The Dude Abides
As with most people who haven’t concluded that Trump is Jesus 2.0 or that Ron DeSantis is the man of the hour because he kicks buckets of Florida sand in the faces of defenseless people, I’m deeply worried about the 2024 presidential election. (To be clear, I’m deeply worried about the other elections and just about everything else, too.)
There have been moments recently where I’ve looked at Joe Biden and his quiet, sometimes stumbling speaking style and thought that we’re risking a re-run of the 1980 Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan presidential race. Carter was and (still) is a man of great substance. But his failure as a communicator brought down his presidency when confronted with the script-reading talents of a Hollywood actor. It’s taken decades to disabuse middle-class people of the idea that Reagan was a great president. His policies have hollowed out the middle class who are still awaiting their “trickle” while more and more wealth accumulates at the top.
Charismatic leaders are nothing new, and they are not inherently bad (Obama, FDR, JFK) — but they are potentially dangerous.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, re-elected this week to a third term as Turkey’s president, started out as a reformer — but has become a Trump-DeSantis-Orban-style populist — ranting about the LGBTQ “threat” and promising to make Turkey Great Again (after overseeing the near-collapse of the Turkish economy). His opponent — selected by a coalition of opposition parties, came within 4% of Erdoğan in the runoff election. While logic would dictate that Erdoğan was vulnerable given his policy failures, his dynamic campaign style, his reliance on religious and tribal intolerance, and his hectoring of “the other” appealed to enough social and religious conservatives to carry the day. His opponent was comparatively mild-mannered and — perish the thought — competent, having had a long career as a civil servant. A number of commentators have speculated whether a more charismatic opponent could have taken Erdoğan down.
Trump is the poster boy for charismatic danger. His willingness to engage in buffoonery is disarming. (Hitler was considered a buffoon, too — for a while.) Trump’s dominance of the media, though, is his super-power. It’s not just the right-wing media. Everyone, from MSNBC to the NY Times twitches at his every utterance. And CNN’s agreement to give the Kraken two hours of unrestrained propaganda access during the recent town hall is only explainable through profit motive: “We knew it was bad for democracy, but the ratings!”
And while DeSantis is whiningly devoid of charisma — his “wokey-wokey” malarkey seems to play well with terrified social conservatives. Lots of Republican deep-pockets have decided to fund the “Where Woke Goes to Die” tour.
(DeSantis’ unending reliance on “woke” reminds me of one of the great moments of presidential debating in, 2007, when then-Senator Biden tagged Rudy Giuliani for his overall incompetence: “I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else!”)
But that was then.
Yesterday, on the heels of negotiating a possible resolution of the debt-ceiling “crisis” reporters had to ask President Biden why he wasn’t beating his chest talking up the deal. After all, Kevin McCarthy was all over the media tooting his own horn, claiming that he had beaten Biden and that Biden had wasted everyone’s time refusing to negotiate. Biden said: “One of the things that I heard some of you saying is why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is? Why would Biden be saying it’s a good deal before the vote? You think that’s going to help get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
Jay Kuo, in an excellent piece about the “spin-cycle” that follows agreements like this, argues that the louder the braying by one side, the more certain you can be that their side got the short end. (In some ways, this is a perfect paradigm for the Trump years: The more you lose the more you scream.)
It’s frustrating to see Biden maintaining this kind of Zen-like message discipline. But, as Kuo writes, we are condemned to live in a world where current president actually knows how to get things done:
“One last thing: We often hear that Democrats are “terrible at messaging.” However, they just held off the GOP and fought them to a stalemate where nearly all their important domestic priorities were spared the axe. Yet aren’t they trumpeting that from the top of the Capitol. Terrible messaging right?
“To do so would be to undermine what they actually need to get done. This is the hard part about being the party of practical solutions that actually help ordinary people, rather than fill them with emotion and anger. It’s our responsibility as reasonable voters to better understand what’s really going on and take the wins quietly and confidently. We need to see that more subdued messaging from the Democrats, the kind that actually gets the ball across the goal line, in the end is far better than the bluster and braggadocio that fails to move it at all.”
Biden knows exactly what he is doing. As much as we can speculate about the vulnerabilities of his advancing age, the man has seen it all and he’s been through more “spin-cycles” than a Laundromat. The net effect of the budget negotiations is that most of his progressive agenda remains intact, and that he’s given up almost nothing of consequence to the GOP. Eighty years of experience can be invaluable — as long as you believe in democratic governance. We somehow need to re-learn that competence triumphs over charisma.
The Republicans will attack him as corrupt, addled and incompetent. The louder they bray, the more assured you can be that they have nothing on him.
Meanwhile, the Dude abides.