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After a short bout of mea culpas and self-flagellating in response to Biden’s State of the Union speech in early March, Ezra Klein is back with a laundry list of complaints about the campaign. He starts by taking as gospel an Axios report about Biden campaign polling denial and proceeds to whine and perseverate about every possible aspect of the campaign.
This passage from the lead in to the piece offers some illustration …
Biden, it seemed, was calling Trump’s bluff. He wanted the fight. But Biden wants fewer debates, not more. On the same day, he pulled out of the three debates scheduled by the Commission on Presidential Debates for September and October. He rebuffed the Trump campaign’s call for four debates. “I’ll even do it twice” is misdirection. He’ll only do it twice.
This is bad precedent and questionable politics. Debates do more to focus and inform the public than anything else during the campaign. Biden is cutting the number of debates by a third and he’s making it easier for future candidates to abandon debates altogether.
Strategically, it’s easy to see why a candidate in the lead wouldn’t want to blow his margin on a bad debate. That’s why Trump skipped the Republican primary debates. But Biden is behind. He needs opportunities to prove to voters that they are wrong about him. He needs opportunities to persuade them to ditch their nostalgia for Trump. He could have had three chances, or four, maybe more. Now he has two and only one will come after Labor Day, when it matters most.
Biden, in other words, is continuing to run like a candidate who is winning rather than one who is losing. He and the Democrats need a theory of why he’s trailing in the polls and what to do about it.
If there was one unambiguous win for Biden last week it was bum-rushing Trump into debating on Biden’s terms. Classic power move. It’s proactive. Biden got what he wanted.
So despite Biden finally getting two debates on the calendar, Klein’s upset with him for not wanting even more debates. He appears to take for granted Trump’s dubious boast that he wants to debate an unlimited number of times, which actually undermines his own point. He’s upset with Biden about undermining the “norm” of the Commission on Presidential Debates and canceling its three debates, a kind of early onset homage to the late David Broder. He manages to be upset because he claims debates are a tool for civic education in themselves (debatable) and Biden is setting a bad precedent for the future (truly not Biden’s problem). He’s even worried that Biden might have delivered a terrible self-inflicted wound by not leaving himself any times to debate in October.
It’s challenging to know how to react to Klein. Because criticizing him can seem like defensiveness or denial. You either get on board with Klein’s vent-fest or you become part of the problem. The structure of his argument is like a trap to fall into. But whining and perseverating is neither strategic nor constructive. It’s a self-indulgent kind of doom-scrolling dressed up as analysis. These are the kinds of frantic mental gestures I was writing about, or I guess anticipating, in this Backchannel from last Thursday.
Along the way Klein manages to subtly and sometimes not so subtly misstate what people say about polling, about the campaign and a lot of other things. He also seems to rely almost entirely on the Times own house poll. That’s understandable in way but not really appropriate for this kind of piece. He should at least engage those who are making contrary arguments in a serious way. When we actually hear from Biden and his campaign they virtually never say the polls are “wrong.” They say they believe current polls understate the strength of their campaign. That’s a very different and very reasonable argument and one that has a decent shot at being true.
I don’t think any of this comes from any willful bad faith. I think Klein’s just not engaged with these debates about polls or campaign strategies and there seems to be a decent amount of cherry-picking of fact points to plug into an existing argument.
In the litany above you can see it’s like someone having a breakdown, looking at bad things and seeing them as bad, looking at good things and seeing them as bad and getting more and more upset as he goes, in a kind of tizzy of self-confirmation. The meat of the column is Klein going through seven possible reasons why Biden is behind, not deciding on which of them he thinks is the case, but insisting the campaign needs to decide which it is. He then declares that he “fears” that the campaign will use its polling denial as an excuse not to “change course.” But when he gets to suggesting how to change course the best he can come up with is a new campaign strategy focused on Jared Kushner and Medicaid cuts.
The perpetual challenge of electoral campaigns is to both recognize and account for problems while also maintaining morale, positive enthusiasm and forward momentum for the campaign. There’s no either/or. Every winning campaign does both. That’s very hard and it’s one of the reasons that there are so many ways to lose. But that calculus is key. And it’s why you look at something like this which is 100% anxious navel gazing and 0% plan to do better and absolutely need to run for the hills.
Klein is upset and worried Biden is running slightly behind Trump (only he doesn’t say slightly); he appears unable to decide why Biden is behind; and when it comes to proposing what a changed course might be he has only a few throwaway lines about policies or scandals that are at best edge cases in electoral terms. What he really seems to want is for leading Democrats to engage in a collective “WE’RE LOSING!!!!” primal scream. But after that he doesn’t have any clear suggestion about anything to do differently.