The GOP distills its attack on Biden: He’ll roll over for the left

Judging by Monday’s first night of the Republican National Convention, though, the Trump campaign’s case against Biden will rely less upon Biden’s track record than his present acquaintances.

In laying out their case against Biden, the GOP spent relatively little time on his Senate record and slightly more time on what the Obama-Biden administration did. It devoted the overwhelming bulk of its attacks, though, to casting Biden as a conduit for his party’s more extreme elements and a stalking horse for socialism and even communism.

To be sure, Biden’s past did come up — mostly what transpired during his vice presidency. The father of a child killed in the Parkland massacre in 2018 hit the Obama administration for its guidance on restorative justice policies. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) accused the same administration of failing historically Black colleges and universities. Former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley hit Biden for the Obama administration’s actions (or lack thereof) regarding North Korea, Iran and Israel, and accused it of stifling economic growth in South Carolina, where she served as governor.

But even in her next passage, Haley revealed where the true line of attack was.

“A Biden-Harris administration would be much, much worse,” Haley said. “Last time, Joe’s boss was Obama. This time it would be [Nancy] Pelosi, [Bernie] Sanders and ‘the Squad.’ Their vision for America is socialism. … Joe Biden and the socialist left would be a disaster for our economy.”

This was a thread running through many of the attacks — the idea that Biden, even as president, would either be powerless in the face of more extreme elements of his own party or would acquiesce to them. It was less that Biden himself is an extremist — an attack that President Trump and the GOP have tried from time to time — and more that he would be hapless in the face of them.

“These radicals are not content just marching in the streets,” said Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis man made famous for toting guns with his wife as racial justice demonstrators marched through their neighborhood. “They want to walk the halls of Congress. They want to take over. They want power. This is Joe Biden’s party.”

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said: “Joe Biden has embraced the left’s insane mission to defund” the police, despite Biden having said explicitly that he opposes it.

Scott said, “Our side is working on policy, while Joe Biden’s radical Democrats are trying to permanently transform what it means to be an American.”

Former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, in the most demonstrative speech of the night, echoed that and then took it quite a bit further.

“Biden, Harris and the rest of the socialists will fundamentally change this nation,” she said. “They want open borders, closed schools, dangerous amnesty and will selfishly send your jobs back to China, while they get rich.”

Her partner, Donald Trump Jr., said, “Joe Biden and the radical left are now coming for our freedom of speech.”

Part and parcel to the argument that Biden would sell out to the far left was the idea that, rather than having a bad record, he didn’t have much of a record to speak of.

Trump Jr. said Biden “is basically the Loch Ness Monster of the swamp. For the past half-century, he’s been lurking around in there. He sticks his head up every now and then to run for president. Then he disappears and doesn’t do much in between.”

Scalise added, “While Joe Biden made hollow promises when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donald Trump took action and delivered criminal justice reform.”

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel joined the two arguments early in the night, suggesting that Democrats nominated Biden because they thought he was a “nice guy” — but then arguing that being nice was a liability.

“President Trump is always going to be tough when he is fighting for the American people because nice guys like Joe cared more about countries like China and Iran than the United States of America,” McDaniel said.

It’s easy to see how the argument that Biden is something of a nonentity dovetails with the larger argument: that he would be a pushover manipulated by liberal extremists (and even foreign leaders). But it came at the expense of saying precisely what Biden has done wrong. It was forward-looking in the sense that it was speculative about what Biden would be, rather than what he’s done. But it’s also asking people to grab hold of something less tangible — something they might or might not ultimately come to believe.

The question from there is whether they will. Polls show voters do question how strong a leader Biden is. A YouGov poll last week showed that just 17 percent of voters view Biden as a “very strong” leader. That’s significantly lower than Trump (32 percent) and even Biden’s own running mate, Harris (27 percent). Biden caught up to Trump when you include people who view them as “somewhat strong” leaders, with Biden at 51 percent and Trump at 49 percent. But it suggests, at the least, reservations about how formidable Biden would be as president.

Biden did significantly better when it came to whom people liked. Just 34 percent said they disliked Biden either “somewhat” (13 percent) or “a lot” (21 percent), while fully 43 percent of people disliked Trump “a lot” and a majority (52 percent) disliked him at least “somewhat.”

The Trump campaign seems to have given up on winning the likability contest — and rightly so — and Monday night it also largely set aside an explicit and detailed contrast of their records. The overarching thrust of it was, as it often is with Trump, fear — not of his opponent as a person, necessarily, but of what his opponent would abide.

Source:WP