The reason they keep asking “is he gonna pack the court” is because they see a potential reframe.
When Biden says “I’m not going to answer the question because they’re just trying to change the subject” he is 100% correct.
Any answer will get stripped of context and nuance and played on a loop. That’s the whole purpose of pursuing an answer.
Saying “well that’s up to Congress” or “we’ll have to wait and see” won’t end the matter.
Republicans want a hard denial that they can hang around his head during a potential Biden administration, or they want to run on the lack of a hard denial.
Saying “but Merrick Garland!” lets Republicans insist that this election is about stopping The Left from destroying the courts out of a politics of retribution.
Which, in turn, would provide legs to this narrative and turn it into an ongoing narrative.
Saying “sure, we won’t expand the court” is a problem because it is extremely likely that a Biden administration will have to, at a minimum, credibly threaten to expand the court. (I think they’re gonna have to actually do it, and also that they should fwiw.)
So the strategic goal here is to provide no soundbytes for the Rs, put the focus back on COVID, and let Trump’s intemperate self-immolation eventually replace it in the news cycle.
That’s... pretty much exactly what they’re doing.
The only downside is that it’ll annoy reporters like Leonhardt. They like crisp, definitive answers, and they like doggedly pursuing those answers when candidates don’t give them.
That’s fine. You accept that downside is a campaign. The reporters will get over it.
Sometimes the non-answer is the most strategic answer.
Sometimes the comms plan that pisses off reporters is the best comms plan.
The Biden campaign is handling this fine. They shouldn’t change a thing.
(Fin)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
There’s a tension in election coverage that is going to become increasingly jarring in the weeks ahead.
We’re going to read stories about business-as-usual campaigning, alongside stories of structural voter disenfranchisement.
The two storylines don’t easily coexist. (Thread)
Here’s a business-as-usual example:
Florida is an important battleground state. Polls show a close race. Whose message is resonating/what strategic choices are the campaigns making/who will win?
It’s a genre of reporting that we’re all used to — horse race reporting.
But then there’s this alternate storyline:
The courts have just effectively barred 770,000 Florida citizens from voting. This is part of a multi-year disenfranchisement effort that FL Republicans launched after FL voted to restore voting rights for ex-felons.
Here's what I think will matter from tonight's speech/this convention:
The premise of the RNC is that everything was going great, COVID has been a blip, but we're totally past it and back to fine now.
That's comforting to an audience that wants to believe it. But it's fleeting.
It's nine and a half weeks until the election. That's a really long time. Particularly now, when every week brings another disruptive horror.
Nine and a half weeks ago was June 16th. What news do you recall from June 16th? What has stuck with you that long?
Reality is the unavoidable problem for the Trump campaign.
They just spent four weeks utterly ignoring reality. I'm sure that felt nice for the supporters who tuned in -- it sure felt infuriating to us critics!
But, tomorrow, reality will start setting in again.
In lieu of my normal “Bret Stephens write a column and it’s dumb let me make fun of it” thread, let me urge you to read this searing conversation between @cwarzel and @IwriteOK.
The Stephens column is his normal low-batting-average stuff.
It’s basically a book report. Stephens read @AlecMacGillis’s complex, thorough article about policing in Baltimore before and after Freddie Gray and provides a conservative Cliff’s Notes version that loses the nuance.
The Stephens column only *matters* in the sense that it signals what you’ll be hearing from his conservative peers — police are good, everyone submit to them or Bad Things will happen.
But what’s happening in Portland? That’s new. It’s dangerous. That matters.
For a political scientist who writes a ton about American politics, Mounk *really* needs to reread his E.E. Schattschneider. (1/2 or 3)
The central insight from Schattschneider is that politics is not like an intercollegiate debate where the rules, norms, and boundaries are agreed upon in advance.
Politics, rather, is about the mobilization of bias. Politics is about about power.
(2/3)
As far as I can tell, Mounk’s new publication/newsletter/community is constructed around the premise that politics *should be* like an intercollegiate debate.
He wants to gather some wonderful debaters to show off just how nice that would be.
(3/4, I guess)