Biden’s hollow reality show an appalling performance

In four days, no one addressed the question of China or the lawlessness still roiling US cities. This was a travesty of a political convention that spoke volumes about Joe Biden

Joe Biden has made his election pitch at last: I’m a nice guy, Trump’s a beast, vote for me. In these dyspeptic, bilious times, such bland reassurance might be enough. Then again, it might not.

The Democratic National Convention was a bizarre decline in American political culture. It mixed a striking lack of coherent content with an endless series of images that circled around a few key emotional themes.

Biden’s nominating speech did the same. Biden’s verbally erratic, gaffe-prone performances have led his advisers to mostly cocoon him in his basement. With Donald Trump taking up all the attention, and coronavirus raging, and most of the media rooting for him, that has worked.

It also kept expectations helpfully low. All Biden has to do is stand up straight and read his lines and it’s a triumph.

Biden delivered his address, the most important speech of his life, with confidence and passion. That a candidate can manage to read a 25-minute speech and get the intonations right is a good thing, but surely the lowest possible bar for a presidential candidate to jump.

The substance of the speech was appalling. Really there was not much substance.

The Democratic convention nearly drowned in schmaltz, most of it concerning Biden’s life. It is indeed tragic that Biden lost his first wife and their daughter in a car accident decades ago, and then an adult son to cancer. The way Biden responded to these tragedies is genuine testimony to his character and any campaign would use it.

But these tragedies, repeated endlessly at the Democratic convention, became the main plank on which Biden seemed to be running for president. That is not how a mature democracy operates. It is reality TV, celebrity politics. Democrats lampoon Trump as the reality TV show president but they stripped all substance from their own convention and turned it into the Biden family reality TV show.

Here is a telling fact. In four days, no one addressed the question of China, either its strategic or economic challenge.

Nor did anyone mention the violent crime and lawlessness still roiling big American cities and soaring murder rates in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.

This was a travesty of a political convention.

Biden identified four crises his presidency would address: coronavirus, the worst pandemic in a century; the economic downturn, the worst since the Depression; racial injustice, where the call for change is more urgent than at any time since the 1960s; and global warming, where he thinks millions of jobs will be created in clean energy.

Yet Biden mentioned almost no policy of consequence.

For the virus he will have a national mask mandate and follow the science. For the economy he will provide $US2 trillion ($2.7 trillion) of infrastructure. For racial injustice he will ooze empathy. And for climate change, non-sequitur alert, there will be millions of jobs.

Biden does have policies on his website. But over four days not a single policy was discussed in any detail. Is the broad public utterly uninterested in policy?

For decades, the big nominating conventions have contained a lot of hoopla and showbiz. They have been declining in substance, partly because a convention centre full of delegates can be not only passionate but unpredictable when policy is discussed.

But they have normally involved high-production video clips introducing leaders, some of whom actually spoke about policies. Not this time. Rather, this convention focused on emotion, not reason. Each day, while concentrating on the main business of abusing Trump and sanctifying Biden, had a few sub-themes.

Women and Democrats were the sub-theme on day three while God made a comeback on day four. Biden is a Catholic, and the Democrats traditionally have a problem with religious voters, so a priest and a nun got bit parts. This is full of paradox and irony. Biden opposes Catholic Church teaching on most life issues, certainly on abortion, as is his every right. But his vice-presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, has a record of anti-Catholic posturing.

In 2018, in a hearing to confirm a Trump nominee, Brian Buescher, to a district court, she attacked Buescher for his membership of the Catholic charity Knights of Columbus.

The Knights are not a political or campaigning organisation. They are a legendary charity and do immense good work. But like all Catholic organisations they are pro-life rather than pro-abortion. Harris strongly implied that this membership therefore was unacceptable in a judge. That would mean any Catholic membership is unacceptable. This so annoyed Harris’s Senate colleagues, even the woke, that the Senate passed a resolution affirming there was no religious test for judicial office in the US.

You wouldn’t expect all that to get a run at the convention, but you’d think something of substance might have been discussed. Harris herself condemned the “structural racism” that she said characterised the US. She and Barack Obama painted a bleak picture of America and its history, but a bright picture of its future so long as Biden is elected.

Harris, like Biden, seems to have no fixed political convictions. Or perhaps more precisely, like Bill Clinton, she holds intensely whatever view she is expressing at any given moment, however it contradicts her past views.

But it is a dismaying indication of what a Biden presidency might actually be like that Harris rose to national notice through prosecuting the culture wars.

And while the Democratic National Convention almost drowned in the gross sentimentality that disfigures so much American life, and that does not lead to virtue or decency in public life but more often emotionalism and self-indulgence, there was still a good degree of nastiness evident.

Obama and many other speakers blamed Trump for more than 170,000 American deaths from COVID. That is an outrageous charge. Most analysts and many Republicans agree that Trump’s leadership in response to COVID has been poor. He got some things right, such as the early travel ban on China. But his messages have been confused and at times he has publicly contradicted the official advice from his own health authorities.

It is absolutely legitimate to criticise Trump, robustly and harshly, for such failures. But to blame him directly for 170,000-plus deaths is grotesque. It is a matter of record that when Trump imposed the travel ban on China, Biden was opposed, calling the ban “xenophobic” and saying it would do no good.

In any event, the US death rate is high — and Trump is at his irrational worst when he claims it is low by international standards — but it is still lower than European nations such as Britain, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and others.

Much of the moral charge Democrats and left-liberal cultural leaders make against Trump is undercut by the way they distort facts, and often enough lie, and the wide-ranging personal abuse they engage in.

Trump has been vulgar, crude and offensive on many occasions and therefore has little to complain about when people behave that way towards him. However, you cannot sell yourself as representing a higher moral standard of pristine decency if you engage debate on those same terms.

Moreover, the Democrats are abusive and dismissive of Trump’s supporters as well. Vice-President Mike Pence has surely never been seriously rude about anybody. Yet Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who hosted the convention’s fourth night, and former Democrat candidate Andrew Yang undertook a ghastly segment where they parodied Pence’s name, a lame joke Louis-Dreyfus returned to through the night. She variously called him poonce and ponce. This seemed a response to TV commentators getting the pronunciation of Harris’s name wrong. This is an entirely trivial matter, but can you imagine the storm of outrage that would follow if a senior Republican lampooned the Democrat vice-presidential candidate’s name?

The convention did achieve a number of positives for Biden.

It presented a united Democratic Party. In truth, the party is riven by ideological and geographical divisions. It suffers the same kind of contradictions that the Australian Labor Party faces and that confront many social democratic parties, the inner-city voter versus the outer-suburban and rural voter. What plays on climate change or identity politics in Manhattan or San Francisco doesn’t go so well in West Virginia or even suburban Michigan.

But Democrats certainly are all united in their desire to defeat Trump and get jobs in a Biden administration. Obama’s two secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, are all over Biden and had honoured spots in this convention. Both are said to be quite keen to return to a Biden cabinet.

Clinton was actually a pretty good secretary of state, but that was when she thought she would face a hawkish Republican opponent, like Marco Rubio, for the presidency.

Kerry was sublimely ineffective, authored the disastrous Iran deal, was useless in the broader Middle East, neglected Asia and over-invested in almost worthless multilateralism for its own sake.

A Biden foreign policy could well be worse even than that.

The convention also featured a lot of former Republicans, such as John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, now endorsing Biden. The Democrats have gone to the left, not the centre, but their pitch to moderates and centrists is that Trump is unfit to be president. The hope is that the presence of these Republicans will give such voters “permission” to opt for Biden.

In policy terms it is almost impossible to glean anything of substance on how Biden might govern. The TV audiences were much smaller than for the parallel event four years ago. But Biden is like a football team, up on the scoreboard with 20 minutes to go. His strategy is to play mistake-free football and hope he’s still ahead when the siren sounds.

But the party revealed some things about itself. One was the almost demented emphasis on identity politics. Pete Buttigieg was the most intellectually impressive of the Democratic presidential candidates, denied the chance to consolidate the moderate vote because his party could not count its votes properly and he was wrongly marked as coming second in a crucial primary he actually won.

He happens to be gay and married. He ran on substantial policies but was happy to answer questions about his marriage and gay rights if asked.

But at this convention he was prevailed on to make the fact of being a gay candidate the main element of his speech. That is a step backwards from where Buttigieg was in the campaign.

The Democratic Party has moved a very long way left. Bernie Sanders was right when he said his radical agenda is now the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Biden is still favourite, but the polls are tightening and the RealClearPolitics betting odds now have Biden at a 57 per cent chance of winning and Trump at 43 per cent. That means it’s a live contest.

If Biden becomes president he might be like Lyndon Johnson. Realising he would have only one term in his own right, Johnson took on the huge task of civil rights. Biden might do the same, perhaps on healthcare or some other domestic issue.

Or he might, like Calvin Coolidge, be a political lifer whose key talent is persistence and survival, who is ultimately somewhat astonished to end up at the top and just enjoys the ride.

We are not any wiser as to what kind of president Biden might be after this infomercial trivialising of American politics, this brain-rotting cotton candy of the mind, that was the Democratic National Convention.

SOURCE 

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IN BRIEF

Democratic National Convention Circus
Viewership tumbles 24% on first night of convention (Bloomberg)

Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren speaks at Native American Caucus meeting (Bongino.com)

Linda Sarsour, who raised funds for terrorist, featured as speaker (The Federalist)

DNC rejects #MeToo "reckoning" over Bill Clinton by gifting him with speaking slot (The Federalist)

Trump takes 700% more questions than Hidin' Biden in one month (Washington Examiner)

Senate Intel Committee says FBI gave "unjustified credence" to Steele dossier, Russia "took advantage" of Trump transition team (Fox News)

Postmaster general suspends changes to Postal Service to avoid any impact on election mail (NBC News)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo publishing book on his coronavirus (mis)leadership after lambasting Trump in DNC speech (Forbes)

Judge blocks Idaho law preventing biological males from competing in women's sports (The Daily Caller)

Yet another riot is declared in Portland on 83rd night of trouble: 200-strong mob of protesters torch city's famous Multnomah Building (UK Daily Mail)

Portland police identify suspect in brutal beating of truck driver (The Daily Wire)

Six arrested after George Washington statue toppled, vandalized near Los Angeles City Hall (KTLA)

New home construction surged 23% in July (UK Daily Mail)

S&P 500 hits all-time high despite COVID-19 devastation (New York Post)

Dangerously incompetent Scott Israel defeated in bid for reelection as Broward County sheriff (The Truth About Guns)

Never-before-seen photos of Bill Clinton getting massage from Jeffrey Epstein accuser released (The Daily Wire)

What corporate media won't tell you about Trump's historic Middle East peace deal (The Federalist)

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