A short newsletter today, featuring my latest column for the Kansas City Star/Wichita Eagle about Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly — who gets portrayed in the national media as something of a “rural conservative state whisperer” — and a new NYT article in which she and other Dem governors give Joe Biden advice for 2024.
This week it was the New York Times, looking to Kelly and a few other Democratic governors for their advice to President Joe Biden, who is off to a shaky start in his re-election campaign, probably against his predecessor Donald Trump.
Kelly’s advice: Ignore the elephant in the room.“If I were in Biden’s shoes, I would not talk about Trump,” she said. “I would let other people talk about Trump.”
That’s terrible advice.
Why? Because Donald Trump isn’t just another candidate, and Biden can’t float above the fray. The former president is a threat to American democracy — we all saw what happened on January 6 — and it seems rather obvious to most observers that his second term will be worse than the first.
Trump is the issue in 2024.
Please! Read the whole thing!
I realize there’s some tension between my take here and my post yesterday suggesting that everybody already kind of knows the stakes in 2024. I think that’s true. But since Biden is actually running, I think he has to actually make the case about those stakes.
On the one hand, of course you're correct. But on the other--maybe we should understand Kelly's advice as solely pertinent to Biden's re-election chances, not the larger political crisis we face? And maybe re-electing Biden is the necessary (if not sufficient) condition to warding off the worst aspects of the crisis facing us? I actually don't think that's correct either; there is good evidence that Biden's harping on the crisis of democracy posed by the Trumpified GOP really did contribute to minimizing mid-term losses in 2022. Still, viewed in that narrow focus, Kelly's advice makes more sense, even if I'd agree with you in encouraging Biden to ignore it.