The past week in national political events has been satisfying to me because it put my candidate, Joe Biden, back in the race, and I saw the week before last that something like this was necessary-- either a Biden resurgence or a Bloomberg surge-- so that Sanders would not run off with the nomination because I thought, as apparently did so many other people, that Sanders was the candidate most likely to be defeated by Trump. Most voters, I think, are not like me, who will support anyone but Trump, but will instead settle for the known evil rather than what they suspect to be the worse evil of a Democratic Socialist. Now we will see what happens with Biden. The week has also been satisfying because it provided a splendid example of political drama, something that happens more often than we might expect because the forces that make it a drama are arranged fortuitously rather than by the hand of a playwright. This political drama brought together engaging and distinctive personalities, noble rhetoric, a clash over issues and constituencies as well as personalities, all occurring, mostly in public view, in the course of a brief period of time that allowed for plot complications as well as for the reversal of expectations. Playwrights should do as well, and certainly Shakespeare did in “Julius Caesar'' and Oscar Wilde did in “An Ideal Husband”.
I do not know what political operatives say behind the scenes to one another; one would have to be one to know whether they offered just a hint to Amy Klobacher that she might be offered the Vice Presidential nomination or to Pete Buttigieg that there was a cabinet post in the offing, or whether, in these days, it is not considered appropriate to even hint at such things, lest it get out that a kind of bribe had been offered, when what had been going on was what I would consider just the normal horsetrading that goes on in politics. What I do know, and it was there for everyone to see on live television, was Pete and Amy full heartedly endorsing Joe and he flattering both of them by saying that each of them would be around for years to come, that Amy won all the debates, and that Pete reminded him of his dear, departed son. That might have been a bit too much, and people have said so to me, but I prefer to think that Biden was indeed thinking about his dear, departed son and was again wearing his heart on his sleeve, which is indeed part of his appeal.
The key drama of last night was whether the surge toward Biden set off by the results in South Carolina would have enough time to develop. After all, Beto O’Rourke had fought a valiant fight against the very unpopular Ted Cruz in Texas and had still fallen short. The drama lay in whether people would quickly catch up with the new endorsements and allow their sentiments to change in very short order, or whether people are slow to catch up with new political news. Well, they did, and so there was a Frank Capra moment in which the underdog triumphs., Biden even carrying Texas, which was very unexpected. Biden is to be credited with the political skills that allowed him to get those endorsements but should be grateful as well for the way the voters responded to changed circumstances. Steve Kornacki on MSNBC used his polling data well when he demonstrated that it was those who voted on primary day, the late voters, rather than those who had voted beforehand, who voted so much in favor of Biden. Those last minute endorsements can therefore be said to have made a difference even if people had been primed to like Biden before that, when they were undecided or supported a different candidate.
The candidates who had come to his side just before Super Tuesday did not dwell on issues. I think that is wise because aside from defending Obamacare I don’t think there is much mileage in policy issues this time around. This race is a referendum on President Trump, what is the nature of his character, and Biden has been pressing that point since the beginning of his campaign: we have to restore dignity to the white House. That is the way things have very seriously gone off track in that the economy is doing fine and foreign relations are stable. Beto O'Rourke, who was also on hand to endorse Biden, said of Joe Biden that he is “kind” and “decent”. You would not think that was the key issue in an election, but it is because no one would ever describe the current President as kind and decent. This is very fundamental raw politics in that politics often seems to be about issues or constituencies or competence but here we have it to be about the moral character of the candidates.
How much more fundamental can it get than that? Class and values and interests pale before that. I remember talking to a white supporter of Rev. Farrakhan way back when and asking him if he didn’t think Farrakan just seemed mean and dismissive of those who disagreed with him. The supporter said, no, not at all, and I realized that it was that gut reaction that set us apart, not some difference in ideology or the need for Black empowerment. There is nothing else to be said when a person assesses a character and finds it acceptable or not, whatever its shortcomings. Sure Trump is a loudmouth not well versed in the issues, but he is my kind of bastard and so I will stick with him, even if some people are more queasy and so insist on what they claim is more moral purity in a candidate, which never happens anyway, all of them somehow corrupt. Well, for myself, I don’t think Obama was in any way corrupt, though the fact is I supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964 though I know he probably was corrupt, having somehow managed to get elected to the Senate in 1948 on the basis of a box full of ballots that turned up in a remote county sometime after the other ballots in Texas had been counted. And how did Lady Bird somehow manage to wind up with the license for the television station in Austin? Johnson was an operator but he also was very much and honestly in favor of civil rights and that is what I cared about in 1964.
This primary season should also put an end, though it won’t, to the argument that we need radical campaign finance reform to keep money from determining the results in elections. That was the argument behind McCain-Feingold in 2002 and Bernie saying just a few days ago that corporate America was ganging up against him. Well, Biden did it without much money and Bloomberg’s money, heaps of his money, didn’t make anywhere the impression he thought it would when he entered the campaign because he thought that Biden was floundering. Message and personality carry the day.
It is remarkable, in fact, how often presidential politics are full of drama, of conflicting forces that come to a head over a short time in personal confrontations. That happened in 2008 when John McCain booted the election by giving himself a laughing stock for a running mate and so squandered his reputation as a serious person, and also seemed unequipped to deal with the financial crisis, while his Democratic challanger seemed cool as hell and won on his likeability, the voters treating a vote for a black man as an easy way to show what upstanding citizens they were, something voters did not think they needed to do when it came for women to vote for a female candidate in 2016 to prove their loyalty to their sex. So many things are going on at once in a political campaign and you never know what will prove the dramatic crux, the tipping point, the determinative quality.
I am also thinking of the decision to put Harry Truman on the Democratic ticket as the Vice Presidential nominee in 1944. There also there was a concatenation of conflicting and profound forces. The Left wanted Henry Wallace to continue as Vice-President but Roosevelt heeded the advice of party leaders that they were not satisfied with Wallace, that he was too Leftish. Then Roosevelt considered a person he quite liked, Jimmy Burns of Georgia, a man much respected in Washington at the time, as he would be in the Truman years, when Truman was able to get him to be Secretary of State. But Byrnes was an arch-segregationist. What would have happened if Byrnes had been President and had to consider whether to integrate the Armed Forces? The times were just no longer his. So Roosevelt settled on Harry Truman, the machine politician from Missouri who had made something of a national reputation for himself by having admirably conducted a committee to oversee that there was not too much waste or corruption in war spending. A safe political choice, though not someone to consider as a statesman.
All this drama proceeded in a short span of time behind the scenes while public attention was on the fact that the President was conducting a world wide war. But the gist of such a drama appears again, just a few years later, in Gore Vidal’s insufficiently appreciated play, “The Best Man”, where the leading contenders knock themselves out of the box, and an unknown takes his place, the playwright suggesting that the office would make him-- something even the cynical Vidal may have believed at the time but which we can no longer believe, because the office has not reshaped its present incumbent.