Trump v Biden: Somehow the Democrats have ended up with another candidate they need to hide

It’s August and I’m disappearing for a couple of weeks. Before I go, to the fridge to pour a glass of the palest Provencal pink stuff, I wanted to thank you Reaction subscribers for reading us. During the crisis, with your support, we’ve expanded the team and the amount and quality of journalism provided. There’s a blend of brilliant youngsters and alongside them experienced writers. That’s always what we’ve aimed to build with Reaction – creating opportunity for next generation journalists who, thank goodness, still want to pursue a career in this trade even though the work of the tech giants has destroyed the business model of news media.

Anyway, you don’t need another sermon from me on why good journalism matters and why I’m optimistic about the prospects for the best of the industry because the digital subscription revolution started (and mocked at the time) by Rupert Murdoch could herald a new golden age for journalism.

Instead of all that I was going to in this latest newsletter review the state of British politics. But, frankly, most of that can wait until we’ve all had a good lie down. Everyone needs a rest.

It’s been exhausting enough just to observe the last year. Goodness knows what it was like to take part on the frontline. No wonder some of the key participants have been driven “Bertie Bonkers” by the intensity of it all.

Just a year ago, Boris Johnson was the new Prime Minister and few gave him much of a chance of emerging from the carnage with a majority of 80. Last summer it was still fashionable in parts of London to think that a second referendum to reverse Brexit was coming along with a GNU, a government of national unity, about to be formed. It was a fantasy. In that context, one of the most (unintentionally) hilarious recent FT pieces is the “deep dive” – American media terminology for “long” – by Henry Mance published this weekend on the warfare inside the People’s Vote campaign last year. He explains how divided the key players were.

It was futile. There wasn’t going to be a second referendum. Even if sufficient numbers of MPs had voted for it on one of those interminable Commons evenings last year, the resolution for a referendum rerun and the coalition of interests required to see it through would have had to hold together during the impossible business of agreeing a question and a franchise.  A government could not have sustained after being built on such shaky foundations – namely the democratic outrage of MPs who refused to hold a general election seeking nonetheless to overturn 2016’s referendum.

At Reaction, our then office in Westminster was next door to the People’s Vote operation. The shouting and so on suggested to us that PV was not a united crew destined for ultimate victory, and so it turned out.

Boris then succeeded in driving his opponents in the Commons so mad that they did exactly what they had set out to avoid, that is they gave him an election. And he thrashed them.

What followed on Covid-19 then made it – Brexit – seem, temporarily, rather small.

Boris’s biggest problem beyond Covid is that although he has forged an extraordinary connection with a portion of the electorate – those new Tory voters – large parts of the longer-established Tory tribe knows (whisper it) that while he was the right man for one particular thing, getting it done, it is highly questionable whether his approach works for the complex business of running a government. We’ll see soon enough.

If British politics has been weirdsville of late, that’s nothing compared to the situation in the United States.

The US will soon launch into the general election campaign proper, and what a campaign and aftermath it promises to be. By this point in the 2016 rollercoaster I had been, numerous times, in the US to try to get a sense of what was going on. That’s not possible this time, for obvious reasons, so this observation comes with a health warning that I’m not getting that close view that comes from being in the timezone(s) and tuned into the media and conversations with Americans.

Even from here the situation with Joe Biden reminds me too much of the mess the Democrats got themselves into with Hillary Clinton last time.

Hillary was a candidate voters liked less the more they saw her. So her candidacy became an exercise in damage limitation to maintain a fragile poll lead. It was as though she, they, were carrying a delicate vase across a shiny, highly-polished floor. Senior Democrats oscillated between arrogant complacency and ominous thoughts about what might go wrong. A poor choice of candidate was compounded by a campaign that left the back door open in three states the Democrats were convinced, wrongly, were in the bag. It was enough for Trump to win in a tight race.

The drama proved again that it is usually an extremely bad idea for a major political party to land itself with a candidate that it knows, deep down, is far from ideal in terms of convincing the voters in the key places that need to be convinced. To their horror, the Tories discovered this about Theresa May only once the election campaign in 2017 was underway.

The Democrats went into this knowing that Biden is a problem candidate. In his television performances he can flip suddenly from congeniality to confused eccentricity. Trump is wild, but people expect that. Biden is supposed to be the reliable counter, the antidote.

In his favour, Biden is a mainstream post-1960s Dem who was necessary to defeat the crackpot far-left that threatened to win his party’s nomination. Beyond that, in a binary election, he is clearly extremely vulnerable to a sustained attack on the basis that his mental faculties are failing and his party’s agenda is “woke” and far left even if he is not.

The wonder is that somehow, in a country with a population of more 320m souls, replete with some of the greatest universities and research facilities in the world, with exceptional talent in commerce, technology and the armed forces, the Democrats have ended up via internal warfare with a weak candidate who makes his supporters nervous rather than energised and proud. That’s usually a bad basis on which to fight any election, never mind one as important as this November’s contest.

Have a good weekend and a good August, ahead of what promises to a very exciting autumn.

Iain Martin,
Editor and Publisher.