He seemed to be in a defensive mood, basically scolding any grassroots leaders for pressuring him on Executive action of being too conservative in his approach. At this point in the process, he's trying to establish himself as someone they need to persuade and not take his support of their proposals for granted. Also, in the old DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) playbook on which he's relied for most of his political career, scolding black leaders is assumed to be a good way to signal to white voters that a politician is willing to indulge white racial prejudices.
The underlying assumption has been that African-American voters have nowhere else to go than the Democratic Party. But the risk is not that black voters will flock to the Confederate Republican Party. The risk is that they will be too little interested to vote. In a state like Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Georgia, a relatively small drop in Democratic voter participation can make the difference in elections, including Presidential elections.
This is part of a larger strategy of depoliticization of the base voters that the Democrats developed to be a center-left policy that could also be understood by big campaign donations by being as corporate-friendly as possible. But it's a very difficult trick to demobilize the base just enough that they will refrain from putting pressure on Democratic officeholders by becoming active in local party organizations or protest groups, but still engage them enough to provide a majority vote at election time.
We hear Biden in this recording pushing back on demands to use Executive action to counter Republican obstructionism in Congress. "We have to be careful," he says on this subject. But nobody on the Democratic side is arguing that the President can rule by decree. But whatever he's trying to signal to the civil rights leaders, by taking this position he is also signaling to Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Confederate Party that he's reluctant to use one of his most powerful options, an option based on powers he will have under existing law the day he takes office.
But to me the most concerning moment is when Biden pushes them to oppose making public pressure during the next three weeks before the Georgia election on reducing police violence and homicide. And he also adds his support to the ConservaDem accusation that the supposed association of Democratic candidates with the "Defund the Police" slogan is to blame for ConservaDem losses down-ballot in November, "That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not. "We’re talking about holding them accountable." (Also quoted in Jeanine Santucci, In leaked audio, Joe Biden says 'defund the police' was used to 'beat the living hell' out of Democrats USA Today 12/10/2020)
Video of that moment is here from The Intercept, Biden Says Republicans Used the Phrase "Defund the Police" to "Beat the Living Hell" Out of Dems.
Since very few Democratic candidates actually did use the "defund the police" slogan, that has never made much sense to me. Yeah, the Republicans used it to fire up those among their white voters who adore the idea of police brutalizing black people. But the whole ConservaDem pitch is based on stressing that they are not part of the party's progressive wing. And voters are capable of telling the difference between actual candidates running for office and what protesters chant as a catchy slogan.
Pollster Stanley Greenberg provides important perspective on this question in Race War: Will Trump’s use of bigotry to rally anxious white voters end with his term of office? The American Prospect 12/10/2020:
The role of race in the election was a choice for Democrats, too. It was a moral choice. After the murder of George Floyd and the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor and pervasive protest marches, Democratic leaders joined the marches and House Democrats passed the Justice in Policing Act. Joe Biden chose an African American woman as his vice president and devoted a major part of the Democratic Convention to the fight for racial justice. He closed the campaign with an ad where Biden said, “Black Lives Matter,” and promised he would address the country’s racial inequities. And after winning, he said one of his highest priorities was addressing “systemic racism.”This is a point we should not forget. Not in the next three weeks, and not in the next four years. Doing something effective about reducing the number of arbitrary police killings of African-Americans is part of Joe Biden's Presidential mandate. An extremely important part. This is part of how he beat cult leader Donald Trump by around seven million votes.
He has to find a way to deliver on that. Whether it's by getting meaningful legislation passed, using appropriate Executive orders, or by making sure that his Attorney General is someone willing to intervene when local courts and prosecutors stick to the old Southern segregtionist playbook of giving a free pass to local cops who brutalize and murder black people - he has to deliver, and the public needs to see him deliver.
Yes, there are undoubtedly white voters, a not inconsiderable number of them, who feel safer knowing that police are arbitrarily murdering black people and for whom that is an important political priority. Voters who watched the video of four Minneapolis cops sadistically choking George Floyd to death in a lynch murder seen all over the world and said, "Yeah, that's what I wanna see cops doing!"
But here's the thing: None of those voters are voting for Democratic candidates.
Voters for whom ending that practice is a priority vote Democratic. They are not likely to switch to Republicans in 2022. But if Biden wants those voters to turn out in 2022 in big enough numbers to keep his own party in control of the House of Representatives - he needs to show Democratic voters visible results in addressing that issue. If he fails to do that, he can still claim the extremely low bar of Not As Bad As Trump, of course. How much it will be worth in preventing a resurgent Trumpism is another question.
Greenberg's article gives some analysis of how Trump used white racism in the Presidential race and throughout his term. The effect of anything so specific as the use of the "defund the police" slogan in Republican ads is very difficult to pinpoint. Greenberg argues the Trumps's racialized law-and-order theme did increase turnout of white voters who favored Republicans. He also makes the important point that "Trump cynically shifted from attacking Mexican Americans and Latinos to attacking Blacks." Which Greenberg thinks gave him more of a chance among Latino voters in Florida, in particular.
He makes this important observation:
Trump's racializing of the election was only part of the story on why Democrats underperformed. They were not pulled down by “fear of socialism,” my research showed. They were pulled down by the lack of any economic relief and any economic offer to counter Trump’s racist imagery and push to open the economy. Democrats were pulled down by their offering no competing narrative to Trump’s drumbeat on “law and order” on what was at stake in November. Democrats were not heard decrying the health care costs that are killing people, or battling for lower insurance and drug costs, or battling corporations and their big tax breaks—as they were in the midterms. Biden ended up with no advantage on who would be better for the middle class. [my emphasis]This echoes the common observation that Biden's case for his own election of I'm Not Trump seems to has worked for himself but wasn't so effective for his political coattails down-ballot. Because he deiliberately pitched his message to be against Trump but not against the Republican Party. So, for instance, he featured a number of Republicans including the rightwing anti-women's-rights John Kasich at the Democratic National Convention itself.
But Greenberg is not making that argument. In fact, in that first quote above, he seems to be straining a bit to make a Clintonesque argument that Biden but too much emphasis on racial justice in the campaign. But he puts particular stress on how pro-Trump white turnout exceeded was stronger than pro-Biden turnout among African-Americans and Latinos. Part of the point he makes is that those voters also respond to messaging around economic needs and populist concerns about establishment corruption, along with an anti-discrimination emphasis.
In this article, he is focusing heavily on the messaging aspect. He doesn't stress a couple of important factors. One is that the unusually large turnout complicates the demographic analysis of the turnout in comparisons with earlier elections. He also doesn't talk about the reportedly better-organized Republican get-out-the-vote operations at the local level or the effects of the COVID pandemic, which lead Democrats to restrict their in-person campaigning more than for the Republicans.
But he does allude to the important role that widespread Republican voter-suppression efforts played. Those will continue. One function the propaganda around Trump's clown-coup attempt is playing is to set the stage for even more such voter suppression by Republicans. Since minorities and Democratic areas are the particular targets of those voter-suppression efforts, Democrats have a partisan self-interest as well as a moral and civic duty to fight those attempts in the most serious ways they can find.
And even though he really does seem to think that a 1992-style "Sister Souljah" Clinton approach might still work, Greenberg emphasizes that the Democrats seriously do need to deliver on the economic and anti-corruption of their agenda as well as the liberal racial justice part:
In short, while Democrats championed Black lives as a racial issue, they fell far short in addressing how much Black Americans wanted to shake up a rigged political system to do more for working people and bring changes that can help their families, that they can feel in their pocketbook. That, more than anything else, explains the disappointing level of Black turnout. [my emphasis]And Greenberg encourages the left-populist approach for Democratic politics more generally:
Trump’s total race war grew the white working-class electorate in 2020, but Republicans didn’t take into account how economically populist they are. Over 60 percent of this battleground electorate wants to raise taxes on those worth more than $35 million, including two-thirds of white working-class women and over half of the men. Republicans may pay a price — as Trump did when he failed to deliver affordable health care — if they try to stop all of Biden’s efforts to raise taxes on the richest and corporations to get them to contribute their fair share. Future Democrats can compete for these voters.
Despite Trump’s racist campaign, most 2020 voters know America must face its racial past. Black Lives Matter is still viewed positively in this battleground electorate, and a big plurality believe racial discrimination is the main reason Black Americans are not getting ahead. Biden has every reason to believe he has a mandate to act on COVID, unite the country, build back better, act boldly on climate change, as well as address the country’s deep racial inequities. [my emphasis]
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