Steve McGookin“This is not a reality show. This is reality.”
When former President Barack Obama last week addressed his first crowd on this year’s campaign trail, he tore into the man who had replaced him, saying: “I never thought Donald Trump would embrace my vision or continue my polices, but I did hope for the sake of the country, that he might show some interest in taking the job seriously. But it hasn’t happened. He hasn’t showed any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends.”
It was a speech that articulated four years of frustration with the current president’s priorities, behaviour and approach to the office, but left its most scathing criticism for his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic that has left approaching a quarter of a million Americans dead.
“Donald Trump isn’t going to suddenly protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself,” Obama said. “Joe [Biden] isn’t going to screw up testing. He’s not going to call scientists idiots. He’s not going to hold a superspreader event at the White House.”
On Monday, we begin the final week of an endless, wearying, soul-sucking campaign that in truth began five years ago when Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in his Trump Tower building and lectured the country about what he thought was wrong with it, and more importantly, whose fault he thought it was. Not much has changed in the president’s campaigning style since then. He still desperately needs enemies and something to blame them for.
What has changed though, is that he is now an accountable incumbent, not an indignant challenger; and he goes into the final stretch having essentially dismantled the ideological framework of the Republican party in favor of empty slogans and personal vitriol, while abandoning a campaign pledge to “drain the swamp” that resonated so well in 2016 with voters who had become disillusioned with politics as usual.
Instead, he is probably running, as Max Boot writes in the Washington Post, the sleaziest presidential campaign ever. And while he may have done little to expand his base from four years ago, the 42 per cent of the country that say they continue to approve of the job he’s doing appear as committed to their cause as ever.
It’s significant, therefore, that Obama chose as the location for his formal campaign debut the city of Philadelphia; with Pennsylvania a crucial state where Biden has been holding a slightly larger lead than Hillary Clinton did four years ago. But of course, at this stage – and with the experience of 2016 hanging ominously in the background – no lead is really safe. If you’re looking for enemies, the Democrats’ biggest foe right now is complacency.
As Molly Nagle at ABC News reports, the Biden campaign has kept its focus firmly on the six core battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida – but enjoying a significant cash advantage, they have the resources in the final days to expand into states like Georgia and even Texas.
While Obama was making headlines on the streets of Philadelphia, Biden himself was preparing for the following evening’s final televised debate; a spectacle that Amy Davidson Sorkin at the New Yorker described as Donald Trump’s “bitter, vainglorious fantasy of America.” There were certainly echoes of his “American carnage” inaugural speech, but even as his lies and exaggerations continued unabated the bar he set by his performance in the previous encounter meant that Trump managed to get credit for “not setting himself on fire.”
Amanda Carpenter wrote at The Bulwark that Trump’s closing message was “it’s not my fault,” observing that the only sympathy he bothered to express was for himself.
Interestingly, the one thing that didn’t come up in the debate was Trump’s usual tirade of disinformation against the integrity of the voting process and the problems he keeps repeating with mail-in ballots.
Usually the final presidential debate is when a lot of people finally make up their minds before election day. The difference this time is the sheer number of votes that will have already been cast by the time next Tuesday rolls around, either by mail or in record numbers among early voting.
Almost 60 million Americans have voted so far across the country, CNN reports, already exceeding early totals for 2016 and – crucially – with more than half of them being cast in the 16 most competitive states.
The AP reports that the “split in voting behavior — Democrats voting early, Republicans on Election Day — has led some Democrats to worry about Trump declaring victory because early votes are counted last in Rust Belt battlegrounds. But they’re counted swiftly in swing states such as Arizona, Florida and North Carolina, which may balance out which party seems ahead on election night.”
It has been a surreal, dystopian, uncertain election campaign truly like no other; but now it feels increasingly like there is an end in sight – not just to this election process, but to the shattering of norms, the daily national nervous breakdown that has characterized American politics for four years.
What happens next is genuinely anyone’s guess.
Perhaps sensing what’s to come, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has been singularly focused on the urgency of confirming Supreme Court pick Amy Coney Barrett – with the process expected to be finalized on Monday – to the point where any settlement on coronavirus relief measures has become tangled up in a jockeying for political advantage at a time when Americans need help the most.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic there appears to be growing disquiet inside Downing Street at the prospect of a Biden victory and the implications for any potential UK-US trade deal, to say nothing of the complications for the British government around Biden’s previously stated support for the Good Friday Agreement.
As their man continues to lag in the polls, Trump’s hardcore supporters point to how far behind he was last time – right up until election day – and hold out hope of a so-called “Red Mirage” where Trump appears to be ahead in early returns, possibly allowing him to claim victory, well aware that the picture can change dramatically as more ballots are counted.
For the editor of The Bulwark Jonathan Last, though, the emerging outcome is cut and dried.
“Donald Trump is going to lose the presidency, probably by a historic margin,” he says. “One thing is not in doubt: When America wakes up on November 4, Joe Biden will have earned more votes than any man who’s ever run for president.
“That doesn’t tell us anything about a Biden presidency, of course. You don’t get, say, an extra Supreme Court appointment just for getting more votes than any presidential candidate in American history. But it will be part of his mandate, part of the continuing realignment of American politics, and the most vociferous rejection of a sitting president in decades – and possibly in any of our lifetimes.
“The Democratic party will have a chance to rebuild America.
“And the Republican party will have defeat with dishonor.
He concludes, simply, that “Trump is toast.”
We’ll see.
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See also:
Northern Slant hosts online discussion on ‘The U.S. and Us’
Supreme Court Fight Set To Dominate Election’s Conclusion
Campaigning for Change From Your Couch
‘Celtic’ Biden’s Call to Irish-America
