The dramatic tussle between Biden and Trump deserves a Broadway musical of its own. It is being played out all around us and not just for an American audience but a global one. The highlights of the ongoing campaign are being telecast live not just on CNN and the BBC but repeated on the Indian news-channels.
In the blue corner of the ring is the 77-year-old Joe Biden whose 78th birthday on November 20 will either be a memorable one, celebrating the making of the oldest president in American history, or the end of a lost dream, inspired, we are told, by a son who died at 46 and who was supposed to be the future. Joe Biden had named his son Beau (French for handsome). One is reminded of P C Wren’s romantic fictional hero Beau Geste who sacrifices everything for the family pride in the good old days when honour was the only thing that mattered.
In almost every campaign speech and in what the American TV channels call the town-hall meetings where questions can be posed by members of an audience drawn from a cross-section of American citizens, Biden refers either to the 1972 car-accident in which his first wife Neilia and little daughter Naomi died or to the son who was supposed to be the hope of the future of not just the family but the country.
The accounts we hear are all about a Beau Biden who, in the best traditions of middle-class America, was determined to make it on his own. A son who had launched a political career on his own by successfully contesting for the position of attorney-general for Delaware and who, in the midst of a nascent political career, served for a year in the American army in Iraq, being awarded a Bronze Star Medal before returning to his elected position. The son who, while eying higher office as the Governor of Delaware, was determined to make it on his own without any help from his father who was then America’s and Barack Obama’s vice-president.
And then it all ended tragically with Beau being diagnosed with brain cancer and passing away in the Walter Reed Military Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, on May 30, 2015. The narrative goes that, in his last few days, Beau wanted his father to carry the dream forward by contesting for the presidency when usually it is the other way round. It is the father’s dream which is fulfilled by the son.
The narrative continues that the second tragedy of his life was too much for the then 72-year-old Biden who sat out the election of 2016 where Hillary Clinton was surprised by the 68-year-old billionaire Donald Trump, whose campaign theme was that he would make America great again by ensuring that the working class would get back the jobs they had lost due to the globalized misadventures like the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). It was an election where a slender cumulative margin of 77,644 votes in three crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was more significant than Hillary’s overall national majority of 2.87 million since Trump was a marketing man who knew where to make the numbers count.
While more Americans voted for Hillary in 2016, Trump appealed to the largely-white working class in ways that his rival could never do, Trump focused on the lost jobs and closed factories in the midwest states which Hillary rarely visited if at all and that too with celebrity couples like Jay Z and Beyonce. Candidate Trump underlined this point in one of the last 2016 campaign speeches he made in Wisconsin: “Here I am. No guitar, no Jay Z. Just you and me,” as he put it to the crowd in the state he was never supposed to win.
The problem with President Trump is that he has not been able to keep connecting with those who are not part of his core group of white-American working-class supporters. In all the key moments of his presidency, he has given the impression that his 2016 theme of Make America Great Again and his 2020 one of Keep America Great Again is all about reminding Americans about the good old days when what was good for American business was good for America.