The Task at Hand
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/19/opinion/biden-trump-polls-debates.html"
“Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It)”
Joe Biden has performed a wondrous magic act: making himself disappear.
It is true that Donald Trump takes up more hot air in the room than imaginable, leaving little space for anyone else to be seen or heard. And his current criminal trial, in a perverse reversal of fortune, has seemed merely to afford the baddest of boys even better opportunity to swallow the limelight whole.
Meanwhile Joe is railing about Donald being the ultimate threat to democracy. Which of course is true. But it somehow comes off like the boy who cried wolf because, heck Mr. Trump was king for four years already and, what do you know, we're still standing.
So Mr. Biden has to drink from the fountain of youth between now and November. He has to be everywhere all at once. Has to be ubiquitous, omnipresent and omniscient. Not merely predicting the end of the world as we know it should the unthinkable become thinkable but the specific ways in which Mr. Trump will pull a Hannibal Lecter and eat your babies.
And most of all, a gallon of gas and a quart of milk must cost less today than yesterday and even less on election day. And, oh yes while you are at it, the damn price of mortgages must find their way back down. Because America remembers 3% rates and they don't give a number two why that was, only that it was.
If Mr. Biden can merely do all that, and appear not to even break a sweat in the process, there is a slim possibility democracy will still be alive after Mr. Trump has finished doing his best impression of a dictator in waiting. Otherwise, well you know the drill.