Lucky (The Book)

 

Four years ago, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes gave us Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. That title played on the Clinton campaign's mission to shatter what she herself labelled "the highest, hardest glass ceiling," but which instead ended up leaving that ceiling solidly in place, shattering instead both Clinton's and the Democratic party's hopes and expectations for 2016 (meanwhile saddling the country with the disaster that was the Trump presidency). The book recounted how everything that could go wrong did go wrong - a set of trials and tribulations virtually unlike any other in American campaign history: a partisan congressional investigation; a primary opponent who attacked her character; a rogue FBI director; the rank misogyny of her Republican rival; a media that scrutinized her every move while failing even to get that Republican rival to turn over his tax returns; and even a Kremlin-based campaign to defeat her." That book becomes a kind of autopsy of what is rightly called a "doomed campaign," in which according to one staffer, "We're not allowed to have nice things."

Four years later, Allen and Barnes have given us Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely won the Presidency, in which the authors show how, whereas four years before everything went wrong for Hilary Clinton, in this alignment of political time and space everything Joe Biden needed to right for him went his way. "It is the story of a candidate whose life, politics, and message best met the moment, as judged by the collective wisdom of the 155 million-plus Americans who cast ballots." Whereas Hilary "had used her platform to try to define Trump, but everyone already knew Trump’s flaws, Biden thought. If you’re going to take on Trump, he told confidants, people want to know what you’re for."

Despite the obvious roadblocks to his party's nomination, including his age and the party establishment's antipathy to his candidacy, time, "Biden put a lot of faith in his own charm as a tool for bridging personal differences and substantive divides." Biden, we learn was always quite confident that he could beat Trump and win the general election, but recognized that his problem would be winning the nomination. As for theObama, et al., establishment, "Biden most resembled the establishment, and the establishment had reacted to him by turning up its nose. It was painful, and embarrassing, that even when he led in the polls, Democratic insiders did not seem to believe in him." And, then, there was his age: "a courtship-era candidate operating in a Tinder world" (something which, again turned out to be less of a disadvantage than might otherwise have been the case).

But Biden was lucky. So, for example, when he came in a poor 4th place in Iowa, the story was instead about how poorly the party primary was conducted. Then, of course, he got Congressman Jim Clyburn's endorsement, which probably guaranteed him a win inSouth Carolina and set off a massive move on the part of the party establishment to coalesce behind Biden as the only way to avoid the disaster to the party of a Sanders nomination. Then, of course, came the pandemic, which saved him from the risks of tripping over his words while running a traditional campaign while pitting him against Trump's catastrophically incompetent performance against the pandemic. For all the pre-campaign anxieties about whether he could or would run a viable campaign, the pandemic freed him from the need to campaign in a traditional way, while highlighting the contract between him and his opponent, who kept making himself look bad without any effort on Biden's part. And Biden "believed that his life, his values, and his conduct as a public servant reflected what his party preached—but didn’t always practice—and provided a black-and-white contrast with the silver-spoon president."

Biden as also, of course, especially lucky in locking up African-American support, the support of a constituency desperately desirous of defeating Trump and willing to vote strategically to accomplish that.. "Biden had already established a broader coalition among Black voters and conservative Democratic whites. Some voters of color were attracted to him because of the affinity conservative white Democrats had for him, not despite it. The chance that white voters in swing states would pick Biden over Trump—backed up by polls showing Biden defeating Trump head-to-head—appealed to many Black Democrats who were more concerned with a Democrat winning the presidency than which Democrat did it."

As for the General Election campaign, Biden was agin lucky in which he had for an opponent. "Like so much of the campaign," the authors note about the first debate between Biden and Trump at the end of September, this was not the way Biden had envisioned his bid for the presidency. And yet, once again, an unpredictable moment—an unbelievable moment—favored him."

As with the 2016 book, three authors' coverage of the election itself is riveting. And, once again, despite a clear win in the popular vote, the electoral college would be the scary challenge. Unlike Clinton in 2016, however, in the electoral college in 2020 Biden got lucky: "what was striking was how close Trump had come to pulling off another upset. In 2016, Clinton had lost the three pivotal Rust Belt states by a total of 77,736 votes. Trump lost the three states that would have given him a victory—Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona—by a total of 42,918 votes. In Wisconsin, Biden wound up with a 20,682-vote margin, topping Trump by less than two-thirds of a percentage point. In Georgia, the number would be 11,779 votes, or less than a quarter of a percentage point. And in Arizona, where Fox had doubled down on its call for Biden despite pressure from the Trump camp, it would be 10,457 votes, or less than a third of a percentage point. To get Trump to a clear victory of 270 electoral votes—adding roughly 23,000 votes to flip Nebraska’s Second Congressional District—it would still have taken fewer votes for him to win than his margin in 2016. Publicly, Biden’s team struck the posture that he had won a big victory. Privately, campaign officials acknowledged they had hung on by their fingernails."

In the authors' words, "between Trump’s pernicious efforts to invalidate the results by lying, intimidating state election officials, and inciting his followers to storm the Capitol, and Biden’s incentive to portray the outcome as a landslide, many voters didn’t realize how close the president had come to winning a second term."

In short, both Biden and the country got lucky. "In 2016, Trump had needed everything to go wrong for Hillary Clinton to win. This time, Biden caught every imaginable break."

Of course, being lucky. being the right candidate for the right moment, does not diminish the effectiveness what he himself brought to his campaign. "The key to Biden’s victory, more than anything else, was the consistency of his message about what he would do for voters—restore 'the soul of this nation'—and why he was uniquely capable of delivering on that promise. Ridiculed for so long about his lack of discipline as a candidate, Biden stuck to his theory of the case during a brutal primary slog and in the face of pressure from his allies—even members of his own staff—to change his strategy and tactics in the general election. ... Knowing who he was, and where he wanted to be politically, allowed Biden’s campaign to capitalize when luck ran his way—and it did, time and again."