What does Joe Biden need to do to defeat Trump in November? And hopefully not just squeaking by but by trouncing him.
First, the President has the bully pulpit, and never has that phrase been more apt than in the case of Donald Trump. Biden has to figure out a way, in this age of pandemic with social restrictions, to give himself a public presence, to make him a leader for the American people. He must develop his own bully pulpit.
Videos from his basement don’t hack it! Yes, he can’t hold rallies and many of the usual things that candidates do.
But he can hold press conferences … live ones … that reporters will cover. Certainly on the issue of how to respond to the pandemic, he has ample reason to hold a regularly scheduled weekly news conferences to criticize what Trump is doing or not doing, tell the people what needs to happen and what he would do if President. Like his plan for the Federal government taking over responsibility for testing and contact tracing … which was announced in a post on Medium and hardly noticed. There is so much confusion surrounding the virus and opening up, the people would welcome a sane, trustworthy voice on these issues.
He can also use press conferences to announce his policy positions on other important matters linked to his criticism of Trump administration actions or policies. There is no shortage of weekly items that highlight how Trump is destroying policies that were meant to protect the average person … health care, environmental roll-backs, the post office, to name just a few. And that would give Biden the opportunity to showcase his own policies, not just to protect the status quo but to improve protections for the average person.
One caveat: do not in general campaign against Trump the person. Data show that most people are not as upset about Trump the person as liberals and especially progressives are. Especially since Biden needs to attract people who voted for Trump, attacking Trump the person becomes viewed as attacking the people who voted for him. So stick to attacking Trump’s policies.
In taking himself to the people, he has to keep in mind four key audiences: white voters without a college degree, people of color both Black and Latino, and young voters. If Biden is to win, let alone win handily, he must achieve a large turnout of voters in all four groups. Luckily, everything that Biden should be saying, all the policies he should be promoting, he can say to all these audiences. But he needs to make sure that in addition to talking about the big overarching issues, he addresses the needs of each of these constituencies directly.
One of the ways he can do this is to go and speak to them directly. Yes, again, he cannot hold rallies. But he can have news conferences around the country, in different type of locales that emphasize the inclusive nature of his policies. He can hold these conferences in rust-belt areas, in urban Black ghettos and urban Latino ghettos, on college campuses. And he should hold them in rural areas to emphasize that Democratic policies are good for rural areas; they aren’t just about helping the urban poor.
What’s disturbing is that either Biden has surrounded himself with a week campaign crew, because none of these what I think are obvious tactics are happening, which is what I think is what’s going on, or the less likely possibility that he just isn’t comfortable doing what needs to be done, other than through ads. That would be unfortunate.
Whatever. If he is not by his nature the man for this time, than those around him have to goose him up to become the type of man needed for this time. The future of our country depends on it, and I am not saying that lightly. Another four years of Trump would be devastating. Even a nail-bitingly-close election would be harmful because it would indicate that the country as a whole was still terribly divided, not ready to move forward to do what’s necessary to truly make America great again.
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