Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo
Joe Biden during his Illinois virtual town hall earlier this month
The presidential election is a little over seven months away, and through no fault of his own the presumptive Democratic nominee has become a kind of ghost, visible from time to time on your screen from his new home studio but without any corporeal presence.
Not that Joe Biden isn’t trying to do something resembling campaigning, with interviews and electronic roundtables and online ads. But while Donald Trump is on TV every day holding what are essentially White House briefing room rallies—praising himself, railing at the press, insulting Democratic politicians—Biden is literally trapped in his house, with aides donning masks and gloves before entering his presence lest they sicken the 77-year-old candidate.
This situation would be frustrating for any candidate, but especially so for Biden, who is the most tactile of politicians, always eager to place a reassuring hand on a shoulder or give an enthusiastic hug. Not infrequently, a voter will come up to him and share a story of a family member’s death, eager to connect with a politician for whom grief is so much a part of his being. He will gaze intently into their eyes, the connection of shared loss visible to everyone watching.
But not now. Perhaps the most striking thing about Biden’s existence as we see him now is that he is always alone. He may talk to an interviewer, but he does it while staring into a camera from hundreds of miles away, in a room by himself. (Presumably there are aides nearby, though we never see them). If he can’t literally touch someone, he’s not really Joe Biden.
Biden’s physical isolation is robbing him of the enlarging process every presidential nominee needs, in which they grow to the point where we can imagine them inhabiting the position of ultimate power and authority. Biden can’t do that yet, so we’re in this moment of national crisis with a plainly inadequate president and a half-visible alternative.
The whole drama has been suspended, the propulsive, forward-moving adventure in which the candidate travels from city to town and controversy to controversy, the ups and downs proving his mettle and resilience. Sooner or later the campaign forces itself into the consciousness of even indifferent voters, dominating the news and butting into conversations in workplaces and homes.
Biden needed that, because though he is familiar to most Americans, it’s a shallow familiarity. People know he was a senator for a long time and was Obama’s vice president, always in the background applauding and encouraging. But though he was actually an excellent VP in many ways, the average voter would struggle to name anything in particular he did in the job.
That average voter probably has a general sense of him, that Uncle Joe persona with its “Here’s the deal, folks” and “I gotta tell ya” and “No joke,” and the apparently limitless number of pithy aphorisms supposedly passed down from his dad. And perhaps they know he wears his heart on his sleeve for better and for worse, that he can empathize with your sadness and fear but also that he can be testy when challenged. But that too only goes so far.
Consider this recent poll from The Washington Post and ABC News. Though the poll found Biden leading Trump (as nearly every poll has), there was this potential warning sign:
Among registered voters who support Trump, 55 percent say they are very enthusiastic about backing him while 32 percent say they are somewhat enthusiastic. Among Biden’s supporters, a far smaller 28 percent say they are very enthusiastic while 46 percent are somewhat enthusiastic.
That gap will probably narrow once Biden is the nominee and the general election begins in earnest, and of course one shouldn’t put too much stock in any one poll, particularly this far from the election. But it isn’t all that surprising given how the campaign has gone so far and the suspended animation it’s in right now.
Biden’s candidacy was always delivered with a note of “He may not be your favorite, but you should vote for him anyway.” It was sometimes implicit and occasionally spoken plainly; at one point even his own wife told an audience that voting for Biden meant “maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, ‘Ok, I personally like so and so better.’ But your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Donald Trump.”
The conventional wisdom will tell you that it will be awfully hard for a candidate to win if he’s hoping to assemble a grudging majority of supporters. But in the Donald Trump era nothing is conventional. Perhaps most important, negative partisanship has become the key force driving our politics, with voters making decisions more on who they hate than on who they love.
So while Biden may not get 50 percent of Americans to love him, he may not have to. But he will have to find a way to make them see him in full.
That may happen with plenty of time before the election, if our social distancing is effective enough for us to move back within six feet of one another by the summer. Then the disembodied Joe Biden can become concrete again, and we’ll see what the voters really think of him.
