ET CONTRIBUTORSBy Raghu Krishnan
The dramatic tussle between Biden and Trump deserves a Broadway musical of its own. It is being played out all around us and not just for an American audience but a global one. The highlights of the ongoing campaign are being telecast live not just on CNN and the BBC but repeated on the Indian news-channels.
In the blue corner of the ring is the 77-year-old Joe Biden whose 78th birthday on November 20 will either be a memorable one, celebrating the making of the oldest president in American history, or the end of a lost dream, inspired, we are told, by a son who died at 46 and who was supposed to be the future. Joe Biden had named his son Beau (French for handsome). One is reminded of P C Wren's romantic fictional hero Beau Geste who sacrifices everything for the family pride in the good old days when honour was the only thing that mattered.
In almost every campaign speech and in what the American TV channels call the town-hall meetings where questions can be posed by members of an audience drawn from a cross-section of American citizens, Biden refers either to the 1972 car-accident in which his first wife Neilia and little daughter Naomi died or to the son who was supposed to be the hope of the future of not just the family but the country.
The accounts we hear are all about a Beau Biden who, in the best traditions of middle-class America, was determined to make it on his own. A son who had launched a political career on his own by successfully contesting for the position of attorney-general for Delaware and who, in the midst of a nascent political career, served for a year in the American army in Iraq, being awarded a Bronze Star Medal before returning to his elected position. The son who, while eying higher office as the Governor of Delaware, was determined to make it on his own without any help from his father who was then America's and Barack Obama's vice-president.
And then it all ended tragically with Beau being diagnosed with brain cancer and passing away in the Walter Reed Military Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 30, 2015. The narrative goes that, in his last few days, Beau wanted his father to carry the dream forward by contesting for the presidency when usually it is the other way round. It is the father's dream which is fulfilled by the son.
The narrative continues that the second tragedy of his life was too much for the then 72-year-old Biden who sat out the election of 2016 where Hillary Clinton was surprised by the 68-year-old billionaire Donald Trump, whose campaign theme was that he would make America great again by ensuring that the working class would get back the jobs they had lost due to the globalized misadventures like the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). It was an election where a slender cumulative margin of 77,644 votes in three crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was more significant than Hillary's overall national majority of 2.87 million since Trump was a marketing man who knew where to make the numbers count.
While more Americans voted for Hillary in 2016, Trump appealed to the largely-white working class in ways that his rival could never do, Trump focused on the lost jobs and closed factories in the midwest states which Hillary rarely visited if at all and that too with celebrity couples like Jay Z and Beyonce. Candidate Trump underlined this point in one of the last 2016 campaign speeches he made in Wisconsin: "Here I am. No guitar, no Jay Z. Just you and me," as he put it to the crowd in the state he was never supposed to win.
The problem with President Trump is that he has not been able to keep connecting with those who are not part of his core group of white-American working-class supporters. In all the key moments of his presidency, he has given the impression that his 2016 theme of Make America Great Again and his 2020 one of Keep America Great Again is all about reminding Americans about the good old days when what was good for American business was good for America.
In August 2017 when protestors wanted the statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee removed in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a white supremacist drove his car into the group and killed one person, Trump observed that "There are very fine people on both sides." And that was after white supremacists had taken out a rally while shouting slogans like "Jews will not replace us. You will not replace us."
In all such key moments, Trump comes across as tone-deaf and colour-blind to an extent where he still insists that he will not agree to rename US military bases like Fort Hood which commemorate Confederate generals who led the Civil War against the country's unity some 160 years ago and who hailed from the southern states were slavery was actively practised, something which President Abraham Lincoln wanted to end..
It's not that President Trump has not delivered on his campaign promises. He has replaced NAFTA (ratified in 1993 and effective from January 1, 1994) with the US-Mexico-Canada agreement which has enforced environmental and other regulations, incentivized more domestic production of cars and trucks, and strengthened intellectual property provisions while giving the US greater access to the Canadian dairy market.
President Trump has also taken a much stronger stand against what many Americans see as the subversion of the international order by China through unfair trade practices, currency manipulation and the theft of intellectual property rights.
President Trump has also tried to bring about peace in West Asia by getting first the UAE and then Bahrain to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. There are reports that he incentivized the process by promising the UAE and Bahrain the latest American military equipment like F-35 fighter-jets.
However, all these achievements have been undermined by President Trump's inability to look beyond his core support base at all the key moments in domestic politics. The repeated horrific instances of the gunning down of Afro-Americans by police officials has been ridiculously likened by President Trump to choking while playing golf. There has been no condemnation of even the March 13, 2020, midnight breaking into the black woman Breonna Taylor's house by Louisville cops in Kentucky who gunned her down when her boyfriend started firing to protect himself from intruders he mistook for armed gangsters. President Trump has routinely condemned the riots that have broken out in the wake of the frequent killing of Afro-Americans by police officials. He has, however, never condemned the violence of white supremacists.
And as violence has polarized American politics to an extent where two cops sitting in their police car in Los Angeles were shot at by an unidentified pedestrian on the night of September 12 and a barbaric slogan of "Let them die" was being shouted outside the hospital where the grievously injured duo were being treated, Trump has further fuelled the fire by bracketing even the Black Lives Matter protesters with rioters and clubbing all of them as "left-wing anarchists out to destroy the American way of life". So much so that even the supposedly non-partisan US Attorney General appointed by President Trump is now talking of taking action against protesters.
All of which has reinforced apprehensions that President Trump is systematically undermining American institutions and nullifying the time-honoured tradition of peaceful protest and free speech. The latest revelations in Bob Woodward's book "Fire", where Trump himself has gone on record that he knew in February itself that the coronavirus was far deadlier and far more contagious than influenza but that he deliberately downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic so as to not alarm the people, has reinforced the perception that the President's priority is not to protect the people but to win the election.
It is now being estimated that the majority of the 198,407 Amerians killed by Covid-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, could have been saved if President Trump had in the month of February itself lived up to his responsibility and warned his countrymen about the seriousness of the threat and advised them to meticulously wear masks and practise social distancing, something he is not doing even now, going by his September 17 rally in Wisconsin where hundreds of his supporters were sitting side by side "without wearing masks and breathing on each other". as Biden put in a town-hall interaction, courtesy CNN. The vice-president has noted that the death-toll in the northern neighbouring country of Canada is around 9,000, not even five percent (5%) of the Covid-19 fatalities in the USA.
While accusing President Trump of almost criminal negligence in the tackling of the pandemic, Biden lyrically describes the 2020 contest as a battle for the soul of America. (As Mario Cuomo, a former governor of New York once quipped, "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."). It is a family tradition of sorts. When Joe Biden was nominated as Obama's vice-presidential candidate, his son Beau, while introducing him, spoke about the Christmas-shopping accident in which his mother and sister died and he and his two-year-old brother were injured and of how the then US Senator would make it a point for weeks and weeks afterwards to take the Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington every evening so as to be with them. Beau Biden's speech had the 2008 Democratc National Convention audience in tears.
Biden seems to be looking for Beau in every campaign speech he makes. However, he never mentions his second son Hunter. It may be cruel to say so but Hunter could be remembered by Trump during the first of the US presidential debates on September 29, specifically the allegation that the younger Biden, as a partner of a consultancy firm, was given a monthly payment of $83,333 from April 2014 to November 2015 by the big Ukrainian energy firm Burisma in an attempt to influence US policy at a time when his father was the American vice-president.
The closer we get to the November 3 election, the more likely it is that Hunter Biden will be mentioned not just in the Trump campaign advertisements but in the presidential debates. This is especially so since Trump was first impeached and then acquitted on the charge of abuse of power and of trying to pressurize the Ukrainian president Voloddmyr Zelensky into ordering a probe into the allegation against the Bidens.
How an emotional Joe Biden will cope remains to be seen.
Views are personal
The dramatic tussle between Biden and Trump deserves a Broadway musical of its own. It is being played out all around us and not just for an American audience but a global one. The highlights of the ongoing campaign are being telecast live not just on CNN and the BBC but repeated on the Indian news-channels.
In the blue corner of the ring is the 77-year-old Joe Biden whose 78th birthday on November 20 will either be a memorable one, celebrating the making of the oldest president in American history, or the end of a lost dream, inspired, we are told, by a son who died at 46 and who was supposed to be the future. Joe Biden had named his son Beau (French for handsome). One is reminded of P C Wren's romantic fictional hero Beau Geste who sacrifices everything for the family pride in the good old days when honour was the only thing that mattered.
In almost every campaign speech and in what the American TV channels call the town-hall meetings where questions can be posed by members of an audience drawn from a cross-section of American citizens, Biden refers either to the 1972 car-accident in which his first wife Neilia and little daughter Naomi died or to the son who was supposed to be the hope of the future of not just the family but the country.
The accounts we hear are all about a Beau Biden who, in the best traditions of middle-class America, was determined to make it on his own. A son who had launched a political career on his own by successfully contesting for the position of attorney-general for Delaware and who, in the midst of a nascent political career, served for a year in the American army in Iraq, being awarded a Bronze Star Medal before returning to his elected position. The son who, while eying higher office as the Governor of Delaware, was determined to make it on his own without any help from his father who was then America's and Barack Obama's vice-president.
And then it all ended tragically with Beau being diagnosed with brain cancer and passing away in the Walter Reed Military Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 30, 2015. The narrative goes that, in his last few days, Beau wanted his father to carry the dream forward by contesting for the presidency when usually it is the other way round. It is the father's dream which is fulfilled by the son.
The narrative continues that the second tragedy of his life was too much for the then 72-year-old Biden who sat out the election of 2016 where Hillary Clinton was surprised by the 68-year-old billionaire Donald Trump, whose campaign theme was that he would make America great again by ensuring that the working class would get back the jobs they had lost due to the globalized misadventures like the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). It was an election where a slender cumulative margin of 77,644 votes in three crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was more significant than Hillary's overall national majority of 2.87 million since Trump was a marketing man who knew where to make the numbers count.
While more Americans voted for Hillary in 2016, Trump appealed to the largely-white working class in ways that his rival could never do, Trump focused on the lost jobs and closed factories in the midwest states which Hillary rarely visited if at all and that too with celebrity couples like Jay Z and Beyonce. Candidate Trump underlined this point in one of the last 2016 campaign speeches he made in Wisconsin: "Here I am. No guitar, no Jay Z. Just you and me," as he put it to the crowd in the state he was never supposed to win.
The problem with President Trump is that he has not been able to keep connecting with those who are not part of his core group of white-American working-class supporters. In all the key moments of his presidency, he has given the impression that his 2016 theme of Make America Great Again and his 2020 one of Keep America Great Again is all about reminding Americans about the good old days when what was good for American business was good for America.
In August 2017 when protestors wanted the statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee removed in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a white supremacist drove his car into the group and killed one person, Trump observed that "There are very fine people on both sides." And that was after white supremacists had taken out a rally while shouting slogans like "Jews will not replace us. You will not replace us."
In all such key moments, Trump comes across as tone-deaf and colour-blind to an extent where he still insists that he will not agree to rename US military bases like Fort Hood which commemorate Confederate generals who led the Civil War against the country's unity some 160 years ago and who hailed from the southern states were slavery was actively practised, something which President Abraham Lincoln wanted to end..
It's not that President Trump has not delivered on his campaign promises. He has replaced NAFTA (ratified in 1993 and effective from January 1, 1994) with the US-Mexico-Canada agreement which has enforced environmental and other regulations, incentivized more domestic production of cars and trucks, and strengthened intellectual property provisions while giving the US greater access to the Canadian dairy market.
President Trump has also taken a much stronger stand against what many Americans see as the subversion of the international order by China through unfair trade practices, currency manipulation and the theft of intellectual property rights.
President Trump has also tried to bring about peace in West Asia by getting first the UAE and then Bahrain to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. There are reports that he incentivized the process by promising the UAE and Bahrain the latest American military equipment like F-35 fighter-jets.
However, all these achievements have been undermined by President Trump's inability to look beyond his core support base at all the key moments in domestic politics. The repeated horrific instances of the gunning down of Afro-Americans by police officials has been ridiculously likened by President Trump to choking while playing golf. There has been no condemnation of even the March 13, 2020, midnight breaking into the black woman Breonna Taylor's house by Louisville cops in Kentucky who gunned her down when her boyfriend started firing to protect himself from intruders he mistook for armed gangsters. President Trump has routinely condemned the riots that have broken out in the wake of the frequent killing of Afro-Americans by police officials. He has, however, never condemned the violence of white supremacists.
And as violence has polarized American politics to an extent where two cops sitting in their police car in Los Angeles were shot at by an unidentified pedestrian on the night of September 12 and a barbaric slogan of "Let them die" was being shouted outside the hospital where the grievously injured duo were being treated, Trump has further fuelled the fire by bracketing even the Black Lives Matter protesters with rioters and clubbing all of them as "left-wing anarchists out to destroy the American way of life". So much so that even the supposedly non-partisan US Attorney General appointed by President Trump is now talking of taking action against protesters.
All of which has reinforced apprehensions that President Trump is systematically undermining American institutions and nullifying the time-honoured tradition of peaceful protest and free speech. The latest revelations in Bob Woodward's book "Fire", where Trump himself has gone on record that he knew in February itself that the coronavirus was far deadlier and far more contagious than influenza but that he deliberately downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic so as to not alarm the people, has reinforced the perception that the President's priority is not to protect the people but to win the election.
It is now being estimated that the majority of the 198,407 Amerians killed by Covid-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, could have been saved if President Trump had in the month of February itself lived up to his responsibility and warned his countrymen about the seriousness of the threat and advised them to meticulously wear masks and practise social distancing, something he is not doing even now, going by his September 17 rally in Wisconsin where hundreds of his supporters were sitting side by side "without wearing masks and breathing on each other". as Biden put in a town-hall interaction, courtesy CNN. The vice-president has noted that the death-toll in the northern neighbouring country of Canada is around 9,000, not even five percent (5%) of the Covid-19 fatalities in the USA.
While accusing President Trump of almost criminal negligence in the tackling of the pandemic, Biden lyrically describes the 2020 contest as a battle for the soul of America. (As Mario Cuomo, a former governor of New York once quipped, "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."). It is a family tradition of sorts. When Joe Biden was nominated as Obama's vice-presidential candidate, his son Beau, while introducing him, spoke about the Christmas-shopping accident in which his mother and sister died and he and his two-year-old brother were injured and of how the then US Senator would make it a point for weeks and weeks afterwards to take the Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington every evening so as to be with them. Beau Biden's speech had the 2008 Democratc National Convention audience in tears.
Biden seems to be looking for Beau in every campaign speech he makes. However, he never mentions his second son Hunter. It may be cruel to say so but Hunter could be remembered by Trump during the first of the US presidential debates on September 29, specifically the allegation that the younger Biden, as a partner of a consultancy firm, was given a monthly payment of $83,333 from April 2014 to November 2015 by the big Ukrainian energy firm Burisma in an attempt to influence US policy at a time when his father was the American vice-president.
The closer we get to the November 3 election, the more likely it is that Hunter Biden will be mentioned not just in the Trump campaign advertisements but in the presidential debates. This is especially so since Trump was first impeached and then acquitted on the charge of abuse of power and of trying to pressurize the Ukrainian president Voloddmyr Zelensky into ordering a probe into the allegation against the Bidens.
How an emotional Joe Biden will cope remains to be seen.
Views are personal
( Originally published on Sep 21, 2020 )
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
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