It's Still Joe Biden's Party

My thoughts on an effective, concerning DNC.

Did you know that over 90% of fentanyl trafficked into the United States is seized at legal points of entry? Or that over 80% of fentanyl trafficking offenders are American citizens?

You probably don’t, but you should. Someone in the Democratic Party should have told you it at least once during their four days of nationally televised speeches, when they had the largest platform they will have this year to spread their message. It would have made perfect sense, and it would have been quite easy. It’s not as if the party was afraid of calling Trump dishonest or contesting his other narratives. They brought up his criminal history in detail every single night. But when it came to the issue of immigration, they treated the former president as if he was the sole arbiter of credibility. Across four days of programming, the party didn’t task even a single speaker with exposing his constant lies on the issue.

This was both a moral disaster in the short run and likely politically ineffective in the long run. We know what happens when pro-immigration parties abandon their stances in bids to win over the opposition’s voters—it just makes them look insincere while legitimizing racism as a “reasonable” policy position. Still, it might be justifiable in one way: one of many means to the end of getting Kamala Harris to separate herself from Biden. In this case, the actual content of what she and her party says is not relevant. Whatever the issue, she simply must break from him, no matter what direction it may send the party ideologically or how morally suspect it may be. Because that is what she will need to do to win, and winning is what matters most.

Fair enough. So, how did Democrats treat other major issues where Trump has consistently held the advantage over both Biden and Harris, like the Gaza War? That’s a pretty important topic, because it’s where the President has his single worst rating of any issue. His raw approval number on handling the conflict is currently below 30% nationally. That’s solidly lower than his rating on other issues, including crime, inflation, and, yes, immigration. This would have been an incredibly easy place for Kamala and the Democrats to make a clean break from him. The Vice President would get to look strong and independent, the party would get to move on from an objectively failing policy, and they’d get to do it all with the assistance of a peace movement that desperately wanted to work with them.

If your main concern is winning, this should have been a no-brainer. And I’m not just speculating here—polling has found that a Democrat who supports a ceasefire and an arms embargo receives more support than both pro-Israel Democrats and Democrats who are silent on the issue. But Democrats refused to take the opportunity at the DNC. The cold-hearted pragmatism that supposedly drove their surrender on the border was nowhere to be found. Instead, the party would only address the conflict by repeating the White House’s platitudes over and over, sometimes verbatim. When they were afforded an extremely gracious endorsement speech from an uncommitted leader, they childishly refused it, blocking them from the schedule to make time for an 86-year-old Leon Panetta and God knows how many music breaks. Even the most left-wing speakers parroted lines straight from Antony Blinken’s State Department.

This approach, where the party sacrifices countless lives in the name of pragmatism for some issues but dies on the hill of unpopular positions for others, is incredibly moronic. It is also nothing new. We know it very well, because it is the signature philosophy of the man who was just kicked off the ticket. It is a craven approach, one that eschews conflict at all costs at the expense of giving opponents free reign. It is an out-of-touch approach, perpetually stuck in the 20th century. It is a failed approach, one that made Joe Biden a historically hated president and left once-popular liberal positions to rot. And over the course of its convention, the Democratic Party has shown that, against all logic, it has not moved on from this approach one bit.

This is not to say that I believed that the DNC was ineffective. I’m willing to recognize when things that I dislike work politically, and there’s no denying that the convention accomplished much of what it needed to on a superficial level. So, as things stand, I’m more optimistic about Kamala’s chances of taking power, and more pessimistic about what she may do with it, than ever before. Here’s why.