The Last 100 Days
Presidential tenures are often defined by their first one hundred days. This tradition began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and is the direct result of a comment he made in a speech to the nation right after his first 100 days. It therefore seems somehow fitting that the last 100 days of the Biden presidency (defined as the last 100 days before the election) would perhaps most define Joe Biden’s presidency. After all, FDR has clearly been Biden’s role model. He was the president when Biden was born and it was that legacy under which Biden grew up and started his 54 years of public service to the nation. He purposefully placed his portrait over the mantle of the fireplace in the Oval Office, a place of intentional respect for the man and all he did for the American people. Most modern presidents have reserved that spot for George Washington, but FDR occupied that space when Lyndon Johnson was president. The rest of the artwork in the Oval Office is equally important to the message every president intends to convey about his beliefs and influences. Trump famously put the portrait of Andrew Jackson in a prominent position. How fitting that was since the most controversial things about Jackson were his strong racial animus (particularly to Native Americans) and his reputation as a demagogue who thought himself above the law. Trump’s last “official” act (making a mockery of the recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity) was to attempt to intervene in the peaceful transfer of power to BIden and effectively orchestrate a coup in order to remain in power. By contrast, the defining moment of Joe Biden’s selfless career has been to voluntarily cede power to others in his party based on popular demand and a belief that the party and nation needed him to stand down.
There will be much written about Biden’s act of declining the nomination of his party for a second term of office. By all accounts, it will be described as something that began on June 27th when he went before the American public and showed his weakest and most aged side by allowing Trump and his steamrolling pack of lies to run over him and leave him by the side of the political road. Since then, it has been inevitable that something had to change and since aging is impossible to reverse or in this case, ignore, that change was unlikely to lead to anywhere other than what it did. It is said that decisions to run are established at a moment of great expectation and that resolve is one of the commitments one makes early on since few campaigns don’t encounter moments of crisis during the long electoral review process. It is said that the decision to suspend a campaign is very much an unnatural act that does not happen easily. This was no exception. How fitting that the biggest obstacle to Biden’s early presidency was the overhang of COVID-19, and then it was Biden contracting COVID-19 last week that gave him the pause he needed to contemplate his best move in this latest and greatest crisis of the image he had inadvertently projected to the voting public during that ill-fated debate. If one wonders if it was wise for the Biden campaign to call for such an early debate, perhaps the way this has all played out needs to be considered as one of the possible scenarios that some bright strategist contemplated back in the late spring.
The timing of this change strikes me as particularly helpful to the cause of defeating Trump. Trump is so transactional that I am almost certain that had this happened before the RNC, we would have witnessed a very different show and might well have seen a different choice for the vice presidential slot. Where Kamala was forced to tread lightly for the better part of a month when various Democratic operatives were calling on Biden to step down, she is now freed up to praise him and start talking about how she plans to win the nomination and the election to defeat Donald Trump. Meanwhile, all her colleagues in the upper ranks of the Democratic Party are now forced to tread lightly so as not to be seen as anything short of unified in their support for Kamala and yet at the same time keeping all of their own options as open as possible, whether on the ticket or in some ministerial position in the administration that might serve to advance thier name and reputation. Besides getting strong endorsements from Cooper of North Carolina, Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Newsom of California, Whitmer of Michigan and Beshear of Kentucky, some of those are stating in no uncertain terms that they are not angling for a Vice Presidential slot. For some that would be the pinnacle of their political career and for others it would be the dead end of their career. Such is the nature of that job. Also, everyone wants this selection process to both be as open and all-inclusive as possible and yet showing as much strength and unity as possible. Such are the tightropes of politics in any given year.
But this year is still teed up to be so very different ant these last 100 of so days of the campaign are undoubtedly going to be very action-packed. Of the four people on the two tickets, only Trump will be same old, same old. All three of the others will be seen as new faces needing evaluation and having the opportunity for freshness and revitalization and hidden problems, gaffes or tainted legacies. There is simply a great deal of unknown in the equation and Trump himself, as the old face in the crowd, is about as unpredictable as a politician can be, so expect the unexpected.
There is a strange policy dynamic in play as well. As per usual, the two parties have very different platforms despite each one claiming to be populist in orientation. Strangely enough the problems each have with their platforms are diametrically opposite. Democrats have the problem that they totally believe in and are pretty unified in their platform both economically and socially and have a great four-year track record of accomplishments for both and yet they can’t seem to get the American voters to either understand or believe that its as good for them as it has been, is and will be. That is an unusual reality gap. The Republicans, on the other hand, have the problem that the policy platform that they have put forward (whether you call it Project 2025 or Agenda 47) is anything but acceptable uniformly among themselves or by their voters. That gap has caused the politicians to try hard to distance themselves from their own policy platform and to use double-talk to disavow and distance themselves from it. In their case, their voters are very clear that they do not want what the Republican hard-line policy wonks have drafted. What a strange situation indeed.
What that portends for the last 100 days of this race is Democrats working hard to prove that what they have done is good and that the people should want all of it and more of it. And the Republicans will be dancing around issues doing everything they can to avoid a policy conversation that pins them to their own platform. Democrats will force issues conversations wherever possible and Republicans will force cultural or fear-mongering talk wherever they can. All sorts of media, both mainstream and social, will be ablaze with commentary as much as we have ever seen it. Anyone who thinks they have had enough of politics had better go take a vacation abroad because it will be all around us in every flavor we can imagine. This election has been deemed existential from both sides. The Democrats think of it as their last chance to divert the country from a ruinous autocracy. The Republicans recognize that if Trump loses again, it may well be the end of the MAGA franchise and that all their work for forty years may just dry up and blow away. The last thing that Republicans want is for their voters to see and realize that what Democrats are offering them is far better than anything their own policies have ever offered. This might just be a case where one direction is the end of American Democracy and the other direction is the end of the Republican Party. And it all comes down to these last 100 days.