Bill Clinton offered the audience at the Democratic National Convention a gentle admonition this week: to defeat Donald Trump, focus on his narcissism, not his fabrications.
It sounded like he was talking directly to Joe Biden, who by that time was on vacation in California.
Just two nights before Clinton spoke, during Biden’s farewell convention speech, the current president had cited Trump mistruths on crime and border policy multiple times. “I never thought I’d stand before a crowd of Democrats and refer to a president as a liar so many times,” Biden said as midnight approached.
Clinton’s comment was part of something broader going on this week in Chicago: Even as Democratic leaders praised Biden for his leadership (and for dropping out of the race a month ago), they implicitly and specifically rejected his political strategy toward Trump.
Biden’s portrait of this election as a defensive “battle for the soul of the nation:” Gone and replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris’ more optimistic rhetorical focus on freedom, bolstering middle class families and bridging divides.
“With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past,” Harris said Thursday night.
Biden’s focus on the dangers of the former Republican president’s lies — a well-worn fact-checking approach to Trump that’s often dominated Democratic politics since 2016: supplanted by withering mockery of Trump’s obsession with himself.
“The next time you hear him, don’t count the lies. Count the ‘I’s,’” Clinton said Tuesday.
Or as Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who’s running against Sen. Ted Cruz, said Thursday night of Trump and Cruz: They’re the “me guys.”
Michelle Obama’s rousing speech Tuesday night subtly reflected the shift at hand.
Her decision to “go low” by going after Trump got the headlines. But she also captured something about the demoralizing state of affairs that many Americans perceive when she said that “until recently,” she had experienced “a deep pit in her stomach, a palpable sense of dread about the future.”
The phrase “until recently” of course, would have to include the Biden years, during which the president often struggled to communicate a compelling national vision even as he helped bring the country out of the pandemic crisis and pushed a string of legislative achievements through Congress.
Implicit rebuke or not, the former first lady’s speech seemed carefully crafted to encourage Democrats to abandon the darkness — and buckle up for a fight this fall.
Biden’s focus on the former president as a threat to the republic — not as the self-obsessed, if politically dangerous, buffoon that both Clinton and Barack Obama described him Tuesday and Wednesday — has been a tension point among elected Democrats and strategists since Biden took office in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Biden and his inner circle argued that casting the 2022 midterms as a vote to “preserve democracy” helped ensure a stronger-than-expected cycle for Democrats — and insisted it would work again in 2024, in the weeks before he dropped out.
But in a country where half the voting public isn’t buying that Trump is an existential threat — and where some see his lies as probably no worse than those told by other presidents like … Bill Clinton — some Democratic officials viewed Biden’s line of attack with skepticism.
And while it was primarily the question of Biden’s age that drove him from the presidential race last month, some Democrats, like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, had lost confidence in his political instincts, or those of his team.
The past week suggests a rapidly formed Democratic consensus that a serious but sunny message contrasting Trump’s vanity and ego with the virtues of the Harris-Walz ticket is the most effective strategy for a historic 73-day sprint to the election.
Harris warned of a Trump without “guardrails,” but took a more measured approach then Biden Thursday evening. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said. “But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
There was another rhetorical shift evident in the speeches by Tim Walz, Clinton, both Obamas, Oprah Winfrey and others: a “middle class” emphasis on hospital workers, teachers, Amazon delivery workers and more — and a focus, reminiscent of Obama’s 2008 campaign, on the idea that in a deeply polarized society, neighbors of different stripes can find common ground.
The shift still involves some calibration. For instance, even as Harris and Democrats have gone all-in on the abortion rights message — with much made of the fact that Biden never liked to say the word “abortion” — Walz was careful as he spoke about the issue Wednesday.
“We also protected reproductive freedom, because, in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make,” he told the crowd Wednesday night. “And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”
It also comes with risk, as Democrats face an unforgiving battleground landscape over the coming 75 days.
But Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, endorsed the more joyful approach to campaigning that Harris has been pushing. “It’s not naive. It might sound weird talking about joy when we know what we’re up against, and we’re concerned about the durability of our democracy and we’ve witnessed political violence on the steps of the Capitol,” he told POLITICO’s Adam Wren on Thursday. “This call to joy is not about saying everything’s fine. … There’s just more to it than grim determination, and that’s how I’d rather win a campaign.”