2020 Race: Donald Trump, Joe Biden campaign for high ground of virus vs violence

Sports and military metaphors are overused in writing about politics, but here’s a military metaphor that fits the moment: In any battle, the advantage goes to the army that seizes the strategic high ground.

The battle for that high ground in 2020 is under way right now, and the outcome likely will be decisive.

For Joe Biden and the Democrats, the high ground is the coronavirus pandemic, a continuing crisis that they argue illustrates all that is wrong with Donald Trump’s presidency and leadership. For them, the president’s failure to slow and stop the spread of the pandemic, and dodge responsibility for it, is proof that it is dangerous to live in his version of America.

For President Trump and the Republicans, the high ground is unrest in America’s streets, a continuing national trauma that they argue illustrates all that is wrong with the Democrats who run America’s biggest cities and what will be wrong with the country if Joe Biden becomes president. For them, Mr Biden’s failure to forcefully condemn violence in the streets at his convention is proof that it will be unsafe in his version of America.

It’s a complicated race, but for right now it appears that simple. At the moment, Mr Trump’s metaphor feels more powerful and urgent, and he plans to make it more so by travelling Tuesday to Kenosha, Wisconsin, site of the most recent unrest. Yet there is a long way to go in a general-election campaign only just begun.

For his part, Mr Biden pushed back hard Monday against the charge he tolerates violence by proclaiming in a speech that violence in the streets is “lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change.” In any campaign, the most important question is the most basic one: What is it about? The candidate and campaign that succeeds in framing the answer to that question tends to be the one that wins.

Twice in recent history — in 1968 and 1980 — the primary issue was a broad feeling that the wheels were coming off the national cart, that events were careening out of control in a frightening way. In both cases, Republicans took advantage of that feeling to win.

The difference in those cases, though, was that the Republican candidates elected those years — Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — were challengers, while Democrats were in control of the White House and trying to defend their response to turmoil. President Trump is trying to pull off the reverse: He is the incumbent, the man on watch while the unrest unfolds, trying to win by saying the turmoil would be even worse if his opponents were in charge.

The point Democrats will be trying to drive home in coming days is that the violence Americans are seeing isn’t a vision of Joe Biden’s America to come, but the reality of Donald Trump’s America that already exists. In his Monday speech, Mr Biden charged that the president has “fomented” violence.

The problem for Mr Biden is that his failure to forcefully condemn looting and violence in the streets at the Democratic National Convention two weeks ago played into the narrative that he is too weak or too unwilling — or both — to stand up to radical forces within his own party that are fine with destruction in the streets of Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha.

University of South Carolina footballers protest against racial inequality and police brutality. Picture: Getty Images.

Mr Trump has his own vulnerabilities, though, and they also are considerable. The first is that he has avoided talking in any detail about the racial inequalities that underlie the street protests. There is ample evidence that even Americans in the political centre troubled by street violence also are disturbed by examples of systemic racism that now are on the table for national discussion, and want those dealt with as well.

Beyond that, the coronavirus isn’t gone, and the 183,000 American deaths it has caused will never go away. Americans are being reminded of Mr Trump’s handling of it in a dramatic way this week with the rocky efforts to reopen schools amid a pandemic.

Mr Trump’s Republican convention last week was designed to provide a reassuring picture of Trump voters — “the real face of the silent majority” as Trump senior strategist Jason Miller put it in a Wall Street Journal video interview. But beyond that, it also was structured to give moderate, swing voters a feeling that it’s OK to vote for the president by providing them enough reason to think he isn’t racist, antigay or antiwomen.

The task for Mr Biden’s campaign now is to do the same for moderate voters on the question of law and order: give them enough reason to feel it’s OK to vote for him because he won’t let mobs run loose in the streets.

The Wall St Journal