Polls, at least the conventionally trustworthy ones, have Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in gaps larger than the margin of error. But statistics, as they say, are like a string bikini: it reveals the suggestive by concealing the vital. The polls are a sampling of national sentiment and are not very accurate barometers of local voting predisposition. Unfortunately, all politics is local. The US president is not elected at large, but by majority proportional representation--the electoral college system. Getting the biggest number of votes does not guarantee victory. Getting the widest geographic support does. Loosely speaking, a candidate must look to win more states, not more votes.
It's kind of like the Olympics. Even a small nation with only 50 athletes, each one competing in one event, can become overall champion against countries with huge thousand-man delegations competing in the same events if the athletes from the smaller nation win more events. It's not about how many and how noisy your group is, it's how many medals you total up at the end of the races.
It's even much trickier in politics. There is usually no universal issue that swings voting opinion uniformly across all fifty states. Even so, candidates never give up trying to define and campaign by those elusive universal issues--Joe Biden does. If you listen to Biden, he paints a panoramic canvas, using broad brush strokes. He talks about fighting for the "soul of the nation" and "vindicating the spirit of America" and appealing to moralists to anchor their reckoning on the "character of the man." He then invites comparison between him and Trump on those terms.
Donald Trump, in contrast, is happy as a clam just scaring the bejezus out of rural yokels over waning industries and vanishing jobs. Don't look now but Biden's motherhood platitudes are slowly fading behind Trump's frantic wolf-crying. It's not about elegance and class but whatever slogan works best. The sad reality is that the average man on the street gets his opinion from the bumper sticker with the brightest colors.
I do think Joe Biden is more likeable, just watching Donald Trump strutting about with his goofy antics makes your skin crawl. But that's not about character. It's just photogenic-telegenic-cybergenic value, that's all.
What's dangerous is that beneath this thin veneer of endearment, there are some serious questions about Joe Biden's character too that have somehow escaped close scrutiny--either by purpose or lucky happenstance.
I expected the Republicans to pound Joe Biden hard on the questionable affairs of his son Hunter Biden. But they let him off the hook, I think, because they're just too busy or tired to sink their teeth into the details. They stopped at the general portrayal of sordidness, but didn't have the time or the inclination to indict Hunter Biden before the bar of public opinion.
Worse, they oversimplified it. If you didn't research any deeper, you'd think Hunter Biden was some drug-dependent teenage bum dropped out of school, hanging by Daddy's coattails, landing cushy jobs way above his skillset level and riding a golden parachute to early retirement.
Not exactly so. The man is a fullfledged lawyer--not a high school dropout. He served a full five-year term (not a scandal-abbreviated one) in the board of directors of Burisma, Inc. a private energy development company (not a Ukrainian state corporation). About the most eyebrow-raising thing about that whole situation is he happens to be the son of the US Vice president Joe Biden at the time. So the potential for influence-peddling was certainly there.
But there wasn't any earthshaking outrage about it, except among a limited circle of ovethinking Republican strategists who, try as they did, simply couldn't package the whole thing as a sensational-enough scandal.
Back in the halcyon days of nobler politics in America, this could have been enough to trigger at least a 500-word article in the New York Times, or an episode of 60 Minutes. That's because in that genteel era of propriety in public office, the existence of actual corruption is not required. Even the mere whiff or suggestion of wrongdoing is enough to draw widespread public contempt.
That onion-skin criteria for public disdain is gone, in no small measure thanks to Donald Trump himself. ln fact, for a long time to come in US government, I suspect many US presidents will be able to get away with a million things short of murder. Just because the 45th president did horrendously worse before them.
Just the same, I think Hunter Biden--who served in Burisma's board from 2014 to 2019 (April) could have done better. If he thought there was nothing improper with him working for a company with no business dealings with the American government, he should have seized the initiative to claim high ground. He should have made his exit from Burisma much louder and blatant, inviting rather than deflecting attention from it. He didn't, he opted to slowly fade away from public view--no doubt upon the advise of Democrat strategists applying "less talk, less mistake; no talk no mistake." But he left behind a telling confession that even he believed his surname "Biden" was all the Burisma stockholders read off his resumé to bequeath him with a US$50,000 monthly paying job just doing basically one thing: being Biden. You'd think Hunter could have said something--anything--to assuage the ethical community that he didn't draw pay as a wallflower. But he kept mum.
On a limited scale, playing possum was a successful strategy because it deprived Donald Trump of a piñata he could have been whacking all throughout the campaign. That successfully diminished the attraction value of corruption as an issue against Joe Biden. He had a choice between telling his son to man up and explain, or to shut up and don't rock the boat. He preferred the latter. That is character clue right there.
On the other hand, it could be that Americans, in general, couldn't care less about a less-than-shocking involvement of a non-government official (Hunter Biden held no public office) in a non-transaction that involved no American taxpayer dollar. In 1984, Ron Reagan--son of US President Ronald Reagan--appeared in a TV commercial endorsing the American Express credit card company. People thought it was cute, certainly not outrageous. Even today, Donald Trump makes no effort to ensure that the involvement of Ivanka, Eric and Donald, Jr. in state affairs is discrete or even nondescript.
By and large that's the real reason why the Hunter Biden non-exposé simply couldn't get much traction even among the most cynical pundits. With Donald Trump hurling all the mud, it's simply too much of a teapot calling the kettle blacker.
But having said that, Hunter Biden would continue to attract controversy in a Joe Biden administration. The question used to be what was Hunter Biden's lobbying hitch on his father (the vice-president) for a company he is actually connected with?
Now it will be what is Hunter Biden's lobbying hitch with his father, the President, for all companies (not just Burisma) whose connections with him are now invisible? That creates a dilemma for Joe Biden. If he hearkens to his own moral standards of principled politics, he must not appoint Hunter Biden to any government position, certainly not a position in his cabinet. But that keeps Hunter Biden an undeniably well-connected lobbyist lurking in the shadows, unaccountable to no one.
Presidential children in contemporary times are always a tough challenge to handle. Barack and Michele Obama managed to keep Sasha and Maliya out of the political crosshairs by talking little about them. Doing even better, Bill and Hilllary Clinton shielded Chelsea from public view so jealously she was Washington's fleeting unicorn, hardly even seen by anyone. Hunter Biden has a shot to be Joe Biden's mythical Yeti, the Bigfoot--except everybody with a big bore rifle goes out of his way to try catch the poor thing. Hunter will find himself the hunted all throughout Daddy's term. And Daddy will always think of him as the millstone around his neck he simply can't get rid of.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon
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
2 comments:
You obviously only listen to CNN and other biased news.
The first step is to be up front about where we’re coming from and how we see things. We’ve got to acknowledge that everyone is biased, and that it’s OK.
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