Joe Biden’s well-delivered speech, studded with moving evocations of personal tragedies he’s endured and overcome, wound up the Democrats’ 42nd, and first virtual, national convention. Broadcast and cable ratings suggest viewership was down compared to 2016, part of a long-term trend, although no one is sure how many were watching (or will watch) on streaming video or over the internet. Media gushing about Biden’s speech, or those of the Obamas, seems to me to be over the top, but overall, this was an effective performance.
But with, perhaps, some caveats.
(1) Biden and his speechwriters were unnecessarily cavalier with the truth. His misquotation of what Donald Trump said about the Charlottesville incident in August 2017 will not strike many partisan Democratic Trump haters as dissonant, but it may trouble others. Similarly, his bald statements that the United States had the “worst performance” responding to COVID-19 is simply not defensible, since other advanced countries have had significantly higher deaths per capita.
It’s puzzling to me that, when Trump and his administration are genuinely vulnerable to criticism on other serious grounds, Democrats rely on indefensible claims. I suppose that they’re confident that sympathetic media will let them get away with it, and that usually happens — in the short term. But my experience has been that, in the long term, nothing is free in politics; there is just a question of when you pay the price.
(2) Biden says Trump is guilty of infecting 5 million people in the U.S. and killing 170,000, and he promises that “I will get control of the virus.” Is the undecided voter quite so sure that Trump was so totally incompetent and that Biden would be so totally competent? Biden, here, seems to believe that government, in his or his party’s hands anyway, is capable of halting a novel and asymptomatic virus. My sense is that median voters don’t share that confidence.
(3) The speech was weak, almost nonexistent, on policy. There were ritual bows to infrastructure, healthcare, and education, but no believable specifics. And over the entire convention, we heard little or nothing about foreign policy. Biden accused Trump of cozying up to dictators — true, perhaps, of his policy toward Kim Jong Un, but not at all his current posture toward the Iranian mullahs, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. You wouldn’t know from this speech that Biden served for 32 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and eight years on the National Security Council.
All that said, this was a reasonably successful speech for Biden and was not a clearly unsuccessful convention for the Democrats. They may not get a bounce in the polls, but only because convention viewing these days is mostly confined to committed partisans; not only Republicans, but most undecided and moveable voters were most likely not paying much attention.
Democrats went into this convention leading, and they seem to have come out of it ahead. But they’re still relying on a variant of the Biden basement strategy, trusting that most voters’ dislike of Trump will propel Biden to victory. That leaves Trump some room to smooth over his rough edges, as he’s occasionally done, and to attack Biden on the issues he and other Democrats prudently avoided over their four days. We’ll see if he can do this effectively next week.
