After Trump’s unconventional convention, there is danger for the former vice president all over the political landscape.
Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I’m dying to hear your take on the Republican convention. Mine in a nutshell: Joe Biden had better watch out. Gail Collins: OK, open the nutshell — what should Biden be quivering over? Donald Trump’s seating arrangement for his speech? (Loved that squished-together audience.) Or Mike Pence’s rhetorical genius? Bret: I need to be careful with the analogy here, so take this as a purely tactical comment. But I fear the Biden campaign has built its Maginot Line along the character-decency-goodness front, while the Trump campaign has launched its, er, Blitzkrieg against Biden’s left flank, aiming at the strategic Belgian town of (checks map) Kenosha. Gail: Famous, in happier days, for its Cheese Castle. This is the really sad part of the election year craziness. Kenosha’s people don’t want more trouble — and the same is true of Portland. But at times when everybody’s angry and twitchy, you need a well-run police department and an absence of political jerks who want to look like tough guys for their campaign. As Joe Biden says, the job of the president is to lower the temperature. As the convention demonstrated, all Trump wants to do is raise it. Bret: More broadly, the convention helped Trump politically in a bunch of ways. It did what every demagogic party needs to do: create a far-enemy, China, and a near-enemy, the radical left. It painted Biden as an enabler of both. It gave voters something visceral to fear: a progressive mob coming for your suburb, your job and your right to speak your mind. It painted Trump as a straight shooter whose coarseness was courage and whose rudeness was honesty. It gave shy Trump voters moral cover with its long list of Black speakers. And it promised economic growth as opposed to moral restoration. I get that much of this is very distant from the truth. But Trump is now playing offense, and Biden needs a better counterattack than deploying a platoon of fact checkers. Gail: Conventions don’t generally move the needle themselves — not over the long run. And if the target was undecided voters, I’ll bet there were at least 12 watching at home. Bret: Not sure if I agree that there aren’t a lot of undecideds, but go on. Gail: But if your worry is about Biden needing a more focused, aggressive campaign, you’re right. I’m hoping we’ll see that soon. Very soon. Cannot be overly soon. Bret: The Democratic convention succeeded in uniting the party behind Biden. The Bernie Folk aren’t going to be sitting this election out, much less voting third party.
