Biden’s plan

This long portrait of Joe Biden includes the following glimpse into his thinking and that of his advisers into how to win the 2020 election:

He also said that despite the economic recovery under Obama, many Americans were still reeling when Trump came along. “A lot of people were left behind,” Biden said. “In areas where people were hard hit, I don’t think we paid enough attention to their plight.”

The political calculation driving Biden’s campaign — and the main reason he has been assumed by many to be the most electable Democrat — is the belief that the Scranton native can win back enough of those voters to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and deny Trump a second term. “The issues that are front and center now,” he told me, “are issues that have been in my wheelhouse for a long time,” citing what he said was his advocacy on behalf of the middle class. Some who voted for Trump, he went on, were starting to realize that Trump’s tax cuts were tailored for the wealthy and for corporations; to take note of his unceasing effort to dismantle Obamacare; to grasp that he was a false tribune of the forgotten man. “When the carnival comes through town the first time, and the guy with the shell and the pea game, and you lose — the second time they come around, you’re a little more ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, I saw what happened last time,’ ” he said. Trump voters might be unwilling to admit out loud to buyer’s remorse, he allowed. “They don’t want to turn to their buddy and say, ‘I’m taking off my Make America Great Again [hat].’ ” But Trump’s base, he argued, isn’t as solid as it appears: “Not all of them, but I think they’re persuadable, yes.”

Biden and his advisers are convinced that the general election will mostly be a referendum on Trump and his fitness for office. “This is really about character and values as opposed to issues and ideology,” says Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist. He acknowledges that Hillary Clinton tried and failed to make Trump’s suitability the pivotal question of the 2016 election. The difference this time, he says, is that Trumpis now president and has demonstrated his inadequacy. Biden made a similar point. “Even when he was running,” Biden told me, “I don’t think anybody thought he would be as bad as he is.”

There are two quite separate questions here:

(1) Is Trump a deeply aberrational figure in American political life, or is the fact that he’s a terrible person actually inseparable from the fact that the Republican base loves him? The latter would be the case if to a significant extent GOP voters love Trump because he’s a terrible person, not despite that fact.

I think the latter is clearly the case for a large percentage of Trump voters, but of course even if that’s true, that doesn’t answer the second question, which is:

(2) Is it a good strategy for the Democratic nominee to campaign as if Trump is an aberrational figure, even if he isn’t?

That’s a much tougher call. Obviously a lot of Biden’s appeal is related to his insistence that while Trump is awful, the Republican party as a whole really isn’t, and let’s get back to the good old days. A lot of voters love that message, not surprisingly. They want to go back to the Before Time, whether that means the Obama presidency, the Clinton years, Tip and Ronnie, or what have you.

Ironically, it’s another variation on the Make America Great Again message.

It’s powerful, because the message that it was long ago and it was far away and it was so much better than it is today is always powerful, especially to older voters, and (also for obvious reasons) especially to white older voters in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Now a winning strategy will have to peel off some Trump or Trump-curious voters in the key Rust Belt states, and still energize the progressive base at the same time. That’s a tough needle to thread, and it’s hard for me to see that Biden is the best candidate to pull it off, especially since for many reasons he seems far more interested in achieving the former than the latter.