Are You Better Off Now?
Biden sets the stage for voters to think about this key question over the next 60 days
Publisher’s Riff
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Joe Biden’s speech in Pittsburgh on Monday was perhaps one of his most effective counters - if not his most effective - to President Trump’s distortion of him to date. It was a very solid batch of precision-guided rhetorical missiles that completely obliterated myths the incumbent has created about Biden, and it presented the second time in two weeks that the Democratic nominee has utterly embarrassed the president by defying “low-bar” expectations and caricatures of an elderly challenger beset by gaffes, dementia and incoherence. Biden is, clearly, not demonstrating any of that.
Instead, Biden planted a crucial questions on the minds of voters - particularly White independents, Republican “moderates” and White suburban women - that is certain to vex them for the next 60 days: “Are you safe in Donald Trump’s America?” It was a masterful and rather direct script-flipping on the president, whereby Biden’s messaging camp ably grabbed a rampant distortion and spun it into pure, unadulterated truth. No: the country has not been safer under Trump.
The answer to that is an obvious “no,” and not just for the simple reason that, as Biden indicated, homicides are up by 26 percent in major cities. Every major or pillar quality-of-life indicator in the country is in decline or headed fast in that direction. In many ways, what Biden accomplished on Monday (we still need to wait and see if it sticks, though) was, ironically, Reaganesque; or, rather, it was somewhat similar to candidate Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical takedown of President Jimmy Carter on a 1980 debate stage: “Are you better of now than you were four years ago?” Many have pointed to that moment as the tipping point resulting in Reagan’s win over Carter; 40 years later, that same question resonates as strong as it ever has, and it’s coming from a position that’s much more positive and pure at heart.
Biden, along with running mate Kamala Harris, need to constantly pose this question every day on the campaign trail. Use it to gauge voters and to totally disarm Republicans. No: nothing is better now. The country is psychologically traumatized by daily exposure to an unhinged and unpredictable president, along with a destructive pandemic that he could have easily managed, but refused to acknowledge or address - in fact, we can argue that Trump created the pandemic, due to his criminal negligence and refusal (in direct contradiction to multiple warnings from intelligence, defense and public health officials) to activate a coronavirus containment strategy that prevented outbreak and epidemic stages from reaching the current pandemic. As we realize this, reports point to the Trump administration actively preparing for a dangerous “herd immunity” strategy similar to what was officially put in place by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (in many respects, the United Kingdom’s doppelganger to Trump) who himself ended up gravely ill from coronavirus and has even, according to sources, considered resigning as a result of ongoing health issues from that episode. In many ways, herd immunity in the U.S. has already been in motion from the very beginning, signaled by the Trump administration’s lack of strategy.
We are not better off now. Anything that could go horribly wrong for a country - just short of total war, civil war, a large asteroid hit or a nuclear explosion - is happening right now.
Overall deaths, because of the pandemic, are up 18 percent, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association …
Coronavirus cases in the U.S. have increased to over 6 million now - it was just 5 million less than a month ago. That’s nearly 2 percent of the entire U.S. population; it also accounts for 24 percent of all global coronavirus cases.
Coronavirus deaths have increased to over 183,000 - it was just over 170,000 deaths 2 weeks ago (and it’s more than likely much higher since data collection on pandemic effects in the U.S. is still unreliable). That’s 22 percent of all global coronavirus deaths.
Overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the U.S. has dropped: the most dramatic drop in U.S. history ….
Unemployment is still higher than what it was during the Great Recession. According to Trading Economics …
the jobless rate remains above the Global Financial Crisis peak of 10.0%, and more than double than February’s 3.5% before the spread of the pandemic in the US. Official figures still may be far off the reality as many people are being classified as employed even though they are absent from work …
The Black unemployment rate is the highest among all racial demographic groups, and it’s still the highest it has been since the peak years of the Great Recession …
Mass shooting incidents have been more frequent during the Trump presidency than during the previous presidency, with 2019 showing the highest number of mass shootings than any year on record, according to the Gun Violence Archive ….
Violent hate crimes have also been on a sharp rise across the board since Trump’s election in 2016; they are the highest they’ve been over the last 16 years (as far as we know since the FBI data is considered incomplete and is underestimating how high they’ve risen). We’re sure to see more data accumulated for 2020 …
We know that violent crimes, particularly homicides, are on the rise …
3 out of 5 of the hottest years on record have occurred during the Trump administration. This occurs even as the president continues dismissing climate crisis as a hoax, and even global warming and the frequency of heat waves increase (as the administration has completely abdicated its responsibility to do anything while dismantling all forms of clean air, clean water, carbon reduction and methane elimination rules as climate crisis rages on) …
U.S. global reputation has dramatically cratered since Trump has been in office, according to U.S. News & World Report’s Best Countries of 2020 survey …
While the U.S. is perceived as the most powerful country in the world, data shows it is not perceived as very trustworthy,” U.S. News writes. Since 2016, when the first “best countries” report came out, “perceptions of the U.S. as being trustworthy have steadily dropped to a record-low of 16.3 on a 100-point scale.” The publication adds that this was “the sharpest drop in global trust since 2016 among all countries assessed.
Four years ago, then-Candidate Trump bragged along the campaign trail that 'we're going to Make America Great Again." Now, four years later, President Trump is still saying the same thing: 'we're going to Make America Great Again." But, hold on a second: he still hasn't made America great, yet? If this is what making America great entails, we don’t want to know what would make it bad.
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