bragg’s strategy, it seems, rested primarily on the credibility of a stripper and a convicted liar and cheat, both of whom performed poorly this week.
What I’m saying is that the Biden reelection team, the team that did such a great job getting him elected in 2020, should have listened to me when I suggested, more than a year ago, that the right play for them to retain the presidency would be to put the old guy out to pasture and replace him with Gavin Newsom and – to assure victory – Michelle Obama as his running mate.
Had they done that, they would have been ahead in the polls now and not worrying so much about losing the youth vote, the Black vote, the Latino vote, and the Jewish vote.