This Week in the Guardian #16 – Presidential Election Special

The Big Day is almost upon us. Soon Orange Man Bad will be banished back the nether-realm, and good old (not at all creepy) Uncle Joe will be in charge. Briefly. Until he loses the few faculties remaining to him, and we get landed with President Kamala Harris. A politician so incredibly unpopular within her own party she couldn’t even ride the triple identity coups of being black AND Indian AND a woman to success.

Our friends at The Guardian have been busier than Christmas elves on this one. They all likely have opinion pieces ready for morning after election night. Stuff about healing and growing. (Maybe they’ll just use the same column they were going to use last time, but change all the “Hillarys” to “Bidens” using find and replace).

Joe Biden: from a campaign that almost collapsed to fighting Trump for the presidency

This long piece tells an interesting story, just not the one it thinks it’s telling. They try to spin the tale of Biden’s Lazarus-like presidential campaign, without coming to the logical conclusion that presents itself.

I’m going to bullet point out the narrative here, and see if you can spot the glaringly obvious idea, which the Guardian seems to miss:

• Joe Biden was a late entrant to a crowded Democratic field.
• He was seen as old fashioned and non-progressive, but had powerful financial backers.
• He lost the first three primaries embarrassingly badly.
• There was a generalised panic in the DNC that Sanders might win the nomination.
• Biden wins the 4th primary by a landslide in a “miraculous turnaround”.
• All the other candidates start dropping out one-by-one and endorsing Biden.

It’s fairly clear what’s going on here, no?

Is Biden going to win?

The short answer to this appears to be “yes!”. They have not 1, not 2, but 3 separate articles saying as much. Many of them devoted entirely to citing polls and then saying “yes, the polls said Hillary would win, but this is different”.

For example:

Polling is better now, and Biden’s lead is larger than Hillary Clinton’s was.”

Thank god for those leaps forward in polling technology, amirite?

Of course this nailed-down certainty of victory is, in and of itself, a tactic. It doesn’t necessarily mean the result is a foregone conclusion. But it really feels like the result is fixed for Biden, and everyone knows it.

Bu…that is what we said last time, too.

OK, so Biden won, now what?

Since it’s almost certain Good Joe is going to beat Bad Donald (yes, that’s really the level of political analysis we’re dealing with here), maybe we should focus on what Joe is going to do when he’s in office.

There’s lots of talk about that (and none of what will happen if Trump wins, further suggesting a fixed result).

Robert Reich thinks Biden should “fix democracy”. “Fix” being the perfect word. He thinks they should “reform” the electoral college and the Supreme Court, as well as adding more Senators for certain states and even splitting california into two states (thus doubling it’s senator count). This would apparently make democracy “fairer”, and not in anyway simply give voting power to traditionally democratic states.

Simon Tisdall is in ecstasy as he expects Biden to resume the US’s “global leadership”. Jeffrey Frankel says Biden is “safe hands for the eocnomy”.

This article promises “something big” in Biden’s first 100 days, to “fight the coronavirus”. There will likely be a “national mask mandate” and moves to “counter disinformation.”

But by far the worst offender – and a solid contender for the worst, most dishonest article of the year – is this piece from Richard Wolffe.

In it he laments that Trump has “damaged US democracy”, by suggesting it could be corrupt (without ever mentioning all the evidence that it is so). He praises US foreign policy for “focusing on democracy promotion” (yes, seriously):

For most of the last 30 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, democracy promotion has been a mainstay of American foreign policy […] the US plays a central role in spreading democratic government around the world.

He goes in to raptures about how Biden will resume US efforts to “spread democracy”. It is quasi-masturbatory Imperialist garbage. And it’s likely just a taste of what’s in store should Biden win.

Hunter who?

No coverage at all of the Hunter Biden laptop story, or even a discussion about his obviously corrupt employment by Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. (Imagine the news if Trump’s government had backed a change of government in Venezuela, and then Donald Jr. had been given a job in the largest Venezuelan oil company).

One step further, the only talk about the Biden e-mails we get is one column claiming Facebook and Twitter were right to censor the information “because it might be false”, and they should do it more often. And another which, with a straight face, says:

Media organisations shouldn’t publish allegations unless they believe them to be true, after making appropriate checks.

…this from a paper which published a proven falsehood on its front page, and never apologised or retracted it (in fact, it’s still there to this day).

Bonus 1: Vote by mail!

The Guardian (along with most of the media) is really keen on mail-in ballots, and wants you all to know that they are NOT easier to cheat with. As we have written before, this is historically completely incorrect – postal ballots are far more susceptibale to voter fraud. This article is actually just a reprint of something they ran in August – both times it was paid-for content by non-governmental organizations.

BONUS 2: Don’t worry, the military will only get involved “if it’s close”

An entire column dedicated to the US military’s involvment in the election seems bizarre…but there is one. Don’t worry they would “prefer not to get involved” and will likely only be forced to act “if the result is very close” and/or someone contests the elections.

It’s a strange article, it doesn’t have an author attached to it, and seems to be answering a question no one asked. Or apologising for some slight no one has committed. What it feels like, is a justification for crime yet to come to light. “We HAD to rig the election, because if it had been close then Trump would have contested the vote and the military would have got involved.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But it is very odd.

*

So, here is the Guardian’s story of election laid out in nice neat terms:

1. Biden will win.
2. He didn’t cheat.
3. When he’s won he’ll change the laws and courts.
4. Really, he didn’t cheat. Even suggesting it is bad for democracy.
5. The US will resume “democracy promotion” and “world leadership” once he’s in charge.
6. The US military don’t want to be involved but they might have to if it’s close.
7. Seriously, he didn’t cheat.

*

All told, a busy week for The Guardian. And we didn’t even mention how “women will decide this election”, or how Trump “supercharged Russian disinformation” has gone into overdrive.

Did we miss anything? Tell us about it in the comments below, and keep an eye out for articles that should go in the next issue (hopefully not about the coronavirus).