Once upon a time, Joe Biden’s bid for the White House was a run-and-hide campaign; he was running for the presidency while hiding in his basement. It worked well enough. His handlers’ strategy kept attention away from the no-longer-smoking Joe and left President Trump alone in the limelight, where his abominable messaging could destroy him without anybody else interfering.
Now, in the final weeks before the election, the Biden campaign has evolved from run and hide the candidate to run and hide his policies. Biden himself and running mate Sen. Kamala Harris are out and about more in the public eye. But boy are they keen to keep you from seeing their policies!
We already laid this out in a Washington Examiner editorial, but the details are worth repeating. Biden and Harris have, for example, been adamant that they’d ban fracking; Biden said he’d make sure it was “eliminated.” But now that Pennsylvania is on his path to the Oval Office, he avoids alienating the state’s energy sector by pretending there’s no such policy in mind.
And take the Green New Deal. It’s referred to on Biden’s website as “a crucial framework” for policies he’d adopt as president. Yet he and Harris pooh-pooh accusations that this ruinous and unworkable compendium of climate alarmist policies authored by socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is driving their energy and environmental agenda.
On taxes, they pretend that no one who earns less than $400,000 a year will see their taxes rise, and they scoff at the suggestion that they’d use taxpayer money to fund abortion, even though their healthcare plan explicitly says they support “repealing the Hyde Amendment.”
Both Biden and Harris refused to say in their first debates whether they’d pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices if Trump secures a 6-3 textualist majority by confirming Amy Coney Barrett. They want to eat their cake and have it too, by not alienating leftists who want it packed and not alienating independents who don’t. A Washington Examiner/YouGov poll found that the public overwhelmingly opposes court-packing.
Biden won the Democratic nomination by running as a centrist, then tacked to the extreme left to scoop up Sanders’s socialist supporters. Now, he’s running in any lane that gets him to Nov. 3 without voters noticing that he’s faking who he is. One yearns for a candidate like Ronald Reagan, who decided he’d run as himself; it certainly made him comfortable in his own skin, and voters rewarded him with successive landslides.
Trump runs as who he is, but he’s no exemplar of candor. In the final straight of the presidential campaign, he’s caught in the classic presidential lack of transparency about his health. In our cover story, “COVID White House,” Jay Cost’s historical perspective makes it clear that the nation’s chief executives have an unbroken record of concealing their ailments from the public.
