The Swiftboating of Joe Biden
This essay was inevitable.
This essay was inevitable because it is exactly how American politics has played out over the past two decades. Like clockwork, the Democratic Party brings forth a qualified, tempered individual to clean up the mess of a Republican administration and like clockwork, this candidate is relentlessly smeared from a right-wing lie that silent seeps into a media that is all too giddy to accept said lie at face value. This is what happens when you have multifaceted media conglomerates, owned by wealthy White men who greatly benefit when a Republican occupies the Oval Office. The name of the game is ratings and nothing gets better ratings than a perceived even match with the ultimate outcome in doubt. A one-sided November election result would work wonders for our democracy but would be disastrous for those in the television "news" business. At the end of the day, our media would much rather have a nail-biting election result than a clear and concise showing of overwhelming democracy.
It's not hard to see. This modern information warfare is straight out of the teachings of Sun Tzu: identify an enemy's biggest weakness and exploit it. But what happens when your enemy has no glaring weakness? That's the twist that Republicans, and by proxy, our media have now come to use to weaken strong political candidates. John Kerry's heroism in Vietnam? Call it into question by implying that he's a liar! Barack Obama's potential trailblazing presidency? Try to derail it by showcasing some extremist views by his former pastor! Hillary Clinton's competency for the work that she does? Question it by showing her seemingly being careless with classified government documents! Tried and true, Republicans will stop at nothing to paint a Democrat's biggest strength as their biggest weakness.
What about Joe Biden?
Even the most apolitical person would probably react to the famous picture of Biden being sworn in next to a hospital bed. Tell this same person the background of that picture and he or she will likely become emotional, perhaps even developing a sense of empathy for the man. Continue on sharing that this same man as Vice-President would lose his son to cancer and what you have is a sympathetic portrait of a man who has endured much personal tragedy in his life. A man who often speaks about his faith and his upbringing and being forced to move when his father lost his job. This is a man who can relate to a family struggling or a family that has endured loss. At a time when we have an emotionless man incapable of empathy in the White House, Joe Biden serves as a foil when people are most looking for leadership and compassion.
Therefore, Republicans must destroy this image. They must make Biden seem unkind and unpleasant. They must make him seem coarse, even predatory. They tried to make him seem corrupt through his son's Burisma experience but that fell flat and got their president impeached. But now that Biden is the presumptive nominee, leading in all the battleground states, Republicans have to once again try and use Biden's greatest strength against him. Rather than an empathetic family man, Republicans are now attempting to portray Biden as a creepy rapist. Their patsy, Tara Reade, has a checkered history from an infatuation with Vladimir Putin, to sympathy for Julian Assange, to support for Bernie Sanders. Her story has changed multiple times. Her neighbor, whom she allegedly confided in, forgot that she had told her about her accusation 25 years ago. There was never a Senate report filed about the alleged incident, an incident that now suspiciously echoes writings by her father. Oh, and let's not forget there's this little issue that Joe Biden was vetted for Vice-President, a process that Barack Obama and his team undertook with the utmost importance.
Today, Joe Biden will publicly address these claims for the first time on Morning Joe. His denial won't satisfy Republicans. It won't satisfy Chris Hayes or Ari Melber or Jake Tapper. It won't satisfy The Intercept staff and their Russian overlords. And it won't be the end of our media's incessant need to create a horse race over the next 6 months. As has been pointed out on Twitter, there was always going to be something that came forward before the November election regardless of its veracity. At a time and place in our country where ratings are key, that something didn't even have to adhere to basic journalistic standards for a story. All it had to do was generate new news, something that was sorely needed from the constant coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Faced with sharing an unvetted news story or vetted pandemic news, our major networks can and will choose the unvetted news story 10 out of 10 times. It's who they are and it's who they will be for the foreseeable future.
And it's why the American Fourth Estate won't do any favors for Joe Biden from now until November.