The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

AREN’T you ready for the American presidential election to just happen already so newspapers and TV news shows can move on to something else for a change? Here’s a suggestion: How about really trying to get the coronavirus under control?

Recent US national election campaigns have started earlier and earlier over the last 40 years, but this current battle began, as President Trump often proudly reminds audiences, on the day of his inauguration four years ago. It was on that day that he filed his papers for re-election, and he apparently began thinking for at least part of every day since then about how to ensure his tenure would be extended until January 2025.

His many detractors have been thinking of how to derail Trump’s re-election effort for almost exactly as long.

But the whole process has become stultifying, familiar and tedious. Trump is stubbornly reverting to his successful 2016 strategy against aloof, unpopular Hillary Clinton. In addition to still relying on slogans from that campaign like “Lock Her Up” and exhuming tired issues like her improper use of government servers for personal email communications, Trump continues to attack his predecessor Barack Obama.

While Hillary’s engagement with this campaign has been mostly limited to occasional television punditry, the still widely popular Obama has seemed at least as active on the campaign trail in recent days as has Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The former President’s famous emotional reserve is starting to crumble as he reveals more of his striking, pervasive disdain for his successor. And Obama can still deliver stinging zingers. While Biden has tended to react to Trump’s lies and provocations at their televised debate encounters with an eye roll, chuckle or occasional retort, Obama has come right out and branded Trump a lazy liar, an inadequate leader and a selfish plutocrat.

Every day, we are accosted with the latest polling results from states we rarely think about unless we happen to live or vacation there. Breathless, hourly reports are filed from Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania, which is credited (or blamed) for Trump’s stunning 2016 election victory perhaps more than any other state.

As a result, Erie, Pennsylvania has become this election year’s bellwether. The state’s only Great Lakes port, this sagging Rust Belt relic has lost over 30 percent of its population over the past half century as the American steel and coal industries subsided into increasing industrial irrelevance. Trump and Biden have both made personal appearances in Erie in the past month, and the President was candid in revealing that he didn’t really want to be there.

Four years ago, Pennsylvania awarded its 20 electoral votes to Trump. Erie was more aligned with rural parts of southwestern, central and northeastern Pennsylvania in supporting him. Voting for Clinton in the big cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was not sufficient to overcome the rural Trump landslide.

Political strategists are telling the media that Trump needs to repeat his 2016 victories in the three northern Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan in order to win another four years in the White House. Biden is acting and campaigning as if he believes the strategists are right.

There has been a lot of liberal happy talk in recent weeks of a Democratic surge in states like Florida, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio and even Texas. Biden would be wise to avoid being seduced by such talk. He needs the three northern Great Lakes states just as badly as Trump does.

The fact that Biden was born in Scranton in northeastern Pennsylvania may have been neutralized by his seeming lack of support for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), which provides jobs for many Pennsylvanians along with some of the oil and natural gas assets that have helped America achieve energy independence. But the polls still show Biden with a steady lead in all three of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. And all three of those states now have Democratic governors. Four years ago, only Pennsylvania did. This is bound to help the Democratic challenger.

As this interminable campaign finally winds to a close next week, Biden seems to be relying on a television and media blitz underwritten by his big fundraising advantage. Is he duplicating the relatively passive approach Clinton adopted in the late stages of the 2016 campaign?

At times, Biden has not been campaigning as actively in person as has the President. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic is inhibiting Biden’s travel agenda, so that is cited as the reason for his reluctance to travel more frequently or extensively.

But still, Trump is doing what he loves, getting out of Washington and addressing enthusiastic groups of supporters at airport hangars in places like Hibbing, Minnesota; Allentown, Pennsylvania; Waukesha, Wisconsin; Lumberton, North Carolina and Pensacola, Florida.

Those are the kinds of places where his voters live. Trump is counting on repeating his 2016 success by following much the same strategy this year. We’ll soon see how that works out. And won’t it be a relief to finally learn the answer?

Lots of questions, no answers

As the current election campaign has dragged on, it often seems as if hyper-competitive Trump cares much more about winning re-election than he does about what he might do if he did win. Over and over again, interviewers have attempted to draw him out on his plans for restoring the nation’s health, economy, sociology and infrastructure. These would seem to be questions to which a presidential aspirant might have answers readily at hand.

But no. He gives little hint about what he might do. He floods the airwaves with vacuous generalizations that offer no insight into his plans. There is a growing suspicion that he doesn’t actually have any plans. He just wants to win.

Trump’s chief of staff essentially hoisted the white flag of surrender over the weekend in admitting that “COVID-19 will just have to run its course". Nearly a quarter million Americans have died from the coronavirus pandemic, and this is the response of the federal government that is charged with public health and well-being?

Even if you believed that, what sensible politician would admit to such a passive, fatalistic, defeatist attitude?

Trump has often denigrated military or other public service. He has lied to the country so frequently that even dogged liberal fact-checkers have lost track of his total of mendacity.

Are these actions of someone who really cares about his job or retaining it? Or is this US President simply fixated on winning the competition? It does sometimes seem this struggle for control over the nation’s course is just another contest for Trump. Maybe it’s like a Sunday outing with friends on one of his golf courses.

For this President, as for famous NFL coach Vince Lombardi, “Winning isn’t the most important thing. It’s the only thing.”

Passing the Senate baton

On the undercard of next week’s election is control of the US Senate. Trump’s ability to install a third justice on the nine-member US Supreme Court this week served as a vivid reminder of the consequences of political control of the Senate.

The GOP has a 53-47 majority now. They are almost certain to gain a seat in Alabama, so the Democrats would need to capture four additional seats on November 3, assuming Biden wins as expected and the new Vice President exercises her ability to break Senate tie votes.

It looks like the Dems may succeed. Even Trump admitted to donors the other day that “I think the Senate is tough (to retain control), actually. And there are a couple (Republican incumbent) senators I can’t really get involved in. I don’t want to help some of them.”

Various state rules may produce runoff elections to be held in December. Vote counts in several states may delay matters. But when the dust settles, the Democrats seem poised to gain seats in Maine, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina. They might even snag one or two more in Georgia or Iowa.

Neither Trump nor the Republican establishment is likely to be surprised if they do. And they will blame each other.