Joe Biden is going to be President! Hallelujah!
Like so many other progressives I am very happy that Biden will be president and Kamala Harris will be Vice President. And like other progressives I was watching the happy celebration of Biden/Harris Saturday morning on MSNBC and CNN. But just for the fun of it I decided to switch over and see how the celebration was being covered by Fox (Fake and Phony) News.
Of course there was a different take on the happy event. Most of the Fox commentators did manage to say that it looked as if Biden would be officially called as the winner of the 2020 race. A rare, and I am sure, painful, nod to reality. However, the spin the Foxers put on the news, and the things on which they chose to emphasize was, I think, revealing for what we can expect out of Trump’s most immoral and enthusiastic friends and operatives.
Here are just a few.
-The Trump campaign is launching numerous lawsuits to investigate voter fraud and other problems.
In the same breath in which they announced that it looked like Biden was going to win all the Fox commentators (and I do mean all of them) were quick to tell people that Trump and his allies were launching multiple lawsuits.
These lawsuits were long on complaints and breathless allegations, but really short on any claim of a specific act of electoral wrongdoing or proof that even if all of the scurrilous misdeeds were true it would change the election results. Most of them were of the nature of, “we weren’t allowed proper access to view the counting!” Others were like, “we have an affidavit from a person in Michigan who claimed that a ballot was filled out incorrectly but it was accepted anyway.” And there was much hyped and repeated complaint, “In upper midwest southern Wisconsin an somebody swore that an election official found 5,000 Trump ballots that were given to Biden.”
There were and still are, lots of allegations about lack of viewing, people complaining about lost ballots, irregularities in how ballots were handled by local officials and demands to have a recount. But, predictably, there were no allegations fraud, or miscounting or demands for a recount in any state that Trump won. It was only in the states needed to win that such demands were made. Moreover, there is no specific evidence of clear tampering of ballots and no explanation of how any election official ignored or broke ballot handling rules. Lastly, every allegation of lost or tampered ballots was so small that it could not have any material impact on the election results in Nevada, Arizona, or any other state. As such, there would not even be a recount.
-Trump is wildly popular and had a record number of people vote for him.
In the popular vote biden received almost 75 million votes. Trump got somewhat more than 71 million. While conceding that Biden has received both more votes than Trump and more votes than any other president in history, Fox kept coming back to how popular Trump was. And of course they pointed out that he had gained a record number of votes among blacks and Latinos.
All of this was by way of trying to diminish Biden. But it really ignored two things. First, Biden beat Trump by about 4 million votes -which is pretty damn big. And if Biden does win Nevada, Arizona and Georgia then he will come out ahead of Trump by somewhere between 5 and 7 million votes. That is really huge and a strong indication that the majority of people in America wanted the two Democrats and not Trump and Pence.
The second thing Fox ignored is the advantage that Trump had over Biden during the election season by virtue of being president.
Trump has been in the public eye for five years. And during the last four years he has been president, with all the pomp and grandeur and power that comes with it. The trappings of the presidency made him look bigger, more impressive and more dignified than he really is. And of course, it confers on Trump two things that he relished and used constantly: access and exposure to the media.
As president Trump was always covered by the press and other media (even when he is obviously lying and should have been ignored) and has a chance to promote both himself and his message. There is no fighting to get attention when you are the president, and being president seems to imbue even the dumbest remarks with some level of importance when it is transmitted through the lens of national media.
And don’t forget that Trump, as president, had many powerful and important executive powers. This allowed him to do powerful things, to create orders that satisfied his racist base of voters and show them he could give or take at his whim. All of this makes for an enthusiastic voter response that can’t be duplicated any other way.
Very importantly for Trump and his base, he willfully and callously chose to ignore the danger of coronavirus transmission and do in-person rallies constantly in the last few months of the campaign season. This was so even after he got sick with the coronavirus and probably passed it on to others. When these rallies were covered by the media the impression was that there were huge numbers of people and that they were going wild with ecstacy for Trump.
All of this presidential stuff was very nice for inspiring the base and getting people out and to the polls.
On the other hand, Joe Biden had to do it hard way: fight to get the nomination, build up interest, create trust and confidence, and motivate people to register, work and vote.
-Kamala Harris is acknowledged as the first female Vice President.
I thought this was one of the most interesting things about the post-election coverage by Fox. Even though conservatives claim that they do not believe in political correctness it was obvious that the Fox people felt that they had to say something about Kamala Harris being not only the first female Vice President, but also that she is half black and half south Asian.
The Fox commentators had little to say about Harris other than that she is the first female VP and that she is double minority. There was nothing much to indicate that this was really an historic first for America. Nor did it seem to register with them, as it did with the Democrats, that Harris’s success should give hope and encouragement to every member of every minority community that they too could aspire to great things. Nope, true to their narrow and largely racist filled mind set, it did not sink in.
While Trump is still president I am sure that Fox News will continue to promote, defend and explain him. And these remarks are, in my opinion, an indication of what we can expect now that Biden and Harris are leading the country: Trump will try to blame his loss on fraud and mismanagement of the voting process, there will be tons of litigation, and Trump will always be portrayed as a huge success who had the loyalty of most of the country. And, of course, they will acknowledge the politica election of a member of a minority, but otherwise give it no special attention or attach any hope to it.
This last point is something that I felt very strongly while watching Biden and Harris on stage. Even as Harris was being acclaimed as a woman, a black, a south Asian and our first Vice President, I couldn’t help but think, “Yeah, we’re happy, but the Trump supporters aren’t. They see Harris as somebody who has taken something that used to belong to them, as somebody who has displaced them, somebody who has gained what should have been theirs but got it because she was a black, a woman, an Asian.” To them, Harris as the Vice President is something to fear, something to mourn, something to hate - something that just ain’t right.
I predict it is going to be rough going for Joe Biden as president. And that it will be particularly rough for Kamala Harris - not just as Vice President, but just rough.
Stand by for developments..
Vote progressive, live progressive, prosper progressive.