Dear Editor,
It’s primary season and the gloves are off. President Joe Biden is framing any possibility of another election of former President Donald Trump as a threat to our democracy.
At the same time, Trump rails against Republican Party nominee rival Nikki Haley while criticizing. “Crooked Joe” at every turn. It is daunting to consider nine more months of such campaign mudslinging and demeaning affronts coming from the respective party nominees. What do we want to hear from the Presidential candidates? According to some, the answer may be “not too much.”
Immediately following Trump’s January 23 win in the New Hampshire (NH) primary, CNN contributor and political pundit Van Jones said in an interview, “If I were Biden, I would stay hidden. He doesn’t inspire confidence, and he’s not a great messenger for himself.” By comparison, Jones said, “Trump’s strengths, his resilience, is a reflection of Biden’s fragility.” He added, “It would be more strategic to make progressive activists such as union leaders and clean-energy executives act as surrogates to sell the American people on the administration’s policy successes.”
It so happened that on January 24, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain endorsed Biden in his presidential bid. Fain attributed that support, in part, to Biden earlier in September having made a strategic appearance on a picket line when workers were on strike with the three domestic automakers.
Following Jones’s remarks, former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod seemed to reinforce the apprehension about the president’s public persona when he said, “... his performance is a problem.... There is a sense that the world is out of control, and he’s not in command.” Polling among voters continues to reflect uncertainty regarding Joe Biden’s physical and mental fitness for a second term.
Correspondingly, candidate Trump is receiving his share of scrutiny from multiple news organizations.
Both NBC and CNN did not air his victory speech that followed his January 15 win at the Iowa caucus. Subsequently, after his win at the NH primary, CNN and CNBC cut away from the former president’s remarks - the explanation being to fact-check in real-time statements Trump made about prior victories in NH primaries and general elections.
In a statement made by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, she said, “There’s a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things” as the reason why “we and other news organizations have stopped giving away an unfiltered, live platform to remarks by former President Trump.”
For me, that sounds like an arbitrary justification for censorship. It also sounds like a pretext for the resurrection of Biden’s 2020 “stay in the basement” campaign tactic. Analogously, I see this as the opening move in a chess match wherein the game between the two candidates for president may be proceeding toward a stalemate, and the equivalent of checkmate is the American public never got to see a face-to-face debate.
Peter Wibell, Rutledge