Joe Biden took the gloves off in a speech in Pennsylvania, on 5 January 2024. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA
Dear Commons Community,
Maureen Dow had a column yesterday urging Joe Biden to pick up his attacks on Donald Trump otherwise our country might have to live with the hell that is Trump. She also cautioned Biden that he cannot simply depend upon the press to shore up his candidacy. Here is an excerpt:
“With the disreputable Donald Trump challenging the disfavored President Biden, the 2024 race has become the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s witticism about fox hunting: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”
Bleeding young and nonwhite voters, the president finally heeded Democrats urging him to “get out there,” as Nancy Pelosi put it, and throw some haymakers at Trump.
Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Friday to visit Valley Forge and make a pugnacious speech invoking an earlier moment when we were fighting against despotism and clinging to a dream of a democracy.
In a discontented winter during the American Revolution, George Washington tried to inspire his downtrodden troops at Valley Forge by having Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis” read to them.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote, adding, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”
As the voting to determine the next president gets underway, it is clear that the tyrannical Trump won’t be easily conquered. And that is our hell.
“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said in his speech, making a forceful case that America, which dumped the mad King George, should not embrace the mad King Donald.
If we bow down to a wannabe dictator who loves dictators, who echoes the language of Nazi Germany, who egged on the mob on Jan. 6 and then rewrote the facts to “steal history” just as he tried to steal the election — what does that say about who we are, Biden wondered? Her conclusion:
Still, the Biden-Harris campaign… gives the impression that it expects the media to prop up Biden.
Biden has to press his own case and not rely on the media or Trump’s fatuousness to win the election for him.
People don’t want to vote against somebody; they want to vote for somebody.
The president must continue to be aggressive in convincing people he’s the best alternative; that, at 81, he’s not too old for the job; that he has solutions to stop the chaos on the border and relentless death in Gaza….
Do your job Mr. President!
Good advice!
Tony
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