Donald Trump has been holding regular press briefings on the COVID 19 pandemic for weeks. As usual, he's frequently lying, sometimes in ways that endanger the public health. Joe Biden faced criticism from some Democrats for essentially disappearing for an extended period, rather than managing a Democratic response to this as Trump's approval numbers soared to the highest of his presidency. When Biden finally reemerged, it immediately became apparent that it would have probably been better if he hadn't--a string of media appearances in which, as usual, he could barely form coherent sentences and said a lot of entirely incomprehensible or embarrassingly stupid things. I've covered some of these things in other articles. There have been a lot more since.
When, for example, he appeared on ABC's "The View" (24 March), he explained that "The coronavirus is not [Trump's] fault, but the lack of speed with which to respond to it has to move much faster."
The presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Trump also rather astonishingly said he didn't want to be in a political fight with Trump (then why is he even in the race?) and that Democrats should be kinder in how they address Trump's self-serving, public-endangering fictions:
"I have not been criticizing the president, but I've been pointing out where there is disagreement on how to proceed... The American people don't want us in a political fight, and I want no part of a political fight either, but when the president says things that turn out not to be accurate, we should not say 'you're lying,' we should say 'Mr. President that's not the facts, here's the deal.'"On 30 March, Biden appeared on MSNBC and did nothing to conceal the fact that he was referencing notes on his lap during the interview. That's a scandal and a major embarrassment in itself but it got worse. Even having written notes there on hand, Biden was still saying things like...
"...we have to, uh, depend on what the president's going to do right now. And first of all he has to, uh, tell, uh, uh, wait 'til the cases before anything happens. Look, the whole idea is, he’s got to get in place things that were shortages of."He also claimed he was the first to have suggested Trump invoke the Defense Production Act to battle the coronavirus--a claim he had made repeatedly over the previous 8 days." I talked about doing the Defense Production Act before anyone came along." Biden is fond of proffering false narratives in which he casts himself in an heroic or visionary role and he's rarely met an idea from someone else for which he isn't enthusiastic to take credit. The facts in this matter: On 14 March, 57 House Democrats wrote a letter to Trump urging him to invoke the Defense Production Act. Five days later, on 18 March, Trump did that very thing, albeit in a far more limited way than was appropriate. That same day, Biden made his first call for Trump to invoke the act--the first time he'd ever mentioned it. FactCheck.org ran down the details.
The day before that appearance, on 29 March, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll reported that only 24% of Biden's own supporters were "very enthusiastic" about his campaign, compared to 26% who said they weren't at all enthusiastic about him. Biden's were the worst numbers for a Democrat in the history of that particular poll--even worse than Clinton's in 2016. By contrast, 53% of Trump's supporters said they were "very enthusiastic," with only 14% saying they had no enthusiasm. I wrote about this here.
From the Hill, 1 April, another indication of Biden's weakness as a candidate (and while this may have been an April Fool's joke, it wasn't one by the pollster):
"A Grinnell College national poll released Wednesday morning showed that 55 percent of likely voters who said they would back Biden say their minds are made up, while 43 percent said they could be persuaded to support a different candidate."The context for this finding is that the press had, by this point, been insisting for weeks that the Democratic race was essentially over and that Biden was the nominee, a narrative that should have significantly driven up Biden's voter loyalty numbers.[1]
Trump, of course, has no such problem:
"Trump holds much stronger sway over his supporters in the poll, with 82 percent of likely voters who say they will cast their ballot for Trump saying their minds are set and only 17 percent saying they are still persuadable."On 5 April, Biden returned to the coronavirus on ABC's "This Week" and offered more verbal oatmeal:
"We cannot let this, we've never allowed any crisis, from the Civil War straight through to the pandemic of 17, all the way arou... 16. We have never, never let our democracy sakes, second fiddle way that we can both have a democracy and elections and at the same time correct the public health."Crystal clear, eh? At the time of his appearance, Wisconsin was 2 days away from holding its primary and there were efforts in the state to delay it, a delay that could have hurt Biden's campaign. When asked if he agreed with Bernie Sanders that the state should, in the face of the virus, delay its primary, Biden offered only an evasive answer, declining to say there should be any delay and insisting only that Wisconsin should "follow the science."
A few days earlier, Biden had made his view of "the science" clear, saying the primary could be safely held. Which ain't what the science said. The primary went forward; predictably, it was a dangerous, confusing nightmare. Then, once images of this chaos splashed across the news, Biden asserted, "My gut is that we shouldn't have had the election in the first place, uh, the in-person election. It should have been all mail ballots in."
On 8 April, Bernie Sanders, who energized the notoriously difficult-to-mobilize youth vote, ended his presidential campaign, clearing the path for Biden to take the Democratic nomination. That same day, a new Quinnipiac University poll appeared. Among its findings, a large plurality of those age 18-34 have an unfavorable opinion of Joe Biden (49%) and a majority (57%) have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. But while slightly more young people dislike him, Trump actually has a higher positive rating among this demographic than Biden:
Yep, that's beyond the poll's margin of error.
I don't know how long or even if I'll continue these notes on Biden. Given what's happened in the campaign (and what's likely to happen in the Fall), it seems someone should keep a record. I guess we'll see!
--j.
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[1] In the same poll, 50% of those who said they'd support Bernie Sanders said they were firmly committed to him while 44% said they could be persuaded to support another candidate but, again, that context--Biden omnipresently treated as the champion--would have certainly significantly driven down those numbers.
