Biden and Warren Can’t Avoid Their Weaknesses Forever

While both remain in the lead in various polls on the Democrat presidential nomination contest, both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren leave me with a sense of unease and a continued fear that neither can defeat Trump in a general election.  On Biden's part - if one overlooks his constant gaffes and age - the albatross of his son Hunter hangs over him and he refuses to fully and properly address the issue - something that plays directly into the hands of Trump and Fox News, the GOP state news channel.  On Warren's part, her refusal to admit that her health care plan would raise taxes in a very visible way is an Achilles heel that will not go away.  This, combined with her liberalism in general could likewise play to Trump's advantage. As a piece in New York Magazine notes, neither one of these candidates appears willing to address these liabilities and prepare for an onslaught by Trump should they win the nomination.  Here are article highlights:

If you paid close attention to the Democratic presidential debate this week, you noticed something that Democrats might find disturbing. The two leading candidates — Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, probably in that order — both faced tough questions that could damage them in the general election. And neither appears prepared to defend themselves against what is coming.

Begin with Biden, who has a simple problem with no clear solution. His son, Hunter, traded on his father’s name. In Ukraine, Hunter Biden accepted a lucrative position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Burisma surely believed hiring the vice-president’s son would give it political juice with the United States government. It did not. . . . Yet this does not fully absolve either Joe or Hunter. . . . At minimum, the arrangement marginally spent down the moral capital of the American government and economy by promoting the perception that official favor can be purchased through family members of powerful officials.

Trump, of course, has degraded that moral capital a million times over with his open nepotism and self-dealing. The problem Biden faces is that it is difficult to communicate the nuance of his position. . . . . Biden’s response to this dilemma was to elide it completely. At the debate, Biden simply insisted he and Hunter did nothing wrong while deflecting the inquiry.

For human and understandable reasons, Biden is obviously reluctant to scold his troubled son in public. Yet the fact is that his son’s behavior is an albatross for the father, and all indications suggest that, if Biden wins the nomination, the damage from this relationship will only grow.

Warren, for her part, faced yet another round of criticism over her refusal to acknowledge the financing mechanism of the health-care plan she has endorsed. The political weak point of the Sanders plan is that it would move 157 million Americans off of employer-sponsored insurance and onto Medicare. In theory, this should work out great. (I would be happy to trade my employer insurance for Medicare.) In practice, this requires convincing half the country to swap their current insurance for a government plan, and to convert their health-care premiums (which are nontransparent and remitted directly by their employer, reducing their wages only indirectly) into taxes (which are paid directly). Poll after poll shows both these changes turn the abstractly popular notion of broader coverage upside down.

Warren’s strategy is to dodge both objections. She has, in the past, avoided the question of people losing their employer insurance by saying nobody likes their insurance company. . . . On taxes, she changes the question to total cost and refuses to acknowledge that taxes will go up in the swap.

Warren’s admirers consider this dodge to be clever, but the last debate shows just how politically corrosive it could become. The problem is that Sanders, who wrote the damn bill, openly admits taxes would go up.  . . . The contrast between one Medicare for All supporter honestly admitting how the plan would work, and the other one refusing to admit it, did not make her look good. It gave her opponents an opening to cast her as shady, which they seized.

Pete Buttigieg pointed out that Warren’s response was “a yes or no question that didn’t get a yes or no answer.” Biden said, “it’s important to be straightforward with them,” and Amy Klobuchar added, “at least Bernie’s being honest here.” This is not merely a problem of Warren being associated with an unpopular policy. It is a question that is corroding her reputation for honesty, which is a foundation of her outsider, truth-telling brand.

As with Biden, Warren will find the reality that Trump is orders of magnitude worse to be of little value. Republicans have a party-controlled mass-media apparatus that has trained its rank and file to support liars, but the Democrats do not.

If Biden wants to beat Trump, he needs to put more distance between himself and his son. If Warren wants to beat Trump, she needs to ditch Bernie’s health-care plan and come up with one that doesn’t have political poison pills. The question with both candidates is, what steps are they willing to take to win?

Key for Democrats: Expose Trump as Weak, Thin Skinned

As noted in a number of posts, psychologists have described Donald Trump as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder - a trait he shares with dictators of the past such as Hitler, Stalin  and others.  This disorder causes him to be totally self-centered and dangerous due to a never ending desire to inflate his image and to lash out at those who question him or, worse yet, expose him for the fraud that he is.  Being a foul tempered narcissist does not make one strong.  Instead, it shows severe weakness - something the Democrats must expose between now and election day so that the elements of the ignorance embracing  right will awake to the fact that Trump is not the strong leader they think he is.  Rather, he is a grown version of a temper tantrum afflicted child.  A piece in Politico looks at the danger Trump poses to America and the world and the need to expose him.  Here are highlights:

American presidents get insulted and abused and lied about more than anyone on earth. They don’t have the options of thin-skinned dictators who jail dissidents and close newspapers. They have to take the attacks and do their jobs, or they can’t function. Worse, if they overreact and try to get even, they become downright dangerous.

That is why it would be so reckless to elect Donald Trump president. Nothing is more dangerous than a weak man with power, and Trump is weak. Very weak. He can’t take the pain of arguments and evidence that contradict his self-image.

If Trump can’t control himself when he gets bad press on a charity event, what would he do if a U.S. fighter pilot were downed in a skirmish with the Chinese? Would he escalate to prove he is a winner—putting more lives at risk to save his self-image?

Presidents need to take the heat and stay cool.

Trump’s self-description can’t be changed by the facts because it’s not driven by the facts; it’s driven by his emotional needs. It is how he needs to see himself and how he needs you to see him. But no one is as brilliant and triumphant as Trump claims he is. So what happens to the facts that don’t fit his story, the things he leaves out when he’s telling us what a winner he is? They become his shadow—the insulting labels such as “stupid,” “pathetic” and “loser” that he denies in himself and projects onto others.

If Trump’s self-image collides with reality, he revises reality. There is a big gap between who he is and who he wants to be, and when anyone says or does anything that makes him dimly aware of the difference, he hits them with a hot blast of abuse. This is the key to understanding Trump: He is driven by a relentless, belligerent defense of his self-image.

This is why he made racist attacks against Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel for his actions in the lawsuit on Trump University.

That’s why Trump attacked the media over their questions on his charity to Veterans Groups—calling one reporter “a sleaze,” another “a loser” and complaining, “You make me look very bad.”

Trump’s self-image runs his life. If he becomes president, it will run our country.
Trump is dangerous because he’s more extreme than we are—and in five ways: how grandiose his self-image is, how much he twists reality to fit it, how furious he becomes when it’s threatened, how much scrutiny his self-image takes in the media, and how many tools he has to promote his self-image and punish the people who threaten it.

The element that could change dramatically in the next year, and the one that ultimately determines how dangerous he is, is the last one—the tools he has to promote his self-image and punish people who threaten it.

He’s also said, "If I become president, oh, do they [the New York Times and The Washington Post] have problems. They're going to have such problems. And one of the things I'm going to do … if I win … is I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

Trump would not, as president, have the power to change libel laws, but this statement shows how eager he is to use the powers of the presidency to strike at his critics. Imagine if he had the tools of the CIA, FBI, IRS, the Justice Department, the U.S. military—and the nuclear codes—to promote his grandiose sense of self. President Trump would be able, almost entirely on his own—because there are no real checks and balances when it comes to pushing the button—order a nuclear strike. That makes his proximity to the presidency a global emergency.

Trump’s supporters all think he’s strong, so opponents should expose him as weak. They just have to change the way voters see his tantrums.

If the view of Trump as a thin-skinned guy who can’t take a punch becomes a dominant part of the campaign narrative, then his show of strength becomes a sign of weakness—and that weakness is not only exposed; it can be exploited.

The more attention is focused on his tirades, the more Trump’s pattern will become clear: He has a grandiose sense of self; he gets furious with those who challenge him, and if he gains the powers of the presidency, he will use them to confirm his self-image and punish those who attack it. This is the profile of a man who is not fit for duty. It is the face of a tyrant. The question is whether the country sees it before the election, or after he wins it.