RUTHFULLY YOURS

Normally, it’s a sitting president who urges the nation to “stay the course.” Voters prefer stability, so incumbents normally use it as a selling point while seeking reelection. But these are not normal times. In this campaign, the man in the Oval Office is selling transformation while his leading Democratic opponent is promising a return to the calmer days of “no-drama Obama.”

It’s a political oddity.

Although Trump’s slogan, “Promises Made, Promises Kept,” seems to stress continuity, he is really promising something quite different: to keep rolling back the Administrative State, recalibrating American foreign policy, and shaking up Washington. He is telling supporters that he has stuck with his major 2016 themes, especially fighting illegal immigration, lowering taxes, appointing conservative judges, cutting burdensome regulations, and reviving American manufacturing. Internationally, he is determined to wind down America’s long wars, avoid new ones, make America’s allies pay more for global security, and rework multilateral trade deals. Oh, and maybe purchase Greenland for the American people.

That’s an ambitious, transformative agenda, and Trump is running on it. Those policies, plus steady economic growth and an enthusiastic base, give him a decent chance of winning in November 2020, unless the economy falls into recession. His biggest liabilities are obvious: his grandiose personality and his erratic, thin-skinned behavior, which are on display daily.

Trump’s base loves his outsized persona, but it grates on prosperous, educated voters, many of them swing voters in the suburbs. Their switch to the Democrats in 2018 put Nancy Pelosi back in the speaker’s chair. To dislodge her, Trump is making no effort to tone down his personality or slow his tweets. Instead, he is painting the opposition as a Children’s Crusade of Crazed Socialists, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.

It’s too soon to tell if the public will pin that label on the donkey. What we do know is that the Democrats seem helpless to stop it. While Joe Biden wonders whether he fits in the new Democratic Party, the Squad, like Trump, has mastered the new media environment. Not so, Pelosi and the old bulls in Congress. They are still waiting for a dial tone. While they wait, they fret about primary challenges from the left, which is why so few have openly condemned the party’s direction. Establishment Republicans understand the problem. They faced it on their right from the Tea Party.

The presidential primaries only make the Democrats’ problems worse. Except for Biden, all their top-tier candidates are running on expensive, unrealistic programs to transform America’s economy and society, and do it via centralized government. These proposals take issues that center-left voters care about, such as climate change, and turn them into something unrecognizable. Rank-and-file Democrats and many independents want to cut greenhouse gasses, treat undocumented immigrants humanely, and provide a broad social safety net. But they don’t want what Bernie Sanders casually calls “a revolution.” They don’t cotton to the Green New Deal, free college, and decriminalized, open borders. They want to keep their own health insurance, not swap it for “Medicare for All.” They won’t buy into a rose-colored socialist utopia, which they see as expensive, illiberal, and unworkable.

The disagreement — and it is vociferous — comes from the party’s agitated, Trump-hating “base,” precisely the ones who could vote in primaries and donate to their favorite candidates. This group of voters wants those programs, which they see as the fruition of progressive dreams, first advocated by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

The fight over that progressive vision — whether it is utopian or dystopian, whether it has already gone too far or not far enough — is America’s most profound political conflict today. It is being fought in every corner of the polity: the race for the presidency, the battle for control of the House and Senate, and, most viciously, in appointments for the Supreme Court. It will only get worse as the 2020 election approaches.

Technology has reshaped this fight. Not long ago, candidates could balance the demands of primary and general-election voters by saying one thing in April, another in August. Those days ended with cellphones, which capture every speech in Iowa and New Hampshire, and ubiquitous social media, which circulate them. They ended with 24-hour cable channels where candidates strive for air time by outbidding each other for true believers. The resulting video clips live forever, and they will come back to bite the eventual nominee. The tougher those primaries, the greater the incentive to win by going hard left. The farther left they go, the worse the blowback in November.

Biden seems to believe he cannot win this bidding war, and he is trying his best to avoid it. He is running as the Democrats’ version of Warren G. Harding, a bland figure who promised America a “return to normalcy” after the tumult of World War I. His campaign slogan might as well be “Settle for Good Ole Joe.”

So far, Ole Joe is hanging on to his lead, but it is hardly a commanding one. His flaws are painfully obvious. He is a gaffe machine whose hair plugs and plastic surgery cannot hide his age and occasional confusion. His résumé is impressive but, like Hillary Clinton, he can point to more big jobs held than big goals accomplished. He casts a small shadow.

Biden has two other looming liabilities, which will emerge as the contest drags on: his connection to Obama-era domestic spying and his son’s profitable connections to China and Ukraine, forged during his vice presidency.

First, the spying. If the investigations by Attorney General William Barr, U.S. Attorney John Durham, and Inspector General Michael Horowitz uncover widespread misconduct, the former vice president will face a difficult bind. Naturally, he will claim he never saw anything amiss. Unfortunately, he attended some key meetings and, in any case, he cannot prove a negative. If he does manage to disassociate himself from Obama’s CIA, FBI, National Security Council, and Departments of Justice and State, he won’t be able to say he was a major decision-maker in that administration. If a damaging scandal does emerge and the mainstream media deigns to report it, it will tarnish Biden’s biggest asset, his association with the Obama years.

Second, Joe is vulnerable because his son, Hunter, who had little experience in energy production or big-time finance, landed lucrative positions in both fields while his father was in office. Hunter actually flew to China with his Dad on Air Force Two and, soon after, won a big investment deal via the Bank of China. The stench from that deal will only get worse as bilateral relations with China deteriorate.

The family ties to Ukraine are another story in crony capitalism. The energy company that employed Hunter Biden was under investigation for corruption when Vice President Biden visited Ukraine and intervened. The elder Biden reportedly told the country’s leaders that America would cut off billions in aid unless they fired the top prosecutor — immediately, that day, before Biden’s plane left the country. We know his threat worked because Biden publicly bragged about it.

If Biden’s primary opponents don’t raise these sleazy connections, you can bet Donald Trump will. What better way for him to exemplify the Washington Swamp?

Biden still heads the Democratic field. Whether he remains there depends on whether he can convince primary voters with his two main pitches: He is the party’s best shot at beating Trump, and he offers a more stable future, a return to calmer times and familiar policies. The promise of stability is usually the incumbent’s boast, not the challenger’s. But Biden is better placed than Trump or any top-tier Democrat to make it – and it may be what swing voters are looking for. The question is whether they think Joe Biden is competent enough to pull it off.