By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 22, 2020
For the longest time, presidential campaigns followed a
pattern: In the primary, the candidate ran to the wings in order to court the
party faithful and then, having secured the nomination, ran to the center in
order to appeal to as wide a swath of the general electorate as possible. The
value of broad coalition-building was understood: In 1984, Ronald Reagan was
the candidate of William F. Buckley Jr. and the Teamsters — a winning
combination that carried the Republican candidate to a 49-state landslide.
Joe Biden has inverted that model: a centrist in the
primary who is taking a turn to the left before the general.
In the Democratic primary, Biden stuck to the center both
in terms of his notional policy program (e.g., defending the ACA regime over
universalizing Medicare) and in terms of his mood and affect. Perhaps that was
the course of least resistance: It is easy to look like the sensible and sober
fellow on the stage next to Senator Bernie Sanders. In any case, it was the
winning course, assuming that nothing dramatic happens between today and
Biden’s formal nomination.
Having locked up the nomination, Biden is leaning left.
Why?
There are basically two ways for Biden to beat Trump: One
is to galvanize Democrats and increase turnout in key states, and the other is
to poach Trump voters. And here is what you need to understand about 2020:
Moving to the middle would not help Joe Biden with either of those
projects.
The Trump voters who are up for grabs are not disaffected
Republicans. Republicans are generally contented, because the substance of what
Trump has delivered in office has been, for the most part, conventional
Republican stuff: He signed into law a tax bill that President Ryan might have
endorsed, nominated many of the same judges President Cruz would have put
forward, followed a deregulatory agenda that might as easily have been the work
of President Romney, etc. There is not much opportunity for Biden to go
prospecting in that territory.
And Biden would have a hard time reaching disaffected
Republicans by emphasizing the character issue, too: Setting aside the
accusation that he violently sexually assaulted a Senate aide, Biden at the
very least has cynically lied about his first wife and infant daughter being
killed by a drunk driver, is a habitual plagiarist, is enough of a cheap
demagogue to tell a largely black audience that a Romney government would seek
to “put y’all back in chains,” and much more. Biden is no more rhetorically
responsible than Trump is; he is simply incontinent in a way that is less
transgressive to Washington’s sense of propriety. That’s a slender reed. In
fact, most Republicans are going to see their 2020 decision as, at worst,
choosing between a morally compromised jackass who is going to be with them 80
percent of the time and a morally compromised jackass who is going to be
against them 80 percent of the time. The Democrats are doing their very best to
make the case that it is morally illegitimate for those voters to pursue what
they understand to be their own political interests through the ordinary means
of voting for the candidate they believe most likely to advance their goals,
but that is not going to play.
Where Trump is vulnerable is not among conservatives but
among welfare chauvinists, i.e., people who tend to share the Democratic
Party’s preference for a more expansive welfare state but reject the Left’s
dotty cultural agenda — they rejoice about bigger Social Security checks and
job guarantees, not transgender Barbie dolls. A survey conducted by the Center
for American Progress (apply your own ideological discount) suggested that
about 9 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2016 are planning to vote for
Biden in 2020. Those Trump-to-Biden voters are the opposite of the “fiscally
conservative, socially liberal” unicorns the libertarians are forever hunting.
“They sound a lot like the Obama-to-Trump voters,” Ramesh Ponnuru writes, “and
some of them are surely the same people.”
Study authors John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira write:
Nearly 6 in 10 Trump-Biden voters
support steps to ensure students can graduate from college debt-free or to
enact a jobs guarantee, respectively. More than 7 in 10 voters back expansive
steps to combat global warming through new clean energy investments. More than
70 percent support paid family leave, and about two-thirds support a $15 per
hour minimum wage. On health care, they support a public option for government
health insurance, at 70 percent; less than half support a Medicare-for-all
proposal.
The Biden campaign has announced a series of “unity task
forces” composed of activists nominated by the Biden team and by Senator
Sanders, the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn. The climate task force will
be chaired by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another confessing
socialist. Karl Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argues that
this is a mistake for Biden, that his campaign will be dragged to the left. But
many of the “extreme” views that worry Rove — expanded health-care benefits,
tuition-free college, student-debt forgiveness, etc. — are right there in the
sweet spot for those Trump-to-Biden voters. Giving illegal aliens full access
to welfare programs might not float those voters’ boat, and Trump surely will
do his best to wrongfoot Biden on such issues, but many of those big-spending
proposals are going to be much more useful to the Biden campaign than would any
plausible outreach to voters with conservative views on welfare, entitlements,
or higher education.
The incentives for Biden are mostly pushing him to the
left. More broadly, the incentives on both sides currently privilege relative
extremism over relative centrism, even if they do not do so to such an extent
as to make it possible for Senator Sanders to have avoided another second-place
finish. And the fact that we have layered Kulturkampf on top of
practically every policy question and political disagreement from taxes to
social distancing makes the headwinds pushing against any operational politics
of bipartisanship or consensus that much more powerful.
Joe Biden has never had an original idea or voiced an
interesting thought. If he ever had any independent principle or agency, that
atrophied long ago — 50 years in national politics has hollowed out better men
than he. Joe Biden will go where the wind blows him, currently in the general
direction of Burlington.
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