A spectre is haunting the Democrats – the spectre of Joe Biden. Following his explosive comments yesterday – apparently referring to Republican supporters as “garbage” – a cynic might wonder whether the President had returned from the political dead in order to hammer the final nail into the coffin of Kamala Harris’s ailing election campaign. If he has deliberately stirred up a ruckus in order to sabotage the campaign of a party that manoeuvred him out of his own presidential bid, then it is a mischievous stroke of genius.
Still, it seems just as likely that this was just another naive blunder.
Either way, the damage is done. Harris has been struggling throughout the campaign to articulate how her presidency might mark a departure from the failures of the past four years. Her uphill task in this election – which has ultimately overwhelmed her – was to propose “pragmatic” and “common sense” solutions to ordinary problems, proving that the Democrats had more to offer than utopian progressive ideology, as epitomised by Bidenomics.
And yet, for want of a compelling vision of the future under the Democrats, the country has now been sucked back in time to the defining moment of the Hillary Clinton campaign, when she referred to Trump supporters as “deplorables”.
Joe Biden’s comments have reminded America of the dogmatism that bubbles under the surface of the Democratic party’s supposed reasonableness – a dogmatism that harshly divides the world between progressive puritans and reactionary garbage, demure centrists and deplorable populists, woke liberals and braindead conservatives.
This is an unwelcome turn of events for the Democrats, particularly given that it came on the same day on which Harris was trying to win over soft Republicans with warnings about Trump’s supposed threat to democracy. Indeed, there are likely to still be millions of traditional Republican voters – and millions more undecided swing voters – who are unenthused about a Trump presidency yet struggling to find a reason to vote for Harris.
Biden’s comments will niggle at voter unease that the Democrats are ideologues first and statesmen second; it will aggravate their suspicions that what the party lacks in ideas it makes up with its pompous self-regard.
Needless to say, the fact that Biden is in the headlines at all just days before America votes is bad news for the Democrat campaign. It brings back memories of the administration’s chequered record over the last four years – an administration that failed to secure the border, squandered countless billions on dirigiste economic policies, and sowed instability on the global stage. And an administration in which Harris supposedly played a central part.
Garbled, blinkered, supercilious, to many voters Biden is US decline made flesh. For Americans to be heading to the polls with his ramblings ringing in their ears is disastrous.