Cagle World

Editor’s note: Dick Polman will be on vacation this week. He will return with a new column on Tuesday, Sept. 8.

First of all, those maskless South Lawn cultists who soaked up Donald Trump’s serial lies with a dearth of social distancing should be required to wear badges identifying themselves as MAGA Super-Spreaders. That way, innocents on the street can flee their presence with all deliberate speed.

There’s no better way to distill Trump’s deadly feral narcissistic essence than to assess Thursday night’s desecration of what, until now, was known as the people’s house. We taxpayers were forced to underwrite the toxic spectacle, staged for the sole purpose of coaxing the average American sap into believing that normalcy reigns supreme and that COVID-19 is in the throes of surrender.

I won’t waste your time fact-checking his endless string of lies – I threw up my hands after he declared that he’d “passed” a reform law to help military vets, a law that was actually signed by President Obama in 2014.

Instead, I’ll focus on his pandemic propaganda, which casts him in the role of savior taking bold action to mobilize the country, shut down travel from China and develop the best testing system on Earth.

In truth, long after the virus was on the march, Trump attempted to assure us that U.S. cases were declining to zero, that it was “under control” and would magically “disappear.” He also said testing should be reduced because more confirmed cases made us look bad and states should reopen, even as they were failing to meet health guidelines put in place by his own task force.

Trump also thought Americans might benefit if they gulped hydroxychloroquine or injected a disinfectant.

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the blood of 180,000 dead Americans is on his hands. But the ballots of low-information voters count just as much as ours. That’s where the serially bankrupt casino owner has placed his bets.

That’s why he keeps peddling the con about his “bold action” shutting down travel from China. In truth, his ban had all kinds of exemptions that still permitted 40,000 people to enter America from China. And the first confirmed virus cases in America came from Europe, not China.

He’s also betting that enough voters will buy his phony boast about how we’ve supposedly built the biggest and best testing program. In truth, when we look at tests per capita, America lags behind many other countries, including Russia. And the time lag between testing and results is longer in America than in many other countries.

And his boast about America’s supposedly low “fatality rate” – the percentage of virus victims who die – is yet another con. The medical experts at Johns Hopkins University report that of the 20 nations most afflicted by the virus, America ranks 11th. And if we measure deaths per 100,000 people, America is one of the worst. It ranks 4th highest.

But the bottom line, of course – which Trump failed to mention Thursday night – is that America, with only four percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of all confirmed cases. Indeed, between opening night and closing night of the Republican convention, more Americans died from the virus than died on 9/11.

Do the math: Since the dawn of Trump’s pandemic, we’ve had the body count equivalent of 6000 9/11s. If we recall how Republicans went ballistic when a grand total of two people died from Ebola during Obama’s tenure, just imagine how they’d be reacting now if Hillary Clinton – or Joe Biden – had racked up 180,000 dead. They wouldn’t be buying the lies that fouled the South Lawn.

“We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores.” That’s what Joe Biden said… on Oct. 15, 2019.

Will a pivotal share of voters guzzle Trump’s Kool-Aid a second time? I’m loath to predict, given what happened the first time. I just wish people would look up Trump’s 2016 acceptance speech and parse this particular passage:

“The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Aw, gee. The Trumpist Republicans have broken their promise. Who could have ever seen that coming?

They vowed to stage an upbeat, optimistic convention – to offer, in the words of chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, “an aspirational vision toward the next four years.” But what we got instead on the first night was the apocalyptic message that Donald Trump is all that protects us from the radical left anarchist rioting Godless commie socialists who aim to torch the decadent cities and lay waste to the Caucasian McMansions of suburbia.

If nothing else, Trump’s crew knows how to stay on message no matter what. The 2020 Republican National Convention opened with their post office lackey being grilled by a House committee, the news that their top evangelical fanboy (Jerry Falwell Jr.) watched his wife (a Women for Trump board member) have sex with the pool boy, and a recording of Trump’s own sister saying the president has “no principles.” Oh, and 27 ex-Republican lawmakers and 73 ex-Republican national security officials announced their endorsed Joe Biden.

It was downright Orwellian to hear them hail Trump as the sworn enemy of communists, given the fact that Trump has spent his tenure licking the shoes of a former KGB agent and writing love letters to the commie of North Korea. It was similarly weird to hear them hail Trump as the peerless savior who rescued us from the virus, given his track record of quackery and denial, and an ever-escalating death toll that has torn apart families and humiliated us worldwide.

But that’s what happens when a party stands for nothing except a cult of pathological personality.

The GOP, which once stood for small government and limited executive power, is now nothing more than a malleable instrument of der leader’s whim. Its apparatchiks decided – for the first time since the party’s founding in 1856 – not to draft a platform of party principles. You read that right, there is no platform.

Instead, they resolved to “continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”

In other words, “I’m with stupid.”

Even the conservative National Review was appalled, writing in an editorial that “the Republican Party should stand for something.”

Policywise, we did get a few Trumpist bullet points, but they read like they were scrawled on a napkin in a Vegas bar at three in the morning. “Protect our veterans,” “return to normal in 2021,” “provide school choice,” “teach American exceptionalism,” and my personal favorite, “cover all preexisting conditions.” That one is odd, given the fact that Trump is currently in the courts trying to kill off Obamacare, which protects people’s preexisting conditions. And remember, a month ago, when he promised to unveil a health reform bill within two weeks? There’s nothing about that on the Vegas bar napkin.

This is not a party anymore. It is a cult hooked on power, determined to scare the bejesus out of people for the sole purpose of sustaining power. As veteran congressional Republican aide Brendan Buck told Politico journalist Tim Alberta, the Trump party’s ethos can be summed up thusly: “Owning the libs and pissing off the media. There’s really not much more to it.”

The big question is whether the cult’s paranoid doomsday message, amplified hourly by right-wing “media,” will resonate with enough voters to renew the freak show for another interminable season.

As Trump is fond of saying, “We’ll see what happens.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Given how dangerous Donald Trump truly is, how cavalier he is about torching the Constitution and tallying American casualties, it’s probably a darn good thing he’s stone-cold stupid.

Trump’s whole strategy has been to depict Biden as a decrepit vegetable who doesn’t know where he is or what day it is, some old fossil who drools when he tries to string together a sentence. Contrast that cartoon with the guy who capped the Democratic convention with a performance that was presidential in both style and substance.

Only Trump cultists drunk on the demagogue’s Kool-Aid could possibly conclude otherwise, but those folks aren’t reachable anyway. Thursday night, even some of Fox News’ commentators felt compelled to acknowledge reality. Karl Rove, the former Bush guru, said that Biden gave “a very good speech,” Brit Hume said that Biden spoke “with force and clarity,” and former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said that Biden “hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth. He had pace, rhythm, energy, emotion, and delivery.”

How so? Let us count the ways:

He prioritized country over party. Drawing a sharp contrast with Trump (one of many), he said: “While I will be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president. I will work as hard for those who didn’t support me as I will for those who did. That’s the job of a president – to represent all of us, not just our base or our party. This is not a partisan moment. This must be an American moment.”

He concisely defined the historic stakes in 2020: “This is a life-changing election that will determine America’s future for a very long time. Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy. They are all on the ballot. Who we are as a nation. What we stand for. And, most importantly, who we want to be.That’s all on the ballot.”

He pointedly pledged to repair our battered standing in the world: “I will be a president who will stand with our allies and friends. I will make it clear to our adversaries the days of cozying up to dictators are over. Under President Biden, America will not turn a blind eye to Russian bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Nor will I put up with foreign interference in our most sacred democratic exercise – voting.”

He spoke directly, and authentically, to Americans who are grieving and hurting: “I know how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes. But I’ve learned two things. First, your loved ones may have left this Earth but they never leave your heart. They will always be with you. And second, I found the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose. As God’s children, each of us have a purpose in our lives.”

He highlighted his specific plan to fight the pandemic: “We’ll develop and deploy rapid tests with results available immediately. We’ll make the medical supplies and protective equipment our country needs. And we’ll make them here in America. So we will never again be at the mercy of China and other foreign countries in order to protect our own people. We’ll make sure our schools have the resources they need to be open, safe, and effective. We’ll put the politics aside and take the muzzle off our experts so the public gets the information they need and deserve. The honest, unvarnished truth. They can deal with that. We’ll have a national mandate to wear a mask – not as a burden, but to protect each other. It’s a patriotic duty.”

Plus, a quiet coda from an Irish poet: “Seamus Heaney once wrote, History says, Don’t hope on this side of the grave / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme. This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme…May history be able to say that the end of this chapter of American darkness began here tonight as love and hope and light joined in the battle for the soul of the nation.”

We’ll see next week whether Trump can match Biden’s rhetorical power, compassion, and perfect pitch. How foolish it was to place the bar for Biden so low that even a caterpillar could’ve vaulted it. And how fortunate we are to have a sane alternative to four more years of madness.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

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We’re compelled to interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you the latest dire reminder that Joe Biden, now the official Democratic nominee, will be facing off against a willing Russian stooge who welcomed Vladimir Putin’s illegal assistance in 2016 and is totally fine with doing so again. This reminder was voiced Tuesday by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, which released 1,000 pages that truly frames the stakes in 2020.

Page 32 says it all. During the 2016 race, there was a “direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.” Trump’s chief plotter was his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

Here’s another gem: “The committee found that Manafort’s presence on the campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on the Trump campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with Russian intelligence services…represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”

Indeed, Manafort secretly shared Trump campaign info with a guy named Konstantin Kilimnik, who just so happened to be “a Russian intelligence agent.” That jibes with a passage in the Mueller Report that said in the summer of 2016, while the Russians were busy hacking on Trump’s behalf, Manafort was sharing “internal polling data” with a Russian suspected of being an intelligence agent – most notably, polling data from the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

We’ve long known that Trump is a Putin stooge – despite Bill Barr’s craven attempts to spin it all away – but it’s refreshing to see it spelled out by a Republican-led Senate committee. Especially all the dirty details about how team Trump tried to cover up the 2016 Russian connection: “The Trump campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”

Ah yes, WikiLeaks – the repository of the Hillary campaign material stolen by Russia’s hackers. This new Senate report, vetted by the panel’s Republicans, contains the strongest evidence thus far that Trump and his campaign used Roger Stone as a conduit to get the inside skinny on what the Russia-WikiLeaks operation was releasing.

But enough about 2016. What about now?

The Senate report hints – but does not spell out – that the Russians, with Trump’s silent indulgence, is trying to meddle on his behalf in 2020. The committee features a statement from one its members, Ron Wyden, who says that the report “includes redacted information that is directly relevant to Russia’s interference in the 2020 election.”

Ideally, it would’ve been nice if the report had told us more. But to recognize what’s happening, we need only remember what one of our top intelligence officials said publicly earlier this month. William Evanina, a career law enforcement guy who runs the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (and a Trump appointee, no less) said this: “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden…some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media and Russian television.”

But has Trump ever sounded the alarm about any of this? As if.

Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, recalls in a devastating new video that whenever he and other senior security officials tried to broach the Russian meddling issue with Trump, it didn’t go well.

“He was distracted, he was disinterested, but ultimately, he denied it. He denied that this was a threat. He denied that this was a concern,” Taylor said. “What the president wanted to talk about was how resoundingly he’d won the election in 2016…From that point on, you had people in the administration who were scared to go out and talk about one of the top national security threats facing our country.”

Granted, the Trump-Russia connection is not one of the top-tier voting issues in this election. The pandemic and the crashed economy clearly take precedence. And the Democrats, in their virtual convention, are rightly emphasizing the everyday traumas that directly and adversely affecting people’s lives.

What the new Senate report does do is remind us that the choice this year is ultimately between authoritarianism and democracy. It’s up to us to save our noble experiment.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Even in the darkness of Donald Trump’s dystopia, the enduring promise of America has still flickered. Despite all his cult’s efforts to turn back the clock to the good old days of white hegemony, the pluralistic multiracial melting-pot America has still been percolating, yearning to breathe free. It’s been there all along, waiting for a breakout moment.

That moment has arrived, and it defines the stakes for this country in 2020.

In electoral terms, vice presidential picks are rarely pivotal. But Kamala Harris’ ascent is freighted with historic symbolism. As the daughter of Jamaican and Indian parents, as the child of immigrants, she’ll help Joe Biden rebuild the bridge to the America we still aspire to be. Indeed, Biden himself signaled that back in March, when he campaigned with Harris: “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire (new) generation of leaders…They are the future of this country.”

Harris is not a “perfect” pick, not to the Democratic litmus-testers who demand perfection on all left-leaning issues. But what’s most noteworthy – and most encouraging, especially in these difficult times – is that so many pundits are describing her as a “safe” pick. We’ve finally reached the point, happily so, when the inclusion of a Black and Asian woman on a national ticket is deemed to be “safe.”

It’s also shrewd, because Harris straddles all the groups that Trump has long vilified: women, Blacks, and immigrants.

Will she tap her prosecutor’s creds and fillet Mike Pence in the veep debate (assuming Pence isn’t dumped for Nikki Haley)? Yup, Harris v. Pence will likely be a bloodbath. Will she help boost minority turnout (especially Black women) in the key cities of swing states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin – where Hillary Clinton fatally failed? On the margins, sure. Will her track record as a prosecutor and California attorney general alienate some activists on the left (on Twitter, she’s sometimes derided as “a cop” who worked for “The Man”)? I suppose so.

But it’s arguably too early to game out those scenarios. What matters most, right now, is that Joe Biden has sent a powerful message of hope to voters who are desperate to empower democratic diversity and leave authoritarian racism in the rear-view mirror.

And Biden is sending an important message about himself. Harris beat him up in the first Democratic debate 14 months ago, but he’s comfortable enough in his own skin to eschew a grudge – and clearly secure enough to govern in partnership with an assertive woman of color. If someone like Harris had ever assailed Donald Trump in the same fashion, Trump would still be attacking the woman’s looks and tweeting his grievances on the nocturnal toilet. Biden, by contrast, is basically telling the electorate, “As a party, we need to be unified. As a country, we need to heal, racially and politically. The stakes are too high for anything else.”

Sure, Trump is already trying to bust Harris’ bubble. He said she was a captive of the radical left. Trump also inaugurated the nickname “Phony Kamala,” but ask yourself whether he, of all people, can get traction by calling somebody else a phony. And it’s a tad weird for Trump to slap the word “phony” on a candidate to whom he has donated money in the past. Yes, folks, he gave $6,000 to Harris when she was campaigning for California attorney general. Daughter Ivanka kicked in $2,000 more.

Trump fled the other night to Sean Hannity’s safe room, where he said a few nonsensical things about Harris (she’s “against petroleum”), but quickly veered into God knows what: “Wind is nice, it’s nice. But it causes tremendous problems. Site and home values going way down. If you see a windmill and you hear a windmill, your home goes down by half. It kills all the birds.”

When you hear that kind of blather, you can’t help but entertain the possibility that we’re on the cusp of saying “Madame Vice President.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

It’s a waste of time to write or read speculative stories about who’s trending up or down in a veep hunt.

I’m old enough to remember 1968, when barrels of ink were expended on Richard Nixon’s vice presidential search, yet nobody had Spiro Agnew on their bingo card. And as a political reporter in 2000, I joined the hordes who thought that George W. Bush would choose a moderate Republican governor, only to be stunned when it turned out to be Dick Cheney.

So I have little interest in gaming out Joe Biden’s pick, even though the pandemic has dried up the campaign trail, stolen much of the grist for summer stories, and thus stoked the temptation to engage in veep guesswork. The woman’s identity will be shared with us soon enough.

What interests me is that Biden will run with a woman. Unless Trump blows up the postal service and rigs the election, there’s an excellent chance history will be made this year, and for the first time someone who is not a white male will be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

How appropriate that this nomination will be announced on virtually the 100th anniversary of the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote.

So far, the only female vice president I ever recall seeing was Glenn Close in the film “Air Force One.” But that was just reel life. In real life, the two previous nominees were disasters.

In 1984, Walter Mondale needed a miracle to catch incumbent Ronald Reagan, so he tried to shake things up by choosing Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro – who virtually imploded when she tried to stonewall disclosures of her husband’s shady financial dealings. In 2008, in another Hail Mary move, John McCain served up the execrable Sarah Palin, whose babbling ignorance foreshadowed the rise of Trump.

Thankfully those whiffs are old news, and the landscape is markedly different in 2020. Biden is strong in all the swing-state polls, and America’s mortician is sinking under the dead weight of his mendacious incompetence.

All the stars are aligning for a female vice president. Trump has long been hemorrhaging support among white women with college degrees – goodbye, suburbs – and he’s suffering serious erosion among working-class women without degrees. Women of color, in particular, were fervently hostile to Trump in 2016 and remain the most loyal cohort in the Democratic coalition.

So whether the choice is Kamala Harris or Susan Rice or Elizabeth Warren or Tammy Duckworth or Karen Bass or Val Demings or whoever I’ve overlooked, it’s likely that the macro factors at play will buoy her into office. If there’s any good news to be had in 2020, it’s the opportunity to showcase a well-qualified woman who has the credentials to lead. (As if that should be a revelation. Elsewhere in the world, women leaders have been more successful than their male counterparts in flattening the pandemic curve.)

Biden doesn’t have to worry about calculating “geographic balance” or “ideological balance,” not when polls show that 50 percent of the electorate has already dumped Trump as a voting option. Biden has the luxury to pick a woman who simply checks these boxes: Can she do the job if Biden is sidelined or deceased? Is she inter-personally “sympatico” (Biden’s word) with the boss? And in the short run, does she have the smarts and fortitude to weather the scrutiny of a presidential campaign, albeit one that is conducted mostly in the virtual world?

When Geraldine Ferraro won the 1984 veep nomination, she exulted to the delegates, “There are no doors we cannot unlock! We will place no limits on achievement! If we can do this, we can do anything!” If all finally goes well in 2020, historians can say that she was off by a mere 36 years.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

It’s simple math. A successful political coalition is built on the principle of addition, not subtraction. Basically, you welcome anyone who wants to help. You park all disagreements and join forces for the common cause.

All Democrats should be thrilled that vocal cadres of anti-Trump Republicans are laboring to defeat – by the most decisive margin possible – the worst excuse for a human to ever squat in the Oval Office. But alas, that does not please the Democrats’ purity police. The GOP veterans who are currently agitating against Trump have worked with conservatives in the past, therefore, their sins apparently render them unqualified to help in the present.

Case in point: We got word last week that former Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich will endorse Joe Biden and address Democrats at the virtual national convention in August. Lots of liberal litmus-testers are predictably horrified. As one of them wrote the other day, “I don’t think that having a ‘big tent’ means it’s necessary to highlight people who would knock down your tentpoles.” And lefty Twitter predictably weighed in: “Kasich is pro-capitalist. The more Dems lean right, the more we lose.”

One big rap against Kasich is that he signed anti-abortion bills and withheld state funds from Planned Parenthood. But his Republican track record is precisely why he should speak for Biden at his convention.

During this unprecedented national emergency, it should be all hands on deck. If Kasich can help persuade even a small percentage of Republicans to switch sides in November – especially in Ohio, which is unexpectedly competitive for Biden – it could have an outsized impact on the results. Trump’s support is eroding – his approval rating on the pandemic has dropped to a record low 32 percent – and Kasich’s old-school GOP credentials make him the perfect person to woo more Republicans.

Is it possible that the purity police have never heard of the old axiom that politics makes strange bedfellows? Isn’t it smart politics for Biden to accommodate the Bernie Sanders wing on the left (which he’s doing) while also reaching out to anyone on the right who cares about the national interest?

Indeed, the progressives who are hostile to Kasich have somehow overlooked the issues they have in common – most notably, Kasich’s gubernatorial decision in 2013 to defy the GOP by expanding Medicaid under Obamacare. When Republicans assailed him for that blasphemy (because any support for Barack Obama was a blasphemy), he said that he wanted to make “real improvement in people’s lives.” He also said: “When you die and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”

Kasich, like Biden, speaks the language of human decency. In this dire election year, there’s a strong yearning for decency, ideally powered by people who can reach across the divide. If Kasich and other anti-Trump Republicans want to help steer the careening American ship, why should it matter what they did five, 10, or 20 years ago?

The liberal purity police would be wise to remember what Ronald Reagan – winner of two decisive presidential elections – once said about strange bedfellows: He wasn’t endorsing them; they were endorsing him.

Uh oh. Is it OK if I invoke Ronald Reagan?

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Here’s the 2020 presidential race in a nutshell: On Tuesday, Joe Biden unveiled the “third pillar” of his substantive plan to defeat our health and economic crises. A few hours later, Donald Trump droned on at length about the pandemic that he has cataclysmically botched – he conceded it would no longer “magically” disappear – and he finished by sending a verbal bouquet to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficker.

I won’t dwell on the fact that Biden is consistently polling well in all the pivotal states, and threatening to ride a blue wave. I’ll willingly cop to the usual caveats about how “it’s still early” and “a lot could change.” But as Will Ferrell remarked in a recent movie, “Every day is all we have.” And every day, the basic dynamic of this race continues to favor Biden. Three big interrelated reasons:

Biden is an elusive target. He emerges from quarantine on a limited schedule of his own choosing, to highlight his policy proposals and comport himself the way a president should. He refuses to play Trump’s game.

Trump thrives on smear-countersmear. When he lies that Biden is a closet socialist, lies that Biden will “abolish” the suburbs, lies that Biden will end religion, and lies that Biden is a doddering fossil, he desperately wants Biden to take the bait and engage. But Biden has no interest in fighting with Trump on Twitter. He ignores the attacks and assails Trump on his own terms.

There’s an old saying in politics that when your opponent is destroying himself, stand back and let it happen. Why should Biden get down in the mud with Trump when Trump is relentlessly heaping it on himself?

No wonder the Trump team is so flummoxed. As former Republican adviser Max Boot noted the other day, “Biden isn’t an African American like Barack Obama, a woman like Hillary Clinton, or a (real) socialist like Bernie Sanders. He’s a boring moderate white guy who has been around forever without ever being demonized.” In other words, he’s the last person Trump would ever want as a foil.

Biden leads a largely united party. Trump was hoping for a repeat of 2016, when the headlines were “Democrats in Disarray.” He got lucky last time. The Hillary and Bernie forces were bitterly at odds and never really closed ranks. But this time, Trump has nothing to exploit. Biden and Bernie have forged a peace pact, and Biden has selectively moved left on policy without abandoning centrist turf.

Biden’s coalition-building isn’t sexy, it will never sate cable news’ appetite for conflict, but it’s precisely what Democrats needed to do after the 2016 debacle. And it’s the last thing Trump wanted the Democrats to do. The best Trump could do, in his Sunday interview with Chris Wallace, was to concoct the lie (fact-checked by Fox News) that the Biden-Bernie pact will “abolish” the police.

“Sleepy Joe” is actually a compliment. Trump has eased off that intended insult because his beleaguered team has decided it ain’t working. Biden kept rising in the spring and summer polls, which apparently proves that a stupid nickname matters far less to voters than screwing up a killer pandemic. And what’s wrong with being “sleepy?” After Trump, we could all use some rest, a general lowering of the public temperature.

Ari Fleischer, the former Bush flack and no friend of the Democrats, said it best the other day: “With three and a half years of President Trump being as red hot as he is, and with the COVID scare underway, ‘sleepy’ also connotes calm, which may very well be the antidote for many voters.”

So yeah, the campaign calendar suggests that it’s still “early.” But the core dynamic of this race hasn’t budged for months, and, for the reasons I’ve listed, it may well have solidified. As Yogi Berra is reputed to have said, “It gets late early out there.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

In “The Verdict,” a sleazy lawyer played by Paul Newman crashes a stranger’s funeral and cons the widow with a blast of blarney about her late husband: “I knew him vaguely through the Lodge. He was a wonderful man.”

I thought of that scene while reading the Republican tributes to John Lewis. The civil rights icon had fought all his life for voting rights, for equal access to the ballot, and high-ranking members of the GOP paid obeisance this past weekend with faux fulsome words.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy lauded Lewis as “a patriot in the truest sense,” and looked back fondly on a memorial march he’d made with Lewis across the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge. McCarthy called it “one the greatest honors of my life.”

Down in Lewis’ home state, Gov. Brian Kemp called Lewis “a civil rights hero, freedom fighter, devoted public servant, and beloved Georgian who changed our world in a profound way.” It was enough to make your eyes misty.

And up on Capitol Hill, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell swooned, “Our great nation’s history has only bent toward justice because great men like John Lewis took it upon themselves to help bend it…He endured hatred and violence. But he kept working because he was convinced that our nation had to be better.”

The gall of those people. Their honeyed rhetoric is rank hypocrisy, because all three have sought to undercut Lewis’ life work.

Last winter, Kevin McCarthy voted against an historic House bill, co-sponsored by Lewis, that would make it harder to disenfranchise minority voters. Two years ago, Brian Kemp became governor after leading a Republican effort to make voting more difficult, purging 1.5 million voters from the Georgia rolls. And Mitch McConnell, the most powerful figure in the Senate, has been sitting on Lewis’ House-passed voting rights bill for the last seven months, refusing to bring it up.

In the words of former Obama attorney general Eric Holder, their paeans to Lewis are nothing more than “performance mourning.”

If McConnell, in particular, truly wants to honor Lewis’ life, he’d let his colleagues vote on Lewis’ Voting Rights Advancement Act.

As a young activist, Lewis played a crucial role in pushing Washington to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to help minorities gain equal access to the ballot – especially in states, mostly in the South, that had long suppressed minority voting. States with a history of ballot discrimination were put under close Justice Department scrutiny.

Such was the law of the land – until 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Republican appointees erased the Justice Department’s enforcement powers, insisting that such oversight was no longer needed. John Roberts declared (in one of the most hilarious lines of 2013) that racial disenfranchisement “is no longer the problem it once was.” And Antonin Scalia called it “a perpetuation of racial entitlement.”. John Lewis told a reporter that Scalia’s remark made him want to cry.

Sure enough, soon after the high court gutted the Voting Rights Act, vote-suppressing Republican states sprang into action. Texas and North Carolina enacted strict photo ID requirements aimed at low-income minorities. Georgia launched a voter purge and closed polling sites to make it harder for minorities to vote. Nationwide, roughly 1,700 polling sites have been shuttered.

But Chief Justice Roberts had given Congress a wee bit of wiggle room: lawmakers could find a way to revise and update the Voting Rights Act – enabling the Justice Department to stop voter suppression without picking on the southern states so much – then, yes, it could live on. That’s precisely what Lewis was trying to do, with his Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Alas, Mitch McConnell – for all his high-flown rhetoric about Lewis bending the arc of justice – has consistently refused to lift a finger for voting rights.

That’s ironic, because when the Voting Rights Act was up for renewal back in 2006, the Republican House and the Republican Senate passed it overwhelmingly…with a thumbs-up from McConnell. Their reasoning: “40 years has not been a sufficient amount of time to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination…and to ensure that the right of all citizens to vote is protected as guaranteed by the Constitution.”

But that was so 14 years ago. Today’s Republicans are tethered to an openly racist president who’s terrified that equal ballot access will doom in November. Today’s Republicans pay lip service to John Lewis, and thwart him with their deeds. Today’s Republicans, in the words of Eric Holder, “wrap themselves in the Constitution while gutting its protections.”

Unless or until these hypocrites are driven from power, John Lewis’ life work will remain unfulfilled.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected].