Democrats have to channel public anger at a worthy target: Republican antivaxxers
Having spent four years under a president who dominated the media on a daily basis, it’s understandable that many of us are relieved that those days have ended. Donald Trump didn’t “drain the swamp,” he swamped it. Every day he could, he captured attention with wild statements and off-the-wall tweets. While he often generated outrage, quite a bit of it earned by his racist and ethically-challenged behavior, he also overwhelmed public attention, short-circuiting our ability to convert momentary anger to lasting accountability.
While it’s liberating to no longer have the Narcissist-in-Chief commandeering our attention, the Biden Administration has over-corrected. This isn’t just a failure to use the digital bully pulpit the way Trump did — though it’s worth noting that when the former president lost his Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump had almost 89 million followers; Eleven months into Joe Biden’s presidency, his @JoeBiden account has just 31.8 million.
James Carville, the celebrated and sometimes controversial Democratic political consultant, isn’t wrong when he says that too many people in the Biden White House want to do policy and none of them want to “sell.” But that isn’t entirely fair: the Biden team and its allies across the Democratic ecosystem have been earnestly trying to sell their policies for months. The problem with Build Back Better isn’t just the fact that the press has focused too much on multitrillion-dollar spending totals rather than the specifics of improved infrastructure and expanded social benefits. All those things are popular when you show them to people. The problem isn’t what it costs or contains; it’s that it lacks a connection to what people are feeling now.
What people are feeling is anger and frustration at the never-ending pandemic and all the dislocations it has generated, from school closures and supply-chain snarls to inflation. Smart politicians channel those feelings into a larger public narrative about who we are, what we’re facing and what we need to do.
The Republican party is very good at this, though what they do is always in service of the wealthy, big corporations, the military and traditional white Christian values. And Republicans are constantly hunting for issues that might press voters’ buttons in ways that bolster those causes, rally their base and undermine Democratic values and interest groups. The current national obsession with Critical Race Theory is a good example. Before conservative activist Christopher Rufo achieved rightwing stardom with an appearance on the Tucker Carlson show in September where he lambasted Critical Race Theory as “an existential threat to the United States,” he was toiling in relative obscurity trying to whip up fear about rising homelessness and crime in cities run by Democrats.
Unlike Republicans, today’s Democratic leaders don’t have a killer instinct for this kind of political combat. And if you are trying to govern effectively rather than just tear down government, that makes some sense. President Biden may be too much of a traditionalist who believes in a kind of bipartisan cooperation that no longer exists. Or, he may be avoiding partisan attacks because he knows that he needs some Republican votes to move his legislative agenda. But either way, his failure to channel people’s anger and frustration has allowed the Republicans to do so instead. Democrats keep saying “We’re on your side” but the message isn’t resonating.
Imagine if instead of this vacuum, Democrats from Biden on down were hammering Republicans with a simple message: We’re on your side, they’re on the side of the virus. We’re making progress, creating nearly 5 million jobs since January, but antivaxxers are selfishly ruining things for all of us. Notice how differently these messages land when they include an attack.
Last summer, as the Delta variant started to take hold, Democrats could have pushed this framing. A handful of Democratic governors — the very people who have borne the brunt of implementing effective anti-COVID measures — did speak out. For example, here’s New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy calling out antivaxxers for costing people’s lives, back in August. President Biden, unfortunately, picked the wrong target, choosing to lash out at social media companies for “killing people” rather than Republican antivaxxers.
Now you might say that the last thing America needs right now is more divisiveness. That is true but it’s also naïve. We are a divided country; the question is which side has the upper hand. With Omicron threatening a new wave of COVID, it’s too soon to say what the most appropriate response will be. But if this variant turns out to more contagious than Delta but still conquerable by vaccination, then it’s time for everyone who yearns for a post-COVID America to go on the offensive and take back the public narrative.