– Both his speech and the election of Kamala Harris as Vice Presidential candidate showed that he understands the moment he lives in. Thus, he and the Democrats did their job, writes Hilmar Mjelde, senior researcher at the research institute NORCE, in a comment to NTB.
– But the story is not on Biden’s side. Democrats traditionally win when they nominate young, new faces like Kennedy, Carter, Obama and Bill Clinton. They normally lose when they nominate old trotters like Stevenson, Humphrey, Gore, Kerry and Hillary Clinton, says Mjelde.
The Democrats’ four-day national meeting ended with what may have been Biden’s most important speech ever. There he accepted the nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, at the same time as he painted a dark picture of a United States marked by four major crises related to the corona pandemic, economic decline, the demonstrations against racism and climate change.
Coronadominans
Several of the speakers during the national meeting, not least Barack and Michelle Obama, have choked President Donald Trump, and a consistent message has been that American democracy and social order are threatened. However, there have been few concrete political proposals.
According to Mjelde, it is the corona crisis and the handling of it that will weigh heaviest when the United States elects the president on 3 November.
– The handling of Trump and the federal state has been a failure and a national scandal. The USA is the world’s richest and most technologically developed country – they did not have to lose their economy, says Mjelde.
He believes the Trump administration has been responsible for a deliberate disregard and neglect, and that it is now also undermining the conduct of the election. Trump should have received a formal reprimand from Congress, Mjelde emphasizes.
– The 2020 election will be about the pandemic more than the 2004 election was about the Iraq war and the 2008 election about the financial crisis, he says.
– National meetings without effect
Next week, it is ready for the Republicans’ national meeting, but the researcher doubts that the two meetings will have any particular significance for the voting.
– It is the 70,000 jubilant audience, the confetti and the balloons that make the national meetings lift the candidates and engage the voters. But now we get instead a combination of a Teams conference and Grand Prix voting round, says Mjelde.
Although the Democrats have been extremely hard on a sitting president during the National Assembly, he does not think they have helped to sharpen the contradictions in the United States.
– American politics is one big echo chamber. It is a rhetorical aggression and fighting spirit on both sides that frightens me in terms of possible chaos after the election – a hunger for cultural strife.
Too old?
He believes Biden’s biggest challenge is his age, and that his main task during the election campaign will be to convince voters that he has not become too old to rule the country.
– Biden must convince that a president who has reached life expectancy is not a problem. That is the main doubt associated with him. He has been in national politics since Kamala Harris was eight years old. People know what he stands for. He is not a radical, as the Republicans claim, but a pragmatist in the tradition of Bill Clinton and Lyndon B. Johnson, says Mjelde.
He also points out that Trump has lost his favorite format, the rallies, which he believes has been a “test arena for Trump’s one-liners.” But nothing has been decided, he maintains.
– This is not over. I keep this choice to be completely open. I think the polls do not capture Trump’s full and complete support, says Hilmar Mjelde.
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