Biden’s Campaign Proves That Democrats Could Have Been Fighting All Along

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

I embrace my role as something of a nag with an embarrassing level of relish and gusto, but over the years –decades at this point – I’ve regularly complained that the Democratic Party is capable of going toe to toe with the right and has stupidly chosen not to do so thanks to the party’s small-c conservative mindset when it comes to communications. Along comes President Joe Biden’s official reelection campaign, proving just that.

The @BidenHarrisHQ social media account is good. Around the clock, the account advances a narrative favorable to Biden and other Democrats by highlighting the right’s missteps, punches from Democrats, and media coverage that validates it all. The account also pumps out video compilations of Trump’s mental meltdowns and has quickly become a vehicle for pressuring the mainstream media to cover issues they were collectively ignoring or downplaying.

Yeah. Obviously.

The success of the account and the overall engagement of the Democratic Party to kick off Biden’s reelection campaign, centered by Biden himself at the State of the Union, is something I expected. I expect the Democratic machine to fire on all cylinders (more or less) between now and election day and that’s why I definitely wouldn’t write off the president’s chances of winning a second term.

But the problem this engagement highlights is the failure to operate like this over the last four years. The right never truly wound down the smear machine that tried to win a second term for Trump, and it hasn’t gone into hibernation since the 1990s to be frank. Since the Biden/Harris win in 2020, the right has filled the air with nonsense, lies, smears, and bigotry and jumped from issue to issue to make the president and his party into boogeymen and women.

Yes, world events and other unpredictable factors play a role in the erosion in Biden’s support and he has also made a few errors in office, but the smear machine has played a significant part in creating the support hole Biden is digging himself out of. Democrats have spent far too much time in wonk mode, tackling the very real problems that the Donald Trump disaster left behind, and not enough time in campaign mode. They have to do both. It just has to be done.

The narrative-building success of the Biden campaign, both offline and online, proves that the excuses frequently offered for why Democrats can’t always be “on” are bunk. We don’t live in a three-channel television universe anymore. Liberals do not need to get on their knees, begging the lords and masters of the press to cover them and their issues. While it may ultimately help their efforts at spreading a message, there is no need to sit back and wait for a “liberal Fox News” either. Information has never spread further and faster for this cheap in all of human history. Take advantage of it!

Democrats and liberals and progressives need to always be in fight “mode.” It may go against our collective natural inclinations to see politics as separate from policy, but both are needed in the modern world. You need politics to sell the policy and once the policy is law, you need politics to make it clear to the public over and over that the policy is working as intended.

I’ve often cited the example of Coca-Cola. Every person on the planet with a pulse knows what Coke is. We know what it tastes like, where to buy it, how much it costs, etc. Yet, the Coca-Cola corporation never leans back and tells itself, “Everyone knows what Coke is, we can stop now.” No, Coke is everywhere in our lives, constantly reminding us that this sugar water is an essential element.

Progressive policies are infinitely more important than Coke, so the effort to keep them top of mind with the public should ideally reach Coke levels of saturation – at a minimum.

This should be underway at all times. Yes, people do not pay much attention to politics and an election year is one of the few times they will engage, and that will usually be at the excruciating last minutes of a campaign. But that’s why a political operation and its affiliated ideological movement (liberalism) should always be pumping out information.

By saturating the atmosphere with a message and a narrative, when the public finally realizes its time to go vote again, you ideally want the way you’ve framed things to seep into their minds via cultural osmosis. That way, when a news event occurs (like Republicans banning in vitro fertilization for instance) it triggers a response like “this news event confirms what I’ve been hearing about these guys all along, I better go vote to stop them from screwing everything up again.”

None of this is particularly complex or expensive and as the Biden campaign is showing us right now, impossible to do. So, there are no real excuses, just a lack of will. It needs to be found.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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