By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, January 03,
2024
No one ever accused
Joe Biden of subtlety in his approach to politics. True to his brand, then, the
president is set to embark on his reelection campaign with all the delicacy of a battering ram.
Biden will mark a “notable
escalation” of his efforts to win another term in the White House this week
with two speeches, according to the New York Times, the subtext of which will elude no
one. First, Biden is set to appear at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania to mark the
third anniversary of the January 6 riot. With the White House’s guidance,
the Times reads between the lines:
The
location, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary
War, is intended to draw a sharp contrast between Washington, who voluntarily
ceded power after serving as the nation’s first president, and Mr. Trump, who
refuses to accept the results of the 2020 race.
Next, Biden will appear in
Charleston, S.C., at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to
commemorate the massacre of nine black churchgoers in June 2015 by a white
supremacist. “The venue embodies the country’s current fight against political
violence and white supremacy, his campaign said,” the Times notes.
The paper sounds a note of
exhaustion with the Biden campaign’s heavy-handed dramaturgy. These speeches
are “part of an effort to redirect attention” from the president’s lackluster
polls and refocus Democrats on the unpalatability of Donald Trump, the Times observed.
Indeed, these speeches may have that very effect. Or, at least, they might
accelerate a process that political physics would render inevitable if (or,
perhaps, when) Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination.
But expressing just a hint
of fatigue with the “threat to democracy” narrative surrounding Trump is savvy.
Biden’s proposed speeches do run the risk of commodifying and
thereby cheapening widespread concerns about Trump’s commitment to
preserving American democracy and national comity. The notion that the 45th
president represents a singular threat to democratic institutions and
presidential norms has eroded over the course of the Biden administration when the president and his party decided to get in on that very same game. And yet, the White House has every reason
to believe the risk that this maneuver will backfire on Biden is minimal. After
all, it hasn’t yet.
Biden made a mockery of himself in September 2022 when he
adorned himself in the apolitical trappings of the presidency and delivered a
political stump speech before Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Flanked by the
building’s façade bathed in blood-red light, the president issued an
omnidirectional political attack on “MAGA forces,” the Supreme Court’s
jurisprudence, insurrectionary elements on the American Right, and average
Republican voters who oppose his policy preferences.
The president’s objective
was to elide the distinctions between these disparate constituencies — an act
of grotesque irresponsibility from someone ostensibly alarmed by what he also
claimed was a small contingent of genuinely illiberal elements. The speech was
not well received. But who is to say that it didn’t have its intended effect?
After all, what feature is shared across the range of Republican candidates who
underperformed in what should have been a strong Republican midterm-election
cycle but their fealty to the notion that the 2020 election was somehow
wrongly decided?
Biden went back to that
well on January 6, 2023, in what Politico previewed as a “solemn tribute” to the
day’s events and a “warning” about “the danger and chaos posed by election
deniers.” In ceremonies at the White House and the Capitol, Biden awarded a
variety of civilian honors to police, election workers, and other officials for
their service during the 2020 election and the transfer of power. The president
also used the opportunity to assail the “mob of
insurrectionists” who were moved to violence “by lies about the 2020 election.”
The maneuver was attacked
by former Representative Kevin McCarthy as an effort to “divide the country.”
Senator Lindsay Graham savaged the “brazen politicization of
January 6 by President Biden.” The New York Post’s James Bovard railed against the Democratic president’s
attempt to transform January 6 into “a national anti-Republican holiday,” which
perhaps explains why most GOP lawmakers kept
their distance from the day’s remembrance.
These criticisms of
Biden’s conduct are perfectly valid, but the Democratic Party’s unabashed
opportunism would produce no political rewards if Republicans did not play
directly into the president’s hands.
I do wish it could go
without saying, but it unfortunately cannot: Americans do not like what
happened on January 6. The polling is clear. The voting public does not
believe that the threat represented by the January 6 riots has been overhyped. They don’t think a nefarious cabal
of FBI agents and Antifa agitators conspired to frame the
MAGA movement for the day’s events. They don’t think Donald Trump can be
absolved of his role in what transpired. Perhaps most of all, they
don’t want to see what happened on January 6 ever happen again.
If the polling is to be
believed, Republicans are the exception to the rule. Their attachment to Trump
has increased in the intervening years, as has their desire to rehabilitate the
rioters. The most recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll not
only confirmed that Republican voters have gravitated toward Trump in direct
proportionality to the legal jeopardy he faces but also that the rank-and-file
GOP are increasingly apt to embrace Trump’s dubious narratives around January
6. “In follow-up interviews, some said their views have changed because they
now believe the riot was instigated by law enforcement to suppress political
dissent,” the Post subsequently reported.
Many Republicans insist
they want to “move on” from January 6, but they wouldn’t so doggedly
relitigate the day’s events if they did. At the very least, they would
recognize that engaging in that enterprise is to fight on terrain of the
Democratic Party’s choosing. If the goal of Biden’s cynical agitation was to
use elementary reverse psychology to guide Republicans into endorsing views
that are anathema to most American voters, mission accomplished.
Biden and his fellow
Democrats could not be any clearer about whom they want to run against next
November. Republican voters seem inclined to oblige Democrats over and over and
over again. It’s reasonable to expect that, at some point, Republicans would begin
to resent the psychological manipulation to which they’re being subjected and
stop responding predictably to it. From our present vantage, however, that
point seems a long way off.
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