By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, June 05,
2024
A cheery thought for Wednesday: What if, in a month or
two, Donald Trump finds himself on a glide path to reelection?
Not long ago, that looked to be the one scenario for the
campaign that could be safely ruled out. There was a “Joe
Biden landslide” scenario, a “Biden wins narrowly” scenario, and a “Trump
wins narrowly” scenario, but no scenario in which a coup enthusiast with
four criminal indictments hanging over his head wins comfortably.
Maybe there still isn’t. Trump leads by slightly more
than a point in the RealClearPolitics
national polling average and by just 2.3 points in his best Rust Belt battleground.
He’ll need to win one of those states to secure 270 electoral votes. Biden is
competitive in all of them.
But five months out from Election Day, it’s now entirely
possible to imagine a race in which the president falls behind nationally by 4
points and never recovers. A bad debate performance in a few weeks could place
him on that track. So could an especially cringeworthy “senior moment” before
the cameras or left-leaning independents tuning into the race and concluding
that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a suitable “none of the above” option.
It’s long been easy to imagine Trump winning,
but only recently, I think, has it been easy to imagine him building enough of
a lead that by September his victory looks like a fait accompli. In
10 days or so, we’ll have an idea from the polling whether his conviction in
Manhattan has alienated any voters. If it hasn’t—or, worse, if it’s actually
moved voters toward him—that’ll be a strong indicator that Joe Biden can’t win.
It’ll mean that opposition to the incumbent is so diamond-hard that
realistically nothing will cause it to soften before November.
I mention all of that as an introduction to a long story
that the Wall
Street Journal published on Tuesday night. The title? “Behind Closed
Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”
The Journal interviewed 45 people from
both parties about the president’s comportment in private meetings, some of
whom witnessed it firsthand and others of whom were briefed on it afterward.
“Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans,” the paper
acknowledged, “but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the
exchanges.”
How nervous was the president’s team after it got wind
that the story was in the works? This nervous:
The White House kept close tabs
on some of The Wall Street Journal’s interviews with Democratic
lawmakers. After the offices of several Democrats shared with the White House
either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of
those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once
again emphasized Biden’s strengths.
“They just, you know, said that I
should give you a call back,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat,
referring to the White House.
The Journal piece is, understandably,
the talk of American political media as I write this. There are destined to be
more stories like it before Election Day. If and when Trump opens up a sizable
lead on Biden, I suspect that the doubts it describes over the president’s
health will be the single biggest factor why. Unlike inflation and immigration,
it’s the one problem Biden has that can’t even theoretically improve before
November.
Imagine you’re his campaign manager, tasked with
minimizing the political damage from concerns about his fitness for office.
What would you do?
How does one “message” Joe Biden’s age effectively?
***
Broadly speaking, there are two options. One is to feign
indignation at the very idea that the president might be physically or mentally
diminished.
Call it the “don’t believe your lying eyes” strategy.
Many a Trump critic deployed it on Wednesday to try to
undermine the Journal piece, most notably Joe Scarborough of
MSNBC. On his morning show, Scarborough correctly questioned why former Speaker
Kevin McCarthy was a key source for the story when McCarthy had reportedly
found Biden to be “sharp
and substantive in their conversations” last year.
Then he went further and insisted that Biden remains more
cogent in private discussions—with respect to international affairs and passing
legislation, at least—than any House speaker of the last 30 years. Paul Ryan,
Newt Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, all of ‘em.
You’ve seen Biden in action rhetorically on television
many times. Who are you going to believe, Morning Joe or your lying
eyes?
The president himself deployed the “lying eyes” strategy
in a recent interview
with Time magazine. When asked whether he truly believes he could do
the job as an 85-year-old man, he answered Time’s reporter with
annoyed bravado. “I can do it better than anybody you know,” he said. “You’re
looking at me, I can take you too.” Lobbyist Liam Donovan called that Biden’s “Jack Palance schtick,”
referring to the then-73-year-old tough-guy actor who resorted to doing one-armed push-ups onstage
at the Oscars to prove his vitality.
Again, you’ve seen the president in action. Does he, in
your opinion, evince the youthful vim of a roughneck who could “take you”?
The “lying eyes” strategy is quite Trumpy in spirit, as
it aims to replace observable reality with a politically
convenient fiction through brute rhetorical force. And as with Trump’s
lies, the target is mainly members of the president’s own party whose
misgivings about him might otherwise lead them to wander off the partisan
reservation. “Can you believe what these lying Republicans
like Kevin McCarthy will say to try to help Trump?” isn’t the worst point to
make to a loyal Democrat who read the Journal piece and found
himself troubled anew about Biden’s ability to serve another term.
But I’m skeptical that anyone who isn’t already on the
reservation will be persuaded by it. A partisan might feel a duty to reject the
evidence of his eyes and ears upon being commanded to do so by his party, but
why would an undecided voter care after spending three years absorbing evidence
of the president’s senescence?
Especially if that undecided voter remembers what Joe Biden looked and
sounded like in better days. The president has been in public life for half
a century. When gauging his decline, voters are not just measuring Biden
against Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, or Nancy Pelosi. They’re measuring him
against himself.
***
Which brings us to the second messaging option, what we
might call the “yes, he’s old, but” approach.
Under this strategy, there’s no pretending that Biden
hasn’t been diminished by age, so it’s silly to even try. Instead, the topic
should be confronted head-on by explaining to voters why it matters less than
they think. One way to do that is by reminding them that the two candidates
aren’t far apart in age—humorously, if possible:
Olivia Troye, who worked for the Trump White House before
leaving in disgust, invited the Wall
Street Journal to contact her if they’re interested in details of
private meetings in which Trump’s own mental health seemed less than robust.
“Yes, he’s old, but the other guy is also really old and maybe
clinically insane” is one potentially effective way to deflect attention from
Biden’s age.
Trump seems worried about it too. Amazingly, just hours
before the Journal story was published, he posted a
video on
Truth Social with this caption: “JOE BIDEN IS NOT TOO OLD TO BE
PRESIDENT—NOT EVEN CLOSE, BUT HE IS TOO INCOMPETENT AND CORRUPT!” That’s the
sound of a man who fears that his opponent’s chief liability might be
neutralized as more voters discover that Trump—who turns 78 next Friday—is
older today than Biden was when he was elected in 2020. If we’re guaranteed a
president who’ll be too old to serve within the next four years, why not choose
the one who didn’t attempt a coup?
Another iteration of the “yes, he’s old, but”
strategy is “Yes, he’s old, but he gets results.” According to
this talking point, age matters in a politician only insofar as it impedes his
ability to do the people’s business—and it hasn’t in Biden’s case. Democratic
House staffer Aaron
Fritschner pointed out that the private exchanges between the president and
Republicans described in the Journal story invariably ended in
policy wins for the White House, raising the question of what mental defects
the other party might be suffering from if they’re forever being outwitted by a
senile old man.
Biden himself tried to steer the discussion of his age
away from cognition and toward policy outcomes in an
ad he cut back in March. “Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no
secret,” he said, addressing the camera. “But here’s the deal: I understand how
to get things done for the American people.”
“Yes, he’s old, but he gets results” is
a shrewd messaging strategy—or it would be for a president whose mental
wherewithal is questionable but whose agenda is broadly popular, like Ronald
Reagan in 1984. That is … not
the case with Joe Biden. On the contrary, I suspect that Americans blame
his age to some degree for problems like inflation and immigration: After all,
if he’s not “up to the job,” it stands to reason that crises would be more
likely to develop and get out of hand on his watch. “He’s old but he gets
results” doesn’t work if most voters don’t like the results.
And if they don’t like the results, you can’t persuade
them to lay that aside and cast a vote for the young, capable team the
president has put together instead of for him. As one of my editors put it this
morning, Democrats aren’t going to win in November by telling people, “Sure,
Biden’s old, but don’t worry: Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan clearly have
global affairs under control.”
As for “yes, he’s old, but the other guy is really old
too,” that message also doesn’t work as well when the other guy is perceived as
much more vigorous.
A recent
Fox News poll found just 35 percent and 37 percent of Americans are at
least “somewhat confident” in Biden’s physical and mental fitness for the
presidency, respectively. For Trump, the numbers were 60 and 52 percent. There
are Democrats older than Biden
in office right now who betray no sign of cognitive impairment and accordingly
are facing no pressure to retire, proving Trump’s point that it’s not age per
se but mental competence that matters to voters. Americans appear to
believe that Trump is considerably more cogent than the president is, in which
case why would reminding them that he and Biden are almost the same age
ultimately matter?
Because estimations of Biden’s fitness are already so
low, I suspect that the “yes, he’s old, but” approach will always lead
Democrats back to the “don’t believe your lying eyes” argument. Inescapably,
they’re stuck having to convince voters that the grave doubts they harbor about
the president’s capabilities are flatly incorrect or even unfair. Trump is
indeed very old, and Biden has in fact had some major legislative achievements,
but ultimately neither of those facts does anything to ease the widespread
anxiety that the incumbent will die or descend into incoherence in a second
term.
***
Those who read Tuesday’s
newsletter already know the answer to the question I posed earlier.
There is no right way to “message” Joe Biden’s age because, contrary to
partisan belief, not all political problems are “messaging problems.”
The president’s health would be an insuperable barrier to
victory if any other Republican were on the ballot, and it may very well be
insuperable against Trump, too. There’s no spin so clever that can change that.
Democrats can and should deploy the two strategies I
described above to help Biden-leaning voters rationalize away their jitters
about his wherewithal, but I suspect undecideds will not be moved. If they end
up preferring Biden to Trump, it’ll be less a matter of Democrats having made
Joe Biden more acceptable to them than of having made Trump utterly
unacceptable.
That’s why Biden and his party have begun saying “the F-word” on the
trail. It’s why we’re destined to hear a lot about January 6—and
abortion, of course—in Democratic ads in October. The president will continue
to dangle
policy bribes to disgruntled
undecided voters between now and then to try to soften them up, and perhaps
he’ll tantalize them with promises of some exciting Cabinet appointments in a
second term, like making Michelle Obama Secretary of Fun or whatever. But
ultimately, there’s no affirmative case for reelecting Joe Biden. There’s only
a case for not reelecting Trump.
Take it from me, a guy who’s made that case multiple times.
But this brings us back to the problem I described at the
start of this piece. What if going scorched-earth against Trump isn’t enough?
Democrats have already scorched the earth pretty
thoroughly by accusing him of harboring dictatorial ambitions, yet their
candidate continues to trail in polls. There’s a solid chance that the 34 new
felony convictions on Trump’s rap sheet will also fail to move the numbers. And
there’s a distinct possibility that Biden will have a bad debate three weeks
from now, irreversibly shaking public faith in his fitness.
By the end of the month, there could be a semi-serious
debate on the left about replacing him at the convention. Some political
problems simply can’t be messaged.
Replacing Biden as nominee would also risk a political
disaster for Democrats—and not just because it would force the party to
solve its
unsolvable Kamala Harris problem. Even if they figured out a way to do
that, their candidate would barrel into November facing a huge name-recognition
gap with Trump. Many voters would accuse them of having played dirty pool by
replacing an unpopular nominee at the last second, the latest example of
election-year irregularities by Democrats. Undecideds might even hold Biden’s
policy failures against the new nominee, reasoning that a member of his party
would surely govern in the same way as the president has.
“Trump versus Random Generic Democrat” is a good match-up
for Democrats in theory, insofar as it might make the race a referendum on the
unpopular Republican. But ambushing voters by thrusting that choice on them 100
days out from the election, when many have already reconciled themselves
psychologically to a second Trump term, wouldn’t shake out that way. The actual
match-up voters would perceive is, “Should we stick with a known quantity like
Trump or roll the dice on some rando plucked from obscurity who might be a
closet communist for all we know?”
The deus ex machina option wouldn’t work
for Democrats at this point, and I think they know it. The day-long freakout
over the Wall Street Journal piece among the left on social
media accordingly has a doth-protest-too-much
quality to it, as if Biden’s party realizes it has an unsolvable and
un-message-able problem here and can’t think of anything more useful to do
about it than bash
media outlets bent on reporting on it.
If Trump wins, that left-wing angst will be redirected
into a ferocious round of recriminations among Democrats. They’ll blame Biden
for having been too proud and
stubborn to do the right thing for his party and his country by
announcing his retirement earlier in the campaign. They’ll blame Chuck Schumer
and Nancy Pelosi for not having done more legislatively to preemptively limit
Trump’s executive authority when they had the chance in 2021 and 2022. And
they’ll blame Democratic operatives for ever having believed that they could
“message” their way out of a vast public consensus that the president was too
feeble to serve another term.
It’ll be ugly. Everything about American politics after November 5 will be.
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