Elephant in the room

The unseen elephant is Trump's power to rebrand an opponent. 

News headline: "Bernie wins, Pete chases, Amy rises, Elizabeth fades, Joe flops."

Joe Biden's flop did not "just happen."

Pundits are discussing candidates and "lanes." Are Democrats going to be comfortable with Sanders' brand of political change? Klobuchar finally got noticed, but it too late for her to build a national campaign? Bloomberg is waiting to be the savior on the white horse, but will Democrats accept him? All good questions.

One thing is sure: Joe Biden flopped.

Maybe Biden flopped because he deserved to flop, or it was inevitable he would flop, or because Democrats tripped him. But whatever else, Donald Trump was behind the scenes, helping this process along.

There are plenty of reasons to think that Biden was always a hollow shell of name recognition, ready to collapse when criticized on race by Senator Harris, on policy by Sanders, on fresh ideas by Buttigieg. I saw him up close in New Hampshire and Iowa and witnessed strengths and weaknesses. Biden was "good enough," not doddering, not hopeless, but also undeniably in a different and lower level of vitality than his opponents. 

American commentariat and media, and therefore American voters, were prepped to see, interpret, and internalize what they saw and heard about Biden. Trump's huge branding megaphone was at work. 

Donald Trump had good reason to worry about Biden. Polls showed him beating Trump handily. Trump does what Trump does: recognize his own weak spots, then identify similar ones in his opponent, then elevate those into national attention by newsworthy attacks.

It works. He bullies. The media cannot resist the story. The opponents' heads explode by the unfairness and childishness of it, and his base loves watching liberals fret.

Age and vitality. Trump's own age and fitness are a vulnerability, so Trump attacks Biden there. Trump submits a clownish doctor's report on himself, and goes to work on "Sleepy Joe." The media is not demanding a look at Trump's weight or heart fitness or mental health. We are looking at Biden's verbal slips.

Behavior. Trump added "Creepy Joe." Joe Biden is a hands-on old style Irish politician. Trump's reputation with women is a point of potential weakness, so he attacks Joe Biden right there. Joe stood closely behind a woman and inhaled. Trump bragged about grabbing pussies and pays off porn stars. Biden is the creepy one.

Corruption and nepotism.  Democrats are making "corruption" the centerpiece of campaigns. Trump's top appointments, lobbyists heading departments, his children, emoluments, his charity, his golf trips, were all vulnerabilities. Trump pivots to an attack on his strongest opponent in that very area, locating Hunter Biden as a weak spot. Trump involved ambassadors, top administration officials, Rudy Giuliani, the Office of Management and Budget in the loop to create Ukrainian validation of the Biden corruption issue, and position Trump as a corruption fighter. Attack Biden on corruption.

Those memes are GOP talking points. Information from the GOP media silos drift out into the overall political environment. Fox opinion host Sean Hannity routinely refers to Biden as "Sleepy Creepy Joe." Rush Limbaugh hammers away at it. I receive email chain letters and multiple spam comments to this blog describing Biden as stumbling down frail, as perverted, and as awesomely and uniquely corrupt.

Trump has an army of supporters in social media passing around chain emails, doing the negative branding, and spamming the comments section of this blog. Voters are prepped to believe wild things. A large majority of Republicans believed Obama was born in Kenya; a significant number believed Hillary took time to run a side business of child prostitution out of a pizza parlor during her otherwise busy campaign. Really.

Trump has made sharp negative branding of opponents mainstream, even upscale. This adjacent letter was sent to me by a well educated, prosperous male, from blue California. It was not sent to me to explain the over the top nonsense that comes to his in-box. It was to warn me by sharing information that Sanders never really held a job, that he had lived in squalor, and that he supported "oppressive far-left Marxism."  He wanted me to know Sanders is "a draft-dodging deadbeat dad, a globe-trotting communist dilettante, and a petulant detractor of hard-working honorable Democrats."

By election day it is entirely likely that Trump will have approval ratings no higher than 40%. Democrats should take no comfort in that. They should expect their own candidate, whoever it is, to have equally low approval ratings. Attacks from Trump helped to take down Biden. We saw it. 

By election day a great many voters will dislike and fear the Democrat. Count on that.