Joe Biden is Repeating Hillary Clinton's Unsuccessful 2016 Campaign Strategy
Suffering people don't want to hear "America is already great" and "America is back."
Joe Biden is out with a new campaign advertisement and it is American exceptionalism devoid of ideas for fixing the major problems impoverishing the lives of everyday Americans.
He believes our best days are ahead, because he believes in the American people. Those who bet against America are learning how wrong they are. It’s never, ever been a good bet to bet against America, never.
A word salad of American exceptionalism and hyperbolic patriotism. Does it sound familiar?
Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign mostly ignored the significant economic and social problems in U.S. society — from deindustrialization to insecure middle-class livelihoods — and instead deployed vapid patriotic rhetoric, just like Biden is doing right now.
America is strong when we’re all strong. And you know we’ve got work to do, but not to make America great again. America never stopped being great. We’ve gotta make America whole.
The central theme of Clinton’s 2016 campaign was that Donald Trump didn’t need to make America great again, because “America is already great.”
The problem with this messaging was that when suffering people hear that “America is already great,” they interpret it as “America has no problems” or “stop whining,” especially when the candidate fails to emphasize substantive policy ideas over the course of the campaign. Unsurprisingly, Clinton failed to beat Trump because she lost essential Rust Belt states hollowed out by decades of federal neglect and bad trade policies.
It is therefore a bit alarming, but unsurprising, that Biden seems to be repeating the failed Clinton playbook in both actions and words — “America is already great” has become “America is back.” With problematic industrial policy that unionized blue-collar workers in the Upper Midwest are interpreting as privileging low-wage, right-to-work Southern states and a “Bidenomics” messaging effort downplaying pain from inflation that only appears to be making voters more upset, Biden is further alienating working-class voters increasingly attracted to the GOP.
Like Clinton in 2016, Biden’s 2024 strategy mixes attacks on Trump’s character and lack of respect for democratic norms with cheerleading American greatness. You’ll hear more about American exceptionalism than a public health insurance option or free child care. Indeed, Biden’s campaign Web site has zero policy ideas while Trump’s Web site lists 15, including “Fair Trade for the American Worker” and “Better Health Care Choices at Lower Costs.” I don’t agree with all of the “problems” that Trump has identified, nor his proposals for fixing them, but voters value specificity.
The reality is that the U.S. has a lot of problems and voters notice when you ignore them. This is a list of problems that would receive significant attention from any center-left politician running for national office in another country.
100,000 overdose deaths last year: “Europe, where opioids are much more tightly regulated, does not yet present the open market for fentanyl seen in the US. There were about 5,800 drug overdose deaths across the EU last year, a fraction of the US death toll.”
Declining life expectancy: “U.S. life expectancy has declined to 76.4 years, the shortest it’s been in nearly two decades, according to December data from the CDC.”
Millions of poor Americans losing health insurance for paperwork reasons: “A 33-year-old waitress earning $3 an hour plus tips, Fortner walked out of the drugstore without the pills. She is among nearly 4 million Americans who have been lopped off Medicaid since the end of a pandemic-era promise that people with the safety-net health coverage could keep it…”
Surging youth gun violence: “The number of children killed by guns in 2021 was higher than in any year since 1999, the first year the CDC began tracking the data, according to the report.”
Worst affordable housing crisis in decades: “US mortgage rates surged this week, rising to their highest level in 21 years.”
Increasing numbers of Americans unable to afford health care: “The share of Americans who skipped medical treatment last year because of costs rose substantially from the lows of 2020 and 2021, per a Federal Reserve Survey out Monday.”
Average Americans can no longer afford new cars: “The average price of a new car in the United States hit $48,000 in March of this year, according to Kelley Blue Book. That’s about $12,000 higher than it was just five years ago.”
Surging credit card debt: “Unfortunately, it’s only going to go up from here,” Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst for LendingTree, said in an interview with CNN “What’s driving it is inflation, higher interest rates and just generally how expensive life is in 2023.”
Insecure retirements due to current inflation: “More Americans are tapping their 401(k) accounts because of financial distress, according to Bank of America data released Tuesday.”
Compared to Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan — other rich countries where macroeconomic indicators are a bit weaker, but political economies provide for more secure livelihoods and broad-based welfare — the U.S. is not in a good place. In a big federal republic, it would be silly to blame these all of these complex problems on the president alone, but it is an issue when the president fails to even acknowledge them while campaigning for reelection. Instead of acknowledging these problems and proposing solutions, recent Democratic presidential candidates have lazily retreated to the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and narrowly focused on Donald Trump’s moral failings. That’s what Hillary did in 2016 and Biden is clearly planning to do in 2024. (The 2020 election hyperfocused on the pandemic response, though that was largely framed as a failure of Trump’s “leadership,” which allowed Biden to ignore the structural social policy failures most responsible for outsized U.S. mortality.)
It’s possible that, with Trump’s indictments and Republican attacks on abortion, Biden might be more successful with this playbook than Hillary was in 2016, but things aren’t looking good so far. If Biden wants to avoid handing the White House back to Trump, he will have to speak more openly and honestly about fixing the many policy failures causing Americans to lead shorter, harder, and crueler lives than people in other industrialized countries.
I do think that the abortion situation may tip the balance in Biden's favor in some of the swing districts that went for Trump in 2016. Nonetheless this article highlights many of Biden's shortcomings, and the reason that I favor RFK Jr in the primary.