Turning the knife in Joe Biden

     "Joe Biden, who has a habit of verbal missteps on the campaign trail, is again facing scrutiny after a report that he misstated multiple details in a story about a war hero."

      New York Times' description of one of their stories

     "Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose habit of verbal missteps on the 2020 campaign trail has concerned some Democrats, is again facing scrutiny after a new report that says he misstated multiple details in a war story he told last week."

     New York Times' lead, in that story

Donald Trump's strategy is working.

Donald Trump called Biden "Sleepy Joe" and began saying to be on the lookout because Biden has lost a step, that he is getting old and addled. Trump gave a way to think about an opponent's verbal errors: age related dementia.

Democratic candidates have not piled on. They didn't need to. Trump, Republicans and the media do it for them.

As this blog has noted, going back to posts in October, 2015, Donald Trump's extemporaneous speech is near gibberish. Spoken speech, particularly by Trump, is full of half sentences and repeats. It is understandable--even persuasive--because of the gestures and emphasis that accompany the utterances. 

This blog, and others, have put that into context, observing the "real" Trump versus "teleprompter Trump."  We define the extemporaneous Trump as authentic, even what he is saying is clearly and provably inaccurate. The ground rules for Trump are to take what he says seriously, not literally;  to define his verbal awkwardness as proof of unguarded truth-telling; to not be surprised if what he says is inaccurate since it is simply Trump being Trump, and, besides, it might just be Trump do negotiating for a better deal.

For Trump, bad is good.

For Joe Biden, bad is dementia. 

Joe Biden is much more fluent and grammatical than is Trump, including in the three times I watch him in extended extemporaneous speech in Iowa. But Trump--and Fox and talk radio--relentlessly define Biden as addled.  More importantly, so do the two pillars of the gatekeeper serious media, the New York Times and Washington Post. It is the new straight-news reality.

The gatekeeper of progressive straight news, The Guardian, is in on it, using an appositional phrase about Biden this morning: "former vice president, who seems increasingly gaffe-prone and vulnerable, . . . . "

Biden's gaffes aren't something to be argued; they ae a given, like his age or height.

This blog has described the phenomenon of Confirmation Bias. We see what we expect to see. Believing is seeing. Humans look for patterns, and we find them in randomness if we are prepped to believe the pattern exists. 

Are they random for Biden? Is he, in fact, more prone to mis-statements than are, Warren or Sanders or the others? Maybe. Probably more than them, but unquestionably fewer than Trump. 

But what is important is that Biden's gaffes are looked for and sought after, then examined and evaluated on the basis of his decrepitude.

This could work out one of two ways for Democrats. One would be that Biden will survive and become the nominee and we can see now the outlines of the 2020 disqualification of Biden. He is the guy who is dangerously old, and it is better to vote for Trump. 

The alternative is that Trump and the media have acted too soon, that Biden will falter, and that would leave room for a candidate to become the moderate alternative to Warren or Sanders. 

Given what I now see as a full court press by the mainstream media, I predict that Biden will falter sooner than later. 

"Sleepy Joe."

The "Woman" candidate drops out.

Kirsten Gillibrand leaves

Gillibrand branded herself as the candidate of empowered women.

She called herself the antidote to Trump.

Her website reads, "And in the face of a president who demeans women and threatens their rights, Kirsten’s fearless advocacy for women is the antidote. Women are half of this country—and they deserve a president who values and fights for them."

It did not work. In fact it backfired. 

Gillibrand carried with her the scent of inauthenticity. She had switched from being a gun rights advocate to favoring gun regulation when she went from being a Member of Congress from an upstate district to being New York's new Senator.

But her real problem was that Gillibrand was known for one thing. She led the defenestration of Al Franken. She betrayed the Democratic tribe in order to lead the MeToo tribe.

The Franken attack was done quickly. There was an element of group-think and political panic within Democratic circles. Franken was guilty on accusation. Maybe, in the fullness of time, people would have concluded Franken should leave, but Gillibrand's sidestepped the established process. No ethics panel, no testimony, no evidence, no hearings. Gillibrand heard accusations and reacted. Guilty! She got others to go along.

This event might have launched her presidential campaign. She might have galvanized a tribe of politically motivated women, a sisterhood voting block. After all, some 58% of Democratic voters are women. A core group of them might have secured her a position in the first rank, putting her center stage, giving her visibility.

Gillibrand website headline

It did not work. Apparently there is no political sisterhood of consequence.


In 2016 a majority of white women voted for Trump, even in the immediate aftermath of the Access Hollywood video. Women as woman does not appear to be a political motivator for women. 

Worse, it apparently motivates men in opposition. Gillibrand's campaign confirms the 2016 election inference that when many men hear women talking about patriarchy, male predation, and female empowerment, they hear it as an unfair and discriminatory attack on men. So do their wives. Hillary did not just decisively lose the votes of men, but she decisively lost the votes of married women.

Gillibrand became the face of vigilante MeToo justice. Too harsh, too quick to judge, no due process.

The Franken event served as a heads up to Republicans on how to respond to the charges against Kavanaugh. Fight back with angry indignation. They saw that an accusation could be career ending, no matter your position. Don't empathize, deny, and make the issue a matter of team loyalty.

That strategy worked. Every Republican Senator supported Kavanaugh, and Republican male and female voters were energized to turn out to vote in the 2018 elections. They didn't "believe the woman," and women did not vote sisterhood. They doubted the woman and voted Republican.

MeToo makes backlash. Aroused womanhood signified to a great many not "justice and accountability" but a threat to due process, and men--like women--were half of this country.

Gillibrand earned her enemies but didn't win friends. Her campaign languished. 

That Monmouth poll? Nevermind!

Yesterday morning this blog warned about the Monmouth poll. 

Yesterday afternoon they admitted it was "an outlier." 

The Monmouth poll of 298 Democrats said that Biden had collapsed and the race was even.  

Maybe Joe Biden will collapse. Maybe his support is eroding to the higher energy calls for change from Elizabeth Warren, or bow to the longstanding passion of the Bernie's legacy supporters from 2016. But not yet. 

New polls are out, directly contradicting the Monmouth poll. In the new ones, Biden still has a commanding lead with support from some 32% of Democrats.

Click: NY Times

My observations on the ground did not weigh Biden support versus that of Warren. But I saw something real. I did not see collapse.

I saw that Biden had genuine support and I watched from close up his presentation three times. He presents as courtly, as decent, not as doddering and addled. He has something to sell.

Trump is trying to push the "Sleepy Joe" meme. Sean Hannity continually calls Biden "Sleepy Creepy." The New York Times and other media keep looking for signs of weakness, either slip of the tongue gaffes or enthusiasm weakness. 

But the reality on the ground--to my eyes--is that Joe Biden is strong enough. Not Sanders with jeremiads angry at injustice, not kinetic Warren, not buff black Booker, not young Buttigieg, not arm shaking Beto, not scolding Kamala, but a candidate who is safe and strong enough. He projects compassion and decency, not "creepiness." He has been through a lot in his life, and Biden makes that into a positive. 

Experience and decency. That isn't a bad brand. That is what Biden sells.

People sick of Trump have an alternative. It demeans and mis-understands Democratic voters to think that his poll support come only out of name recognition and familiarity. Biden fills a niche, for people who want change but don't want revolution. For people who want to lower the noise threshold and don't have the energy for political revolution. For people who like their health care the way it is, at least for themselves. For people who have jobs and are happy to have them. For people who like their Medicare. For Catholics who wrestle with abortion. For people who like the familiar.

There are a lot of those people in the Democratic Party.

Biden is still in this race. 

Poll Data and Anecdote

Political Tourism is haphazard. So are polls.

Biden crush, August in Iowa

The political commentary world is discussing a recent Monmouth poll. Biden falling! Warren is up! Sanders is holding even! The also-rans flounder!

They polled 298 Democrats or Democrat leaners.

Readers of this blog may well be among the cohort of voracious readers, viewers, and listeners to political news and commentary, so this commentary buzz may well be familiar. The very credible Monmouth people just published a poll and people are taking it seriously.  CLICK HERE  

It portrays something that feels real on the ground and it confirms the Big Media narrative.

Conventional data/media/commentary says:

   

   ***Biden's support is dropping back into the pack. As this blog noted five days ago (August 24), and Nate Silver at 538 notes today, the NY Times has a narrative of low Biden enthusiasm. The Times illustrated its story with a boy playing a video game ignoring Biden, and with an audience sitting. I questioned that presumed lack of enthusiasm, and so did Nate Silver, who examines data, including this poll. Biden enthusiasm might be true, compared to Warren just now, but I saw lots of Biden enthusiasm.

Beto O'Rourke crush, April in NH

   ***Warren is surging. Again, as this blog noted a week ago, Warren has upped her game, and I compared her favorably against Amy Klobuchar. Warren, I said, had increased her charisma quotient and was acting like a rock star worth seeing. The Monmouth poll shows what I saw on the ground.

   ***Buttigieg has a static niche. The Monmouth data showed that notwithstanding his off the charts fundraising numbers, his popularity has fallen back to 5%. This blog has described excited buzz about "Mayor Pete" with stories about his seven languages, learning Norwegian to read a book, his emotional maturity, and his matter of fact comfort with himself and sexuality. He is impressive and he is talked about. He is appealing to an educated, professional group of voters ready to trail-blaze through another boundary, electing a gay president. It is another in those steps toward electing a black president, a female president, a Latino president, now a gay president. Social liberals love breaking through those boundaries and Buttigieg is the present opportunity. This blog observed the people who created the big fundraising numbers; they skewed prosperous, professional, urbane,and gay, to my eye. It suggested Buttigieg has a niche, not a movement, at least not yet.

   ***The also-rans are in each other's way. The Monmouth poll notes that Buttigieg, Booker, Castro, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, and Yang have a combined total that would put them into the top ranks of candidates, some 15%, but currently they each divide up that section of the electorate. Yesterday this blog described Booker, a Rhodes Scholar, former big city mayor, a US Senator, and described him as fully capable of dominating the liberal (as contrasted with Sanders/Warren progressive) lane, the lane currently dominated by Biden and shared with twenty other candidates. 

See what you see, and describe it. 

The Monmouth poll totaled the opinions of 298 "Democrats," plus some unknown number of whom merely "leaned Democratic." Nationwide. They were people who answered their phones, a sample that is increasingly un-representative in an era of multiple robocalls per day. They created data, though, and they counted it and put it in charts.

I had my eyes open when I attended a Buttigieg fundraiser in Portland. Attending a Biden Town Hall outside Des Moines, I witnessed and experienced the crush of people following his speech. I noticed that he seemed slender, possibly a bit frail, but that he stood very erect. He did not appear befuddled. His voice was strong.

In New Hampshire in April I watched Elizabeth Warren, and I watched her again in Sioux City, Iowa. I noted whether people got there early or not--they got there early. They were excited. And she got better, my having heard her the third and fourth times.

I noticed little things, like the way Warren introduced her husband, son, and golden lab at a New Hampshire event, and that she described her difficulties as young single mother as one of poverty, not of gender. The solution, she said, is day care. I noticed what she didn't say, that the problem was endemic pervasive patriarchy. Kirsten Gillibrand is running as a woman; Warren is not. A poll might confirm that, but I didn't need a poll. I saw where she had her husband sit, right up front.

Anecdote does not have credibility, nor should it. The hardest thing to see is the stuff right before our eyes, and it is even harder to interpret it fairly. The Monmouth people used discipline to measure what they measure. Data has value.

Slender. Erect.

But so does having your eyes open. I might be wrong, but I see what I think I see. 

Cory Booker's problem

     "This is a referendum on the dream. We need to stand up, united and say 'I too, dream America.' We won't die in the pit. We won't just get rid of Donald Trump. We will rise!"

     Cory Booker to AFL-CIO in Iowa

Cory Booker looks near perfect on paper.

He is a version of the Type-O Negative candidate, the Universal Donor.

Cory Booker has achieved at the highest levels within the white American meritocracy.  Joe Biden had called Obama "articulate." Booker is articulate.  

Booker played the archetypal masculine game, football, and has stayed in shape. He looks buff. He is also vegan, which gets mocked on Fox News. Booker is tough, but urbane.

He was a high school All American football player, then a graduate of Stanford, then got a degree from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, a Yale Law degree, then a big city Mayor, then a US Senator--a checklist of white meritocracy. Safe for whites.

Booker at Stanford

He was accused in his first election of being "not black enough"--his parents were both executives at IBM, and he grew up in a suburb. Booker got street cred from running a free legal clinic for people in poverty in New Haven, another poverty legal clinic in New York, he lived in a tent in a ten day hunger strike, and has done effective work on poverty and affordable housing issues in Newark, where he won elections. He won contested elections in a majority black city. Black enough.

Booker is a bachelor. There are rumors he is gay. "I am heterosexual," he told the Philadelphia Enquirer. But he doesn't talk about it, and he changes the subject. He is not conspicuously dating. He has a strong record in support of LGBTQ positions, and says that he doesn't mind if people wonder if he is gay, and he is comfortable with people thinking he is. But he isn't. More Type-O Negative.

There is one area where there is middle ground, but it is not a safe spot within the current Democratic Party: appearing "corporate." Cory Booker has a very liberal voting record, but he is a New Jersey senator, and New Jersey is home for much of Wall Street and Pharmaceutical executives. 

He is considered "corporate" by progressives. He dresses in suits and looks like he would be at ease in corporate board rooms. He looks urban. Sophisticated. He doesn't project that he listens to country music or eats fried pork on a stick at the Iowa State Fair. Indeed, he declined to eat it, which got discussed in Iowa and on Fox News.

He has supported charter schools, and he supports having private health insurance be part of the mix, not Medicare for All, a current litmus test for candidates. He is accused from the left of being too close to big dollar donors. His senate campaigns received significant money from Wall Street and drug executives--more than Senator Gillibrand received.

The Cory Booker problem: he isn't first and he isn't number one.  

Barrack Obama already got the buzz from being a nominally black candidate for president. Pete Buttigieg got the buzz for being the super-smart Rhodes Scholar. Booker does not contest Sanders or Warren for the progressive vote. He is not alone in seeking criminal justice reform. He is not noteworthy on issues of war and peace the way Tulsi Gabbard does.

There is no one or two word brand association with Booker.

Booker references the Biblical Joesph in his oratory and he echos Martin Luther King in the summary of his speech to Iowa Labor. He speaks of uplift and triumph. It is good oratory, but the audience did not rise to its feet at its end. It is almost great.

To stay in the race as the nominee Booker needs to be first choice in polls, and then win some elections.  Either he needs to up his game or--more likely--some of the people ahead of him need to falter.

It could happen.

Straw Poll in Iowa

Trump votes

Trump on the ropes? Trump unfavorables sky high? Trump tariffs turning the farm belt Democratic?

That isn't what I saw in Iowa.

Iowa is a swing state, or at least it has been.  It voted for Gore in 2000, for Bush in 2004, for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but for Trump by 8 points in 2016. 

Readers have seen polls showing Trump with approval of 42% and disapproval of 58%. Possibly Trump's behavior in office dooms him. Or not.

The election will be determined by the swing states. I got an up close look at how he is doing in Iowa, a state Trump potentially put at risk with Chinese retaliation against the Trump tariffs. 

Trump is doing OK. 

I watched people put the corn kernels into the Trump jar at the Iowa State Fair, one after another, about half the people. More Republicans than Democrats, and the Republicans almost entirely for Trump.

Vote counts in progress, day 7

 There was a steady lineup of people being handed a corn kernel by an employee of a local NBC station. People surveyed the various jars and deposited their kernel.

There were ample ways to cast a protest vote, and plenty of special reason beyond all the usual ones of Trump policies and tweets. The Trump tariffs have direct consequences for Iowa farmers. The price of American soybeans have collapsed.

Soybeans matter in Iowa. Iowa has some of the world's most productive farm land, and the profitable crops are a rotation of corn one year, soybeans the next. (Soybeans put nitrogen into the soil; corn needs nitrogen; a good combination.) State of Iowa data and conversations with Iowa farmers tell the same story. Between seed, fertilizer, herbicides, equipment amortization, and land rent, a farmer might have $400/acre cost in either crop, with the goal of selling for $100-$200 per acre more than costs. The harvest price matters enormously. They expect to lose money on their crop this year.

Trump has an emergency $65 subsidy available to Iowa farmers, which bails them out and sends a simple, persuasive message:  Sure, Trump tariffs caused the problem but Trump is doing this for the good of America. Farmers are taking one for the American team, but not to worry, Trump has their back.

Aren't they ashamed or feel weird to be getting a government handout? Not much. 

The whole system of commercial farming in Iowa is built around government subsidies and price protections. There are conservation land banks, and federal crop insurance to put a floor under prices in bad years. The government supports the price of corn with ethanol requirements in gasoline. Farmers farm the land and they "farm the government," a well known phrase in Iowa.

Voting

The Iowa corn kernel straw poll splits almost exactly even, between Democrats and Republicans. Among Republicans, Trump gets 97% of the vote. There is no widespread revulsion against Trump here. Republicans are standing by their man.

Is the poll scientific? No, but it reflects the mood of about 6,000 people a day, and organizers monitor the jars to make sure that only kernels handed to people, one per person, get added to the jars. 

What does it say about Democrats? Biden leads. Buttigieg is a strong second. Those two candidates who speak with the quietest voices, are the two most conspicuously religious, both white, both male, the two best know candidates against whom a "Socialist!!" charge is least plausible.

Possibly Buttigieg's performance is a distraction. Possibly the support here for Kamala Harris over Sanders is also misleading. Sanders has his supporters.

What may be important is that many people were content to cast their straw vote for the person I have described as "safe vanilla" Biden.

Bernie Sanders in Iowa

     "What you know and I know is that the only way we rebuild the crumbling middle class, the only way we provide dignity and security for tens of millions of workers is when we rebuild the trade union movement in this country."

              Bernie Sanders, August 21

Bernie Sanders said a class war is underway in America, and the working class must win it.

Bernie Sanders announced a plan: the Workplace Democracy Plan, at a convention of the Iowa AFL-CIO.

He said his goal was to re-establish a large trade union segment in America, with a specific goal of doubling the number of trade union members in America in the first four years of his presidency. He said that working people in America want to join a union but are stopped from doing it because of employer opposition.

CLICK: Workplace Democracy

The Workplace Democracy Plan would make it easier to form unions. It could be done by petition alone, and when 50% of the workers, plus one, in a workplace signed a petition to form a union, a union would be formed at that moment. Under current law there is another step and it takes time to implement it, time that the employer can use to discourage a yes vote.

His plan would allow workers to strike against the federal government and it would ban hiring of replacement workers. 

He would raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. 

He condemned the high levels of pay received by corporate executives, and he condemned their practice of moving manufacturing to China, Mexico, or other low wage countries.

Sanders addressed workplace issues of the gig economy, where workers who are essentially employees under the control of an organization are defined as contractors, and incidences of low level employees being defined as supervisors to avoid paying them overtime. He condemned those practices.

These comments were well received by the 300 or so union leaders in the hall in Iowa. The applause was more scattered for his call for Medicare for All. Unions have negotiated for private health insurance plans which would disappear in a universal Medicare for All.

Takeaway: Class struggle

It is war, not kumbaya. Not unity. Not cooperation. The rich have gotten richer and working people have gotten screwed. Half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

Sanders posits an economic system of sharp conflict: employee vs. employer, working people vs. corporate elites. He draws those lines and he declares he is firmly on the side of the workers. 

CLICK: Class war is underway.

The employers are not good guys doing the best they can in a difficult world. He uses words like "ruthlessly exploit." He said :

   "For 45 years there has been a war in this country waged by the corporate elite against the working class of America. . . and what we have seen is the decimation of working families all across this country while the richest people and larger corporations have done phenomenally well. If there is going to be class war in this country, it's time the working class won that war."

This populist sentiment exists on both left and right, and Trump addressed it with "drain the swamp," a task he voiced in the campaign. Hillary's establishment message fell right into Trump's hands in 2016.  She was the swamp.

As president Trump diverted the attention of the right-populist base away from corporate elites and toward immigrants, reparations, American socialists, and foreign trade. 

Draining the corporate elite swamp is now the message identified with Democrats, voiced most clearly by Sanders. 

Sanders--for better or worse--is a disrupter. Sanders says the enemy is within, Americans at the top--greedy employers--and this message disrupts the political alignment that was underway, a Democratic Party coalition of the women, people of color, and the professional people in suburbs of moderate tastes who want liberal reform and who are anti-racists. These are the people in the 40-plus red and purple suburban districts who elected new Democratic Members of Congress switching the House majority in 2018. 

Many of those professional people want a unity message, not a class warfare one. Often, they are the boss, or are married to the boss, or are in management or on a career path that will lead to management. They don't think they are exploiters. They don't want civil war with their employees. They want a safe, reasonable liberal who will improve the status quo, not demolish it.

Sanders presents himself as a war president. He is on the side of working people.

Possibly one of the Democrats will emerge who can bridge that space between progressive and liberal, but Sanders is not choosing to be that person.

That may be the widest lane for a Democrat to win the nomination, but it leaves open another lane: unifier.

Biden: The NY Times got it wrong

The NY Times described an enthusiasm gap for Biden in Iowa. 

I was there, too, at the same events. 

There was lots of enthusiasm.

Friday’s NY Times had a story by Katie Glueck with a headline that summarizes the conclusion of the story:  "Joe Biden’s Poll Numbers Mask an Enthusiasm Challenge.” The story describes two Town Halls, spaced three hours apart in rural Iowa outside of Des Moines, that took place on Tuesday.

The Times has three photos accompanying the story, each showing a seated audience as part of the photo. In one of the photos there is a boy of about ten, in the foreground, lying on the ground facing away from Biden, playing with a small i-pad, unconcerned with the speech taking place behind him. Those give a stark impression of ho-hum. Here is the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/us/politics/joe-biden-trump-2020.html?module=inline

I saw it differently.

NY Times photo

They could as easily have displayed photos of the times people stood up to applaud, which also happened, with sustained applause at the end, and a crush of people wanting to shake hands. It was 90 degrees in the shade, humid, the second gathering mostly in the sun, on a weekday at five p.m. It was sticky hot.

There were, in fact, a couple of cute, excited elementary school children there who got handshakes, which could as easily have been the photos illustrating genial Grandpa Joe pressing the flesh, but it was a 50 minute speech and the boy did the only sensible thing for a ten year old: find shade and play a video game. The photo choice, though, gives an impression.

The story quotes a few people saying they like Biden, that he is “OK.” What I observed was 300 people at each of two events, in venues out in the countryside, and about as excited as I have observed at any political event for a veteran politician.

My own big takeaway is that Biden is a competent, credible veteran politician. He had teleprompter screens up, which seems to me both odd and unnecessary. Odd because he is saying things he has said dozens of time, and in fact he walked away from the screens to stand directly in front of the audience with a hand-held microphone. He didn’t seem to use the teleprompter. 

Selfies crush

I actually agree that Biden is not new and exciting the way that Buttigieg or Warren are, or in the way Sanders was in 2016 or Obama was in 2008 or JFK was in 1960. 

In a Baskin-Robbins metaphor, the new candidates are Butter Pecan Swirl and Raspberry Blackberry Rainbow, newish, niche flavors and one wonders what they are like. Biden is Classic Vanilla, familiar and broadly popular. Biden is not “the next new thing.” But he is not an embarrassment, either, and that alone sets him up for a pretty good alternative choice to Trump. Trump turned out to be Crazy Firecracker Drama, a pepper flavored surprise. Classic Vanilla is a plausible contrast. 

Fifty two years ago I started a habit of reading the NY Times. I have considered the Times authoritative, the best example of real news.

But I was there, alongside the Times reporter. I saw what I saw, and what I saw was different.

The 10 year old I observed

My headline would be:  “Three hundred Iowans endure sweltering heat to hear Biden make case that America is better than Trump.” The story would be that he shared a long career as a liberal, evolving with his politics along with the changing center of liberal politics, sounding vigorous but not hyper, an old-style ethnic and family oriented Catholic, well positioned to regain the votes of the traditional “family values” conservatives who feel disrespected by the tone of woke, secular Democrats, and who reacted in 2016 by voting for Trump. 

So this blog will use a different set of photographs, what I observed, which includes a 30 minute crush of people eager to get handshakes and selfies with Biden after each event. 

I don’t think Biden will turn out to be the Democrats' strongest candidate, but Biden has more appeal than young people—or the NY Times—is choosing to describe.

CLICK: 3 minute video