Democrats need to take spotlight off President Biden and allow Republicans to expose their extreme positions
The best thing for the Democratic Party right now might be the Republican National Convention.
After two weeks of a very public family battle over the presidential nomination, with some prominent Democrats, regular party members and pundits and observers calling for President Joe Biden to step aside, followed by the insanity of a shooting that wounded Trump and left one of his fans dead as well as the shooter, the GOP is about to seize the public spotlight.
That’s a very good thing for the Democrats. They need to make a decision on Biden soon and move forward. Either he drops out, which seems unlikely based on his fiery statements and solid performance in a Thursday, July 11, press conference, or the party selects a new nominee.
The continued criticism of Biden as too old, too diminished, too incapable of standing up to and defeating former President Donald Trump once again, has harmed their chance of victory in a truly must-win election.
Of course, Biden caused this panic. He appeared frail, tired and at times detached and old during the June 27 debate.
Watching the debate, I was immediately struck by Biden’s soft voice and his failure to appear commanding and strong, as we expect from a commander in chief. The worries quietly expressed for months were proven to be all too real.
The reaction was swift.
“I think the panic had set in,” David Axelrod, a longtime advisor to former President Barack Obama, said on CNN. “And I think you’re going to hear discussions that, I don’t know will lead to anything, but there are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.”
Van Jones, another Democratic strategist, echoed that on CNN: “He did not do well at all.”
Even as the debate continued and Biden rallied a bit, the call for him to drop out began. Biden has, so far, refused to yield.
The good news is, the race appears to still be tight with almost four months to go. While Biden is sure to make some missteps before Election Day, Trump will as well. He can’t help himself.
In addition, he still faces sentencing for the 34 felonies. He was convicted on May 30 and was supposed to be sentenced on July 11. If that had happened, he might have been forced to deliver his acceptance speech from prison.
Now, sentencing is set for Sept. 18. In the wake of the far-right Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees, granting presidents immunity from prosecution for many crimes, Trump is trying to have the jury’s verdict set aside. He has slipped the noose so many times in decades of lawlessness, he might even succeed. That is a depressing thought.
But first, we need to endure the nonsense, mindless boasting and deranged speeches that will fill airtime during the RNC. Like all nominees, Trump has shaped the platform to match his campaign.
That means it is filled with lies about the 2020 election that Biden won by 7 million votes. It will include attacks on women, on the LGBTQ+ community, on Hispanics, Blacks and people of faiths different from the Christian Nationalist movement that has embraced Trump, surely the most non-religious candidate in American history.
Trump is trying to finesse the question of abortion, realizing that while most delegates want it banned completely, that’s a losing argument nationally. He has removed a section calling for a national ban on the health-care process, and said he favors allowing states to decide.
“This has never happened before,” Gayle Ruzicka, a clearly frustrated Republican National Committee member, said about the passage of the GOP’s 2024 draft platform on Monday, according to an MCNBC report.
“We always had subcommittees where we can go in and work on a section of the platform. We can propose amendments, debate them, add them.” This time, she said, speaking of loyalists to former President Donald Trump, “They didn’t allow any amendments. They didn’t allow any discussion. They rolled us. That’s what they did.”
Perhaps the biggest powder keg that Trump is trying to keep from exploding in Milwaukee is Project 2025. It’s a policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation with many extreme proposals. Trump claims to know nothing about it or who is behind it, even as it was crafted by people who have been at his side for years.
He’s lying. It’s his default position.
Project 2025 calls for severe restrictions on access to mifepristone, a commonly used abortion pill.
It says the Health and Human Services Department should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
Biblically? Since when is the United States of America governed by the Bible or any other religious document or belief? That’s not what the Founders intended.
Project 2025 also targets the border, using an old standby — finish the wall. That’s an expensive and almost impossible task, but it sounds good to his mob when Trump is tossing out red meat from the stage.
It states that the president should use active-duty military personnel and the National Guard to detain people along the border. This ignores the border protection plan that was carefully worked out in Congress earlier this year, but Trump pressured Republicans to bend to his will and squash.
That was bad for the nation, but he thought it was good for his campaign. Remember, it’s all about him all the time.
Usually, a candidate receives a bump in the polls following a convention, since they are no longer places of real debate and drama over the nominee. For the last four decades, they have become commercials for the candidate, and the public and media has lost interest.
But we need to watch it closely this year — painful as it will be — to see what the Republican Party and Trump really stand for and what they would do if returned to power. Their response to the attempted assassination on Trump on Saturday will surely be outrage, with plenty of cries for vengeance against Democrats and Biden, even if the shooter was a registered Republican.
It is sure to be a loud, angry gathering of loud, angry people.
That might make President Biden, even an older, slower, frailer Joe Biden, look like the best option.
Fourth-generation South Dakotan Tom Lawrence has written for several newspapers and websites in South Dakota and other states and contributed to The New York Times, NPR, The London Telegraph, The Daily Beast and other media outlets. Reprint with permission.
