A Letter to Joe Biden
Dear Vice President Biden,
President Trump has clearly demonstrated that a president that doesn’t listen to advice can get our nation into deep trouble. I, therefore, humbly ask that that you take a few minutes to consider the advice I am about to give to you. It deals with three topics: your choice of a running mate, the message you should be delivering to the American people, and how you should conduct your campaign.
Your Running Mate
You have already announced that you intend to select a woman as your running mate. The New York Times recently ran a story comparing the records of countries lead by women against those lead by men in terms of their success in combating the coronavirus. The results were not even close. On average, countries lead by women on a per capita basis experienced roughly one fifth the number of deaths as those lead by a man. While it could be that women simply value life more than men, it may also be that their greater success lies in the fact that, being physically smaller and weaker, women have learned that they have to rely on their intellect if they wish to succeed. While it is true that our country is currently the strongest nation on the planet both militarily and economically, that will not remain the case if we don’t start acting with greater forethought. Therefore, I applaud your decision to select a woman as your running mate.
Your determination to select a woman as your running mate does not greatly narrow the field. A number of political junkies, like myself, have suggested that you select a woman of color. While I abhor the notion of selecting a running mate on the basis of the color of her skin, I still mourn the results of the 2016 presidential election in which people of color stayed away from the polls on election day. I know that because my wife and I served as poll watchers in Palm Beach County on election day. Therefore, as much as I dislike the idea of using race or skin color as a determining factor, I believe that you simply cannot assume that Donald Trump has alienated people of color sufficiently that they will not dare sit out this Fall’s election. It is for this reason that I recommend you choose a woman of color as your running mate.
As you must appreciate, serving as this nation’s leader is an incredibly taxing job. I only have to think of how Barack Obama and George W. Bush both turned gray before they left office. Also, being a man who is almost as old as I am, you will need all the help you can get from your vice president. To be sure, there are many women of color who are bright, energetic, compassionate and determined and who could be of great assistance to you. The problem is that most of them lack broad governmental experience. Barack Obama was indeed lucky to have someone of your experience to help him navigate his way through what was a very trying period in our nation’s history. Finding the person who can best complement your abilities will not be easy and I hope that you and your team will make a wise choice.
I would like to raise one caveat. As much as I admire Kamala Harris, I am concerned about your choosing any sitting member of the U.S. Senate. By the time that Donald Trump leaves office next January, he will have done an incredible amount of damage to this nation which will require a monumental effort to repair. You will need every vote that you can muster in the U.S. Senate in order to repair the damage that he will have caused. Unfortunately, there is a strong possibility that Doug Jones will not be re-elected and Joe Manchin ‘s support on many progressive issues is anything but assured. Fortunately, Senator Harris’ term does not expire until January 2023 which means that Governor Newsom would name her replacement who would serve for the next two years. That just might be sufficient as most of the repair work will have to be done in the first two-years that you are in office while the Democratic party will likely to continue to hold a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives.
Your Message
The American people tend to suffer from ADD and pay little attention to political platforms and policy statements. Donald Trump’ election as our 45th President clearly attests to that fact. Therefore, your message must be short and simple and addressed at the failures of President Trump. In short, it’s not about the candidates’ respective policies, but rather about their persona. Candidate Trump’s message in the 2016 presidential election was simple: Hillary was a crook and he was a successful businessman who knew how to get things done. By 2016, after watching Mitch McConnell make sure that nothing got done during the Obama administration, American were willing to vote for almost anyone who could get the nation moving again.
I suggest that your message be “He doesn’t listen; and he doesn’t care about you.” These are two of the President’s biggest failings and two of your greatest strengths. On many occasions the President has boasted that he knows “more than the generals.” Not listening to his generals has led him to make some terrible mistakes. He pulled most of our forces out of Syria against the advice of James Mattis, then his Secretary of Defense and a four-star Marine Corp General. This not only caused us to abandon our allies in that country, but essentially to reward Russia and the Assad regime for their war crimes again the Syrian people. He walked away from the Iran nuclear deal and came very close to getting our nation into a military conflict with Iran. While the President likes to brag about how he has crippled the Iranian economy, Ayatollah Khamenei remains firmly in control of his country and has restarted Iran’s nuclear weapons program. President Trump also ignored advice from his Defense Department and his State Department and began a series of fruitless negotiations with Kim Jung Un, thereby weakening our relations with South Korea. More recently, he tried to have the U.S. military take action to halt civil protests in this country, an effort soundly condemned by both present and former military leaders. Had our armed forces not balked at this command, it would have set racial relations in this country back by 50 years.
More recently, President Trump has ignored the advice of his medical experts, at least those that he had not already terminated or discouraged into leaving before the pandemic arrived. According to the Institute for Health Metric and Evaluation, we are now on track to suffer over 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus, at least 75% of which could (and should) have been avoided had the President only listened to the advice of his public health advisers. Similarly, the President didn’t listen to the advice of his national security advisers when we tried to coerce the Ukrainian government to assist him in his efforts to put an end to your campaign before it even got underway. This little faux pas almost got him removed from office and did irreparable damage to our relations with Ukraine and other allies as well as destroy morale throughout the State Department. It may also cost a few Republicans their seats in the U.S. Senate, but they have themselves more to blame than the President.
Even more important than the President’s unwillingness to listen to the advice of those with far greater knowledge, he simply doesn’t care who gets hurt by his actions as long as they might benefit him personally. John Bolton’s soon to be published book (In the Room Where It Happened) is reported to confirm what we have always suspected; namely, that the President makes all decisions on the basis of what’s in it for himself. Hardly a day goes by that the President doesn’t remind us of those he does not care about.
Surely, he doesn’t care about persons with black or brown skin. He locked them up in cages on our southern border like they were wild animals. He called those protesting the injustices routinely visited upon people of color “thugs” and called for the U.S. Army to crush their protests.
Surely, he doesn’t care about women. He has tried his best to put nation’s leading provider of women’s healthcare (Planned Parenthood) out of business; he has sexually assaulted dozens of women and has routinely demeaned women with names like “Crooked Hillary”, “Crazy Nancy” and “Pocahontas.”
Surely, he doesn’t care about members of the press whom he refers to as purveyors of “fake news” and encourages his followers to regard them as “enemies of the people.”
Surely, he doesn’t care about Democrats like you and me to whom he has tried to attribute all of the nation’s ills and whom he has accused of perpetrating hoaxes intended to force him from office.
And sadly, he does not even care about his most loyal supporters.
Perhaps nothing evidences this last point more than his rally this weekend in Tulsa. The coronavirus is now surging in the nation’s mid-lands and Tulsa is one of the growing hotspots for the virus. While we still don’t know much about the virus, we do know that it is mostly transmitted through the air in microscopic droplets expelled from the mouths of infected persons. The transmission process is most effective in closed spaces in which people are closely congregated and are singing or cheering. One of the early super-spreading events took place in January in the State of Washington when one infected member of a choir infected 52 out of the 60 other choir members attending a single practice session. This is exactly the type of event that the President insisted take place, the only difference is that rather than a 60 persons being present, this rally will had roughly 12,000 attendees; and the President discouraged those who attended from wearing a face mask asserting that it would be a political statement against him. In short, the President doesn’t really care if his supporters become infected with the virus as long as they cheer loudly for him.
Just think about the emotional high the President will experience every time he thinks about the hundreds of supporters who voluntarily sacrificed their health, and possibly their lives, expressing their admiration for him. If he’s really successful, the number who will die might even surpass the 909 residents of Jonestown who participated in America’s largest mass suicide.
Your Campaign
I understand that next Tuesday you will be conducting a press conference on foreign policy. While I respect your foreign policy expertise, I doubt the wisdom of your engaging in this type of activity. This is because the few hundred Americans that even care about foreign policy probably have better things to do than to listen because they are already well aware of what needs to be done. Unfortunately, giving a press conferences on any issue of national policy is likely to prove counter-productive as it will not convince any voters to view you more favorably and it will probably provide the Trump Campaign with ammunition with which to attack you. Therefore, if you have any more press conferences scheduled on issues of national policy, I suggest that you cancel them. Trump had it right when he said that Americans find policy pronouncements boring.
I nevertheless appreciate that you need to keep yourself before the voters throughout the months leading up to the November election; and I have a couple of suggestions that might help you do that. First, you must have noticed that the Trump administration has stopped holding press conferences on the fight against coronavirus and has essentially declared that the war against the virus has been won. Unfortunately, we are still a long way from having tamed the coronavirus; and the fact that most restaurants cannot attract enough diners to operate profitably tells us that most American remain fearful of the virus. Therefore, my suggestion is that you hold regular press conferences talking about what is happening in the battle against the virus. This will provide you with a great opportunity to show the American people that you care about an issue that remains of significant importance to them and which the Trump administration no longer cares about. If you play chess, this would be the equivalent of moving your rook into a safe spot in striking distance of both your opponent’s king and queen. It will give you an opportunity to score points with the roughly 250 million Americans who remain fearful of the virus, while at the same time bringing to the fore a subject that the President would like them to forget about.
In conducting these press conferences, I suggest that you enlist a host of experts who can answer questions that you pose on important issues involving the virus such as in what geographic areas the virus is surging, the status of available medical resources in those areas, what should be done about the problems of nursing homes, prisons and meat processing facilities, what are the best ways to avoid contracting the virus, and the state of efforts to develop a vaccine or therapeutic solutions. After each answer of an expert adviser, you should briefly summarize what has been said to demonstrate that you both listen and understand. This will make a clear contrast with the way President Trump conducts himself. Also, when you take questions from the press, there will be some for which you and your experts may not have a definitive answer. Rather than act like President Trump and pretend that you know the answer, you should simply admit that you don’t know and that you will find the answer and make it available when you do. This will also provide a sharp contrast with President Trump. In this simple manner you will be able to demonstrate that, unlike the President, you both listen and care about what concerns Americans.
A few weeks ago Tom Friedman wrote a column in the New York Times suggesting that you could muster support for your candidacy by announcing at the Democratic Nation Convention whom you plan to appoint as members of your cabinet and to other high positions within your administration. He even suggested that you should consider including some Republicans in your cabinet. Friedman is correct in believing that cabinet appointees are certainly newsworthy items, but I believe the way he has suggested that you go about disclosing your selections is inadvisable which brings me to my second suggestion.
Before I get there, however, we must accept the fact that Donald J. Trump is an unmatched master at manipulating the press. That’s why none of the other Republicans who sought their party’s 2016 nomination ever got their messages heard. Whenever his opponents went to make an important announcement, Trump published an outlandish statement completely diverting attention away from what they were trying to say. What this tells us is that you need a way to keep the press focused on the messages that you will be trying to convey. To do this, I suggest that you announce at the Democratic National Convention that you will be naming two high level proposed appointments of your administration each week up to the election. On each Saturday you should announce the positions that you will be discussing that week, one on Monday and one on Thursday. This will give the press something to speculate over pending each announcement. This will largely enable you to monopolize the attention of the media each week up to the election. In rolling out your list of appointments you should start with the lesser appointments and build up to the more consequential ones as we approach the election.
In announcing each appointment, you should do two things: (1) you should focus on the appointee’s credentials for the job and (2) you should describe what you believe are the challenges that the appointee will have to confront. Then the appointee should talk about the problems that he or she will be facing and the tough choices that will have to be made. The appointee need not even lay out a plan that she or he intends to follow as that will only generate a lot of negative press. What is important is that the appointee demonstrate an understanding of the problems and the goals that he or she intends to work toward.
While Friedman, in offering his advice, mentioned the names of several individuals whom he felt should serve in key positions, I believed that he erred in suggesting a number of U.S. Senators. For the reasons mentioned above, I suggest that you steer clear of appointing serving Democratic Senators as you will desperately need their votes in the Senate if you are going to have any chance of making your tenure in office productive.
I appreciate your taking the time to consider my suggestions and I stand ready to help you in any way that I can.