Joe Biden said everything right in Pittsburgh. So why was his speech underwhelming? Was wasn’t it more elevating than it could have been, given that it checked all the boxes: it was issue-defining, people-uniting, morally-advocating, historically-reminiscing and future-looking. Most of all, it was genuine and honest. It was stock Joe Biden--unenhanced, unvarnished and totally unpretentious. He was 100% himself.
Maybe that is what’s wrong.
Forget the riots and the looting and waste no time explaining their fine distinction from legitimate protest. The key word in “civil disobedience” is still disobedience, and Donald Trump quickly pounced on the average person’s understanding of disobedience. Trump is strictly black-or-white. To him anyone advocating civil disobedience—call it peaceful protest, unionism, occupy movement, sanctuary—is defying authority. And since the duty of authority is to enforce the law, then Trump figured he can piggyback on this distinction confusion by marketing his brand as “President of Law and Order.”
He is wrong as wrong can ever be. But there’s too little time to educate on fine distinctions. Already, the Trump campaign has totally ensnared the Biden campaign with the burdensome task of clarifying “protest.” If Joe Biden plans on spending the next precious 60 days or less trying to correct every Conservative’s understanding of law and order, he will be eating Donald Trumps dust all the way to November.
He should go back to trusting Obama’s tested and proven instinct. His famous words when he was invited to address the British Parliament were “the longing for freedom and human dignity beats in every heart.”
That’s the key, Joe. When you talk about freedom, democracy, human dignity, justice and equality—all these so-called motherhood platitudes—you speak of ideas that need not be taught to any American, whether patriot or traitor. The longing to redeem the America of the Founding Fathers’ visions beats in every American heart—Republican and Democrat. Swing the political dialogue in that direction and you strip Donald Trump of any base.
You can’t say, “You know me, you know my story, you know my family’s story”—now, you’re talking to your base, Joe. The fact is Donald Trump’s supporters don’t know you, and don’t want to. You can’t gamble on them knowing you, or wanting to. But you can be sure of one thing: they must know themselves and they must know what freedom, human dignity, justice and equality are. That’s why they voted for Trump because they taught he was offering them these things. He’s still saying he does and many still believe him because he uses a self-referencing standard: no one can do Donald Trump better than Donald Trump. How can he be wrong?
If Joe Biden runs his campaign by offering himself, in so many hairsplitting words, as a kinder, gentler, more compassionate version of Donald Trump, folks might just go for Classic Orange. He cannot run a successful campaign by being another Donald Trump wannabe pleading for his turn at the wheelhouse. He cannot offer himself, instead of Trump, to America. He must offer America to themselves, instead of Donald Trump, or any president for that matter. Obama was right, the coming election is about the American voter reclaiming his power, not giving to another. Joe Biden forgot that. He missed forcefully arguing that only Donald Trump stands between the American voters and their long-forsaken redemption as a nation. He was sidetracked into the theme “I would do a better job than Donald Trump.”
What made Barack Obama so endearing to true patriots is he didn’t offer himself as the solution. He offered himself as the catalyst, the people are the solution themselves because they know what justice and freedom means better than he can teach them. He spoke above everyone’s heads, including his own. His wife Michelle got it perfectly, “When they go low, we go high.” Joe Biden’s speechwriters make every effort to “humanize” him, “candidize” and make him sound like himself. They want his prose to be groundhugging.
But to win, Joe Biden must be willing to reach beyond even his own limitations--to sound more profound than he is comfortable sounding. He can’t be “what you see is what you get.” It seems his team are wary not to make Joe Biden loom larger than life.
But that’s exactly what they need him to be—to be the model of going beyond one’s self in pursuit of the general welfare, in pursuit not just of the individual's but of the nation's happiness. That cannot be achieved by practical language. That can only be communicated by lofty abstractions—the kind Barack Obama excelled greatly in, and that Joe Biden is too timid to use--up to this point, at least.
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
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