Step It Up, Joe

The sudden disasters affecting Donald Trump, which I covered in my post before last, have certainly helped President Joe Biden in his efforts to win a second term and keep Trump out of the White House, but it's hardly going to be enough.  Biden faces headwinds within his own base, with young people, Muslims and Arab-Americans - who make up a large part of the Democratic electorate in the crucial state of Michigan - angry over his Israel-Gaza policy, as well as with blacks and Hispanics, and he may face more serious headwinds from progressives if he tries to add additional security to the southern border by executive order without the guarantee of a payoff in the form of getting Ukraine any aid.  And so many Democrats are getting dispirited with Biden even as Trump's base remains committed to their cult leader that the only wind at Biden's back, so far, is his own.

That stinks. 

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a column out suggesting that President Biden take whatever action he can on Israel, Ukraine and the border - that is, respectively, stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu on his prosecution of the war against Hamas, find a way with House Democrats to circumvent House Speaker Mike Johnson and get aid to Ukraine, and issue executive orders to crack down on migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the Squad be damned.

Some of Ignatius's column must have gotten through to the White House.  CNN reports that the United States is promoting a new United Nations draft resolution to call for a temporary cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and is also planning to warn the Israelis against aground incursion into Rafah, where displaced Palestinians are now staying.  President Biden, still undecided as to what he can do, if anything, to shame Speaker Johnson into allowing a vote on aid to Ukraine, is announcing tomorrow sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin for being responsible for the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.   Navalny (below) was the brightest hope for a permanently democratic Russia (as opposed to the temporarily democratic Russia that Boris Yeltsin led in the 1990s), and his death has caused that hope to fade rapidly.  Biden's proposed additional sanctions would be in concert with the condemnation of Navalny's murder that has come from every major world figure.

Except for Donald Trump, who compared Navalny's torture and murder to his own legal indictments.

There are other issues Ignatius overlooked.  Biden has to find another way to promote his domestic successes, like cheaper insulin, even as he has to stop promoting economic successes that not enough voters feel ("Bidenomics" is the worst one-word slogan conceived since "Fahrvergnügen").  He also needs to remind voters that he ended the COVID pandemic in this country with his wise, prudent approach to the disease.  He should also point out that he successfully pushed through legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.  And there are other issues I could mention as well, like, oh, I don't know, infrastructure projects?

One of the biggest issues working in his favor is abortion, yet Biden, the second Catholic U.S. President, is reportedly uncomfortable talking about it.  He'd better start getting comfortable about it.  More Roman Catholic voters actually favor Trump over Biden than the other way around, so even as Biden shouldn't be afraid of offending conservative Catholics whose votes he doesn't have a prayer - literally - of getting anyway (like all of the Catholics on the Supreme Court not named Sonia by their mothers), he, as a Catholic, should be able to espouse a pro-legal-abortion stance as a medical issue so no one gets the idea that all Catholics are, well, the bad guys.

And we'd hate for that to happen.

Look, Pope John Paul II found out the hard way that freeing Poland and Lithuania from communism wasn't going to convince everyone that he was a good guy, so Joe Biden, knowing that he can't please everyone, should just come out and declare his personal opposition to abortion while expressing point-blank his even greater opposition to imposing his personal beliefs on others.  Many Catholics won't like that.  Some pro-choice non-Catholics may be even more hostile to that message, as Catholic politicians who adhere to their faith in their personal lives even as they may contradict it in their political lives get no brownie points from the Vatican's critics outside the Church.  But the vast majority of voters would be pleased to find a Catholic President who is broadminded enough to accommodate other points of view on the topic of abortion, and it would go a long way toward defusing the growing anti-Catholicism I see in this country; I mean, how is it that some of the most vocal critics of Islamophobia have no problem dismissing Catholics offended by assaults on their own faith as a bunch of intolerant fools, when Islam is just as patriarchal and socially conservative as Catholicism, if not more so?

As for the need for Biden to get out and engage with the voters, I don't fear that he won't do so.  Remember, the only reason he didn't engage with the voters so much in 2020 was because of that crazy little thing called COVID.  But when he does get out, President Biden needs something he can engage voters with.  This blog, and David Ignatius's column, offer constructive suggestions on what Biden can bring to the campaign trail.