As we all know, Donald Trump is vulnerable to attack from any number of perspectives. He is very good at providing ammunition to his opponents. That said, Joe Biden is also accomplished at inflicted wounds on himself. For example, while Biden will most assuredly win large majorities among black voters, the size of those majorities may well be reduced by his own long history of comments that sound at least vaguely racist.
After the nomination process is complete, I'd expect a barrage of anti-Biden ads that contrast the criminal-justice reform bill that Trump championed and signed with the very, very long litany of Biden statements in support of locking up inner-city folks. I'd expect those ads to feature recordings of Biden's passionate speeches running on top of montages of peaceful protestors and of overjoyed people who won their freedom under the Trump-signed reform law.
Here are some of the Biden quotes and actions:
"It doesn't matter whether or not they're the victims of society. The end result is that they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. So I don't want to ask what made them do this. They must be taken off the street."
"Let the FBI buy weapons as powerful and the drug cartels have."
Biden opposed judicial discretion in sentencing of those who "do not meet the middle class criteria of susceptibility to rehabilitation." Biden said, "They are beyond the pale, many of those people. They have literally not been socialized. They are in jail, away from my mother . . . our families."
Biden was lead sponsor of a bill to add more than 60 new death-penalty crimes to federal law. (He was in a bidding war of sorts with Strom Thurmond to see who could add more.)
In 1994, Biden said, "When I wrote the original bill that started this whole process, the so-called Biden crime bill, I didn't call a liberal confab . . . or Big Society people, I called the cops."
Biden sponsored legislation for evening programs in inner cities. On the Senate floor, he said this: "They started looking at [these programs] and found out that this midnight basketball isn't getting them together a bunch of jive folks who are black, white, and hispanic and living in the inner city to . . . try and see if they can be Michael Jordan. What they found out, they were keeping schools open, so gangs come off streets instead of out raping my mother, marauding me, robbing the local store. They're in a gymnasium [instead]. And my daughter will be safer, my wife will be safer, my mother will be safer, and I will be safer. And I will be happy."
Here's a video that includes these quotes and more.
LinkThe point here is not that Trump is good and Biden is bad. The point is that both are very much vulnerable to effective attacks (both honest and unfair).
The next months will be nasty and not at all uplifting. If only we could look forward to a decidedly more dignified fall. But campaigns these days don't come cloaked in dignity. And in 2020, it seems that anything that could go badly ends up being even worse than any of us could have imagined.
