last updated: 29 August 2020 (approximate reading time: 11 minutes; 2169 words)
Now that both political parties have held their online coronation parties, it’s official: Joe Biden will be running for President of the United States of America, with Kamala Harris as his Vice President, against incumbent president Donald Trump (and VP Mike Pence).
Presidential elections are nothing extraordinary; they happen regularly every four years. But this one is different in every way: the stark difference between the two men, the near dystopian state of the nation, Trump’s repeated attempts to delegitimize the election, and his henchmen actively sabotaging the election via voter suppression and dismantling the US Postal Service.
Let’s take a look at who we’re dealing with, why were here, and what we can do about it.
Joe Biden seems like an unlikely shining knight. He’s not young. He’s not ideological. He is rarely a soaring speaker.
But what Joe does have is compassion. Lots of it. His convention speech was notable for how heartfelt it was. He is known as someone who was not born wealthy, who has suffered immense personal loss, and has still kept his optimism and sense of purpose. Where Trump makes his followers laugh by mocking a disabled reporter, Biden, a stutterer himself, takes time to help a stutterer overcome his disability. He is a steady hand, a man who wants to help, someone who doesn’t always have the perfect word, but does have the heart to dig in and work to make things better.
While the Democratic National Convention painted a picture of a desperate America, laid low by Trump, it emphasized that we can still be raised by the likes of Biden, Harris, and others willing to acknowledge our crises and commit to solving them.
Three ex-presidents endorsed Biden. Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Rosalyn Carter endorsed Biden. Numerous Republican leaders appeared at the DNC to announce that Trump had betrayed American values and endorsed Biden as qualified to lead and to unite a divided nation. Progressives like Warren and Sanders also threw their support behind Biden, making the point that if Biden loses, America loses any hope for the kind of science-based polices and systemic change this country needs.
The speakers were a cross section of America, not just politically, but ethnically as well. Children who’d lost parents to Covid-19, soldiers, artists, LGBTQ+ community leaders, all people with a stake in a strong, diverse, unified America came to speak.
The Democratic platform touched on health policies, jobs policies, community outreach policies, policing policies, all designed to inspire people, to give them hope, to show what a positive, hopeful future, filled with safety, jobs, health, and community support for all of us could look like.
Speaking of Biden’s oratory, his DNC speech was excellent–heartfelt, passionate, strong, and positive. Indeed, in the eyes of many political pundits, this was the best speech of Biden’s career. You can find the video on YouTube, or Stuart Emmrich’s article from The Verge does a very good job of summarizing it. Biden was passionate and pointed, but he was clear in laying out a narrative of optimism and hope in turning the tide of disease and destruction that Trump has wrought.
The Republican National Convention was the opposite. First of all, there is no Republican platform. Instead of a written platform the RNC just released a series of bullet points stating that the Republican Party would support all of Trump’s initiatives. Trump himself has no policy for a second term, other than “keep on keeping on.”
Trump is the first presidential nominee to not have the key members of his own party show up at the convention. Trump is the first nominee to not have the endorsement of one single living former president. This is no accident.
The convention itself was not about hope for a beautiful future under Trump. Instead, speaker after speaker threatened their faithful that the apocalyptic fearscape of violence and chaos in which they currently feel they are trapped in can only be fixed by their exalted “Dear Leader.” All the more maddening a lie considering the violence and chaos is Trump’s own responsibility, and he is dispositionally unable to handle it. The same way that to Trump, this global pandemic is not a tragedy, but just an inconvenience to push aside before his ratings drop, he treats white supremacist violence as a means to an end–that end being keeping himself in power.
So with no values, no platform, and no hope with which to inspire his cult, he did what all autocratic tyrants do, and resorted to fear. Trump and his henchmen insisted that Biden is a socialist/fascist/anti-fascist/anarchist/radical, that everything that is currently happening in Trump’s America is Biden’s fault somehow, and that if the Democrats win, they are going to give everyone forced abortions. I wish I were exaggerating; RNC delegate Ross Little Jr. shouted that “Joe Biden is hiding in the shadows to kill our unborn babies!”
(Joe Biden, by the way, is a religious Catholic, not an abortion supporter on a personal level, and while his entire career he’s committed to women’s rights and health including abortion access when necessary, some far left abortion activists still don’t trust him).
Speaker after speaker at the RNC filled their time with baseless lies in order to paint a picture of an enemy that doesn’t exist, and to try to deflect the blame for what is happening today from Trump. Trump’s acceptance speech itself was chock full of dozens of verifiable lies.
What’s terrifying is that Trump’s fear mongering and lies just might work. Massive untruths are being amplified by extremist right-wing propaganda machines like Fox News, Conservative talk radio, QAnon and other radical conspiracy theory groups, and more. Republicans skew white and older, people who often have economic anxieties, prejudices that they were raised on, and often bristle at progress. So they are extremely receptive to having their natural fears exploited by Trump and his propagandists for their own ends. For those who are anxious, fear holds much more sway than hope.
The thing is, fear doesn’t have to win. Yes, Trump is going to continue to insist that if he doesn’t win, it will be because of fraud. He will continue to try and suppress minority voters, to dismantle the US Postal Service to throw mail-in ballots into chaos, and is hoping to use law enforcement to intimidate voters at the polls.
But these are the moves of a desperate man who knows he has nothing to offer. He has no choice but to try and steal the election, because he knows in a fair fight, he stands no chance.
Biden was not my choice during the primaries. I supported more Progressive candidates. But as I’ve watched right wing propaganda goad people into conflating wearing masks with losing their freedom, the murder of unarmed black people inspiring people to protest, white supremacists using those protests as shooting galleries, and the RNC’s orgy of hate, I’m beginning to realize that Biden may just be the exact president for this moment. The GOP was going to slap whomever became the Democratic nominee as a radical socialist, so fielding a candidate who is so obviously not radical or socialist makes that lie harder to land.
Biden’s instincts may not be transformative the way that the more progressive left would like him to be, but he understands this moment and is prepared to meet it with policies that will fix what Trump has broken. And one thing this moment needs is someone to heal the wounds that divide us and bring us together. That is a job that Biden seems made to do. A firebrand may be more exciting to watch, but we have enough fire right now; we need a unifier, and Biden can be that president.
And Harris, too, seems tailor-made to be an excellent partner. Her narrative is one of bringing together moderates and progressives, with a career devoted to law enforcement as well as promoting minority rights. She’s got the temperament and the ideology, and she brings an ethnic and gender background that helps the ticket reflect the diversity of America in the best way.
So my original idea of perfect has evolved into an enthusiasm for a legitimately good ticket. Voting for Biden/Harris is not a “lesser of two evils” vote–it’s voting for leaders who are qualified to do the job, and temperamentally capable of doing it well.
Perfection is not on the ballot. It’s Biden/Harris vs Trump/Pence. In the end, we need to ask ourselves are we happy with Trump’s near dystopian America? With how he ignored the coronavirus until the whole world had to ban Americans from travel and we loose nearly 1,000 people a day, compared to other countries losing a dozen or less people per day? Are we happy with massive unemployment? Are we happy with children ripped away from their parents and shoved into concentration camps at our border? With unarmed black people being murdered? With the Trump Administration’s corruption and lies? With tear gassing peaceful protesters so “Dear Leader” can get a photo op?
To me the answer is so obvious it sometimes drives me to despair that so many others have been conditioned to ignore the truth, the data, the science, and what their own senses tell them and instead to blindly accept the lies they are being fed by the cruel, narcissistic, racist bully in the White House and his propaganda spewing minions. A recent poll showed that 57% of Republicans think that 176,000 COVID-19 deaths are acceptable. That’s more than we’ve lost in some wars, that’s an insanely high number, orders of magnitude higher than other nations, both in total number and per capita. But here we are.
Honestly, I don’t think that the America we know will survive another four years of Trump’s anti-science, pandemic-out-of-control, racism-run-amok, only looking out for himself and his wealthy cronies. Our economic power will vanish, racial violence will erupt all over the nation, and Trump will preside over it all, not caring, not helping, and blaming everyone else while he rakes in billions for his personal companies.
We need to keep truth alive. We need to keep science alive. We need to keep hope alive. And we need to do it up and down the ballot.
We need to be vigilant, to call out Trump’s attempts to rig the election, to make sure citizens know their voting options, to make plans to vote, and then to follow through with the plan.
In a normal election, we don’t need a “voting plan.” We just show up to the polls on the day and vote. Or we drop our mail-in ballot in the mailbox on election day and vote. But this is not a normal election. Trump’s henchmen have removed mailboxes. They have removed mail sorting machines. They have reduced the number of polling stations. They are doing everything that they can to insure that Democrats do not have the opportunity to vote, and if they do vote, their votes will not be counted in time. So this time, we need to plan for that.
Do you intend to vote by mail? Find out where your ballot drop off points are. There should be some boxes just for ballots that you can drop your ballot in, and they will be taken directly to be counted. Or if there isn’t a box in your area, there will be an election office.
Do you want to vote in person? Scope out in advance where you can vote in a safe, socially distant location in person (the NBA is setting up polling stations in basketball arenas; this seems perfect for socially distant, urban area voting). And if you are going to vote, don’t go to the polling station by yourself, and if there are Trumpers that have been activated to harass you, don’t engage. Just stay out of their way, vote, and go home.
Be sure to return your ballot or vote in person on the very first day of early voting that you can. Remember, Trump is relying election day chaos to help him steal the election. The way to fight it is to be as organized as you can be, and to vote so early that even if there are delays in counting, your vote will be counted. If there’s no chaos, Trump’s claim that the election was fraudulent because of chaos will fail.
As long as the Electoral College is in place, presidential races hinge on a number of swing states; we need to make sure that people in those states have access to safe voting options, and that those votes are counted. We need to support candidates like Biden, Harris, and other Democrats offering visions of hope every way we can–with our time, our money, and our votes.
We can stop America’s downward spiral, we can choose hope, we just need to vote, and vote Blue.
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