Tuesday, July 16. You may already know that ACT’s web site has been dramatically upgraded and updated. You may not know (in part because we have been lax about advertising these) is that we are launching a new series of “mini-Political Notes” – we are becoming more of a blog. We already have three small Political Notes editions that you might have missed: on June 6, I wrote the success to date Wisconsin Democrats have had in organizing to flip their state legislature (https://www.actpasadena.org/post/political-notesby-jon-fuhrman ); on June 29, Fred Register wrote about the debate debacle that maybe won’t turn out to be quite as bad as it may have seemed at the time (https://www.actpasadena.org/post/thoughts-on-yesterday-s-debate ); and on July 9, I wrote about the prior week’s events and the Supreme Court’s immunity decision (https://www.actpasadena.org/post/high-court-makes-bad-week-worse ).
Our plan is to add “mini” editions of Political Notes at least once a week, and we welcome contributions from other ACT members. We’ll try to alert you to new editions by e-mail, with a direct link, but you can just pop in to the site from time to time to see if there’s a new one you missed – or add comments to one of the posts.
Now, on to this month’s Political Notes. Where to start? Last Thursday, President Biden concluded the NATO conference with a strong, off-the-cuff Q and A with the White House press corps. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a solid performance without a teleprompter. On Friday, albeit with a teleprompter, he gave a rousing barnstorming campaign speech in Michigan, perhaps his best performance of the year so far. On Saturday, a twenty-year-old white Republican, for reasons unknown and perhaps inexplicable, attempted to assassinate the former President. On Monday, we get J.D. Vance as the GOP VP candidate. And in the background, a constant rising and falling buzz among the Democratic insiders – donors, party leaders, elected leaders – that Biden needs to step aside, that the ticket is doomed, that Biden will take down Democrats across the board, and that Biden has closed himself off to all but a tiny few advisors and is living in a self-imposed bubble. So let’s talk about J.D. Vance, about the buzz, and about Michigan.
J.D. Vance, two years into his first term from Ohio in the Senate, brings youth and vitality to the GOP ticket. He also brings a wealth of crazy – crazy beyond crazy, which may become a huge albatross around the GOP ticket. It’s not just his own brutal takedowns of Donald Trump from back in 2016 and 2017 – that Trump is America’s Hitler (which actually seems fairly prescient). It’s his more recent social conservatism – no abortion exceptions, even for rape or incest; that a rape victim should be obligated to bring the child to birth; that even abused wives should stay in the marriage; that gay marriage should be called into question. Donald Trump had spent a relatively successful month managing to downplay the conservative extremism of his agenda: he dissociated himself from Project 2025; he stripped the GOP Platform of any reference to personhood for embryos or extreme anti-abortion language; he denied he would support a national ban on abortion, sort of saying instead it should be left to the states.
But now Vance is on the ticket, with a wealth of previous statements, some only months old, on the most conservative side of these social issues. It is manna from heaven for the Democratic ticket, and may be particularly effective with younger voters whose intolerance for those extreme positions – and Vance’s implicit homophobia – might be one of the drivers to get them to vote.
While all these things were happening, the buzz was a constant in the background: we’re doomed; donors are walking away; legislative leaders – even our own Adam Schiff – admit it looks grim; the polls are, at best, not encouraging (although down ballot Dems, especially key Senate candidates, seem to be holding on to their long-term leads). We are abdicating our responsibilities, letting a ticket we know for certain is going to lose – TO TRUMP – be our standard bearer because we lack the moral or intellectual courage to launch a collective revolt within the party to boot Biden from the ticket, per the buzz.
Biden is clearly hearing this. But let’s consider this from his perspective.
In 2016, he stepped aside, for many reasons, but one of which was that he was told Hillary had a better shot and it was “her turn”. We know how that turned out. In February of 2020, he was a dead man walking, yet he turned that around and won the nomination. In the fall of 2020, he was by no means a shoo-in, and few expected him to win Arizona, let alone Georgia, but he did, defying expectations. He’s been down before, and he’s gotten back up and persevered and triumphed. This is not just rhetoric – this is personal, lived experience, from 1972 when he lost his first wife and daughter in a tragic traffic accident, through the years of being single father and a Senator, through 30 years in the Senate, through his travails with Hunter, and now. He is indeed the only Democrat to defeat Donald Trump.
This time, however, he faces two opponents – Donald Trump, and time. Of the two, time is the implacable one. Can he beat time, for just four more months? Can he convince the voters that he is still up to the job, and will still be up to the job, four years hence?
As it happens, he apparently gave another rousing stump speech today in Nevada to the NAACP. But I want instead to focus on his stump speech in Detroit on Friday. It was Joe Biden at his best – animated, direct, connecting with his audience, funny, focused, engaging. If you haven’t watched it, you should. His critics had been demanding that he show them how he was going to win the election. Implicitly, that demand had three components: what’s your vision for the future, how are you going to take down Trump, and you can convince voters that you personally are physically up to the task now and 4 years from now. No question in my mind that he did the first two; the third is more of a personal impression, but he convinced me.
He laid out his vision, using the framework of what his first 100 days in office in the new term would be like (and, although it was unstated, assuming we have a Democratic House and a Senate willing to dump the filibuster, which even with a 50-50 tie we probably will have, given that Dianne Feinstein and Kyrsten Sinema will both be gone, and they, along with Joe Manchin, were the Democratic holdouts on the filibuster). He hit all the key elements: protecting Roe, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights bill, expanding Medicare, raising the minimum wage, banning assault weapons, continuing work on clean energy and climate change, repealing the Trump tax cuts, making the child care credits permanent while enacting a 25% minimum tax on billionaires. And it wasn’t just a rote recital of a dull list; there was real passion and obvious commitment.
Then he went on to take down Trump, with facts and humor. You could see the lines that will clearly keep showing up in all his future stump speeches, because they were laugh-out-loud funny and simultaneously humiliating to Trump: that he sits in his golf cart, filling out his score card before he hits the shots; that Trump advocated fighting COVID by injecting bleach into your arm, but he apparently missed his arm and got his head instead; that Trump went bankrupt 6 times, including once when he owned a casino – “I didn’t know you could do that – doesn’t the house always win?”. He was brutally frank, flat out calling Trump not just a loser, but a rapist – quoting the New York judge who made that finding.
Lastly, the stamina issue. Biden spoke for about 40 minutes, bantering with the crowd, raising and lowering his voice, the quiet asides as if he’s letting you all in on a secret, the full-throated assertions that he is in the campaign and in to win. Apparently, although I haven’t had a chance to see it, he gave a similar performance at the NAACP convention today. He’ll need to do this, over and over and over and over. And at some point, the issue will become Trump, and not Biden; the felon and not the grandfather; choice and not governmental prohibitions; accomplishment and not failure.
My guess is that Biden has decided, and will remain steadfast, that he is in the race, and he is in it to win. On the issues, I think we win. On the merits, we win. If we get our voters out, we win.
Maybe my optimism is getting the better of me, but I still think we keep the White House, keep the Senate, and flip the House. All our down ballot folks are running strong, our organizational efforts remain superior, and I think their vulnerabilities exceed ours. Yes, it may be close, and it will take a huge amount of work to get our voters out, but I think we can do it and I think we will do it.
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