In public, Democrats eyeing a presidential run are playing down their prospects and hinting that an announcement may or may not come after the holiday season. But behind the scenes, potential candidates are running around with their hair on fire planning the logistics of a national campaign and working the line to grab top-notch talent.
This only means one thing: in less than two months, Americans will be saturated with aspiring Democrats making their pitches about why America needs a new person in the White House and why the country needs to go in a new direction.
In fact, Americans have already seen a preview of the messaging.
The Democratic Party is highly unified on taking down President Trump – they just can’t agree on how to do it. Should a presidential candidate give Trump a taste of his own medicine, rhetorically punching him in the jaw and kicking him in the kneecaps with New York-style bravado? Or does the party embrace Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” mantra, reminding voters about the country’s better angels? Can a candidate find a narrow way to meet in the middle of those two approaches?
At this early stage in the 2020 Democratic primary (yes, it’s happening even before presumptive candidates have declared their candidacies), the unifier message is prominent. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is glad-handing New Hampshire political bigwigs and delivering remarks about how the country is in dire need for an uplifting from the gutter. “This country has enough hate, enough bigotry, enough anti-Semitism,” Booker told a room-full of party officials in Manchester last week. “What we need now is courageous actors who call to the conscience of our country a higher moral imagination, who call for a revival of civic grace.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden, pondering his own run, spent part of his address at the National Constitution Center last month decrying the ugliness of American politics. In Biden’s view, the tone is just too nasty, too coarse, too undistinguished: “Think how demeaning our politics has become in terms of how we talk about one another.”
Rep. John Delaney, D-Md., who most people outside of his congressional district have never heard of, is playing the part of Mr. Bipartisanship. The nation, he surmised, can only get consequential things done if Republicans and Democrats stop yelling at each other and start working with one another.
Democrats, in short, are for the most part trying to sell themselves as responsible and respectable professionals who have no interest in using Trump-like tactics. Michael Avenatti, the one man who was gritting his teeth in anticipation of a cage match with Trump, took himself out of the running.
The public, however, aren’t fools. They’ve been around the block and have witnessed this kind of posturing before. There are countless races where presidential contenders commit themselves to a clean and honorable campaign, only to degenerate into hungry predators.
As much as we cry about the nature of today’s political environment, politics has never been that clean to begin with. Politicians who want to be president can’t survive without digging up dirt on your opponent, running negative ads on television, or leveling harsh broadsides during televised debates. The candidate who plays Mr. Nice Guy is either forgotten at the end of the night by post-debate commentators or is surpassed by the more aggressive people on the stage.
Trump single-handedly changed the way the game is played. If politics was always a mean business, it’s now a dog-eat-dog profession. The squeaky-clean candidate is now thought of as weak, unable or unwilling to do what he or she needs to do to stay in the conversation. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich discovered this early in the 2016 GOP primary; Sen. Marco Rubio’s attempt to turn into Trump flopped because he tried to act like the young statesman in the primary’s opening months.
As the 2020 Democratic presidential primary goes on, those running will invariably turn into attack dogs. It’s the nature of the beast. Like it or not, this is what politics has become. In fact, it’s what politics has always been.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
