Trump or Biden? An Appeal to the Genuinely Undecided

Dear Fellow Citizen:

You’re not supposed to exist, but you do. Politically, you might locate yourself somewhere on the line that runs from center-right to flag-waving conservative. You may be evangelical, or you may be a crusty atheist. I wouldn’t be surprised if you described yourself as an independent. (I do that these days, although I’ve voted for Democrats pretty much my entire life.) You might be a libertarian. You may have the bearing of Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino”: scowling at the world, unhappy with where it’s going.

You may be young or old, white or black or white-and-black or Hispanic or Asian or hapa haole or a part-Cherokee loner up in the Tennessee hills. (For the record, I don’t care. We’re both fellow citizens.) You may resent people who make a play for your vote on the basis of race or ethnicity or sexual orientation — and you may be gay, or trans. You may be the sort of person who scowls when they’re forced to check a box, because you don’t fit into that box.

Or not. You may be entirely conventional in some profoundly familiar way: the Middle American norm. But you remain skeptical, perhaps even despairing, as the election approaches. Because you know you ought to vote; you know this election really matters. But — and this is your own little secret — you just haven’t decided who you’re going to vote for.

What you know is that it is people like you, that three or four percent, whatever that sliver of the electorate currently is, who may ultimately determine the result of this election.

It’s quite possible that you voted for Donald Trump last time around. You didn’t particularly like him — or perhaps you were, in fact, charmed by his pitch — but you liked Hillary Clinton even less, even though you knew that she was, in fact, qualified for the job.

Full disclosure: I voted for Hillary last time around, although I didn’t much like her, and I knew that she was highly qualified for the job. But I also was sensible to Trump’s upstart appeal, especially in some of those plain-speaking early rallies that played for an hour or more on CNN — although I never considered voting for him — and I shared my thoughts about that difficult-to-put-into-words appeal on social media, often to the anger and disbelief of my largely liberal cohort of friends.

More full disclosure: As the dust settled on the day after Trump was elected, when my progressive friends were seething with fury and despair, I secretly hoped that Trump would surprise us. I hoped that he would tack towards the center, as virtually every other president had done, and seek to unite the country under the flag of common purpose. I hoped that he would show us the same Trump who swooped down on Wollman Rink in Central Park and built a beautiful facility in record time and under budget.

Donald Trump made his reputation as a real estate developer. I am well aware of his failings on that front. But my hope — call me naive — was that we would get the pragmatist, populist, centrist Trump: the guy who knew how to build. I thought there was a chance, a modest but real chance, that he would grow, and build infrastructure, and soften his tone, and actually make America great in a way that would surprise us all.

That didn’t happen. You and I both know that. My 401k is doing just great — the stock market is high, no question — but in every other respect the country we both live in and love is hurting very badly.

Even more full disclosure: I’ll be voting for Joe Biden. As my friends on Facebook know, I signed in after the first debate and said, “Biden’s done.” It was a terrible performance. He looked old, creaky, and out of touch. I thought he’d exceeded his effective-use interval, as industrial engineers put it. But he hung in there. He got better in the debates. And then, thanks to the intervention of Black voters in South Carolina, he was not only reborn as a candidate, but he went on to win the nomination. There’s a lesson in that: don’t count Joe out. This holds true, I suggest, for how he will govern this country if elected.

So here’s my pitch. I ask you, as your fellow citizen, merely to consider the following things.

1) Apart from your 401k, if you have one, are you truly better off today — right now; this week — than you were four years ago? Your decision must start there. Be honest.

2) That phrase “Make America Great Again” has always been problematic for those, especially African Americans, who look back through the decades and see only compromised citizenship and widespread racism. Who wants to go back to the early 1950s, when Joe McCarthy was riding roughshod and Brown v. Board of Ed. hadn’t yet happened? But I understand the slogan’s appeal. There have indeed been moments of great national unity — during the New Deal, for example, and World War II; during Kennedy’s New Frontier period (we got to the moon first) and the early years of Johnson’s Great Society. I’d assumed that Trump, seeking to make MAGA a reality, would for pragmatic reasons attempt to draw Americans together. He has done the opposite. He has sought at every moment, with every tweet and every campaign speech, to divide us. He has taken the car that is America, veered onto the shoulder of the highway, and floored it. His foot is heavy. We know where that ends. It doesn’t end with American greatness. It ends with a spectacular wreck. We are halfway there.

3) No father, except for a handful of true believers at The Conservative Treehouse, ever put his hand on his son’s shoulder and said, “Son, I want you to grow up to be just like President Trump.” I speak here as the father of a 14-year old son. It’s embarrassing, frankly. Joe Biden isn’t a perfect candidate, and he won’t be a perfect president. He’ll put his foot in his mouth from time to time; that’s guaranteed. But surely America will be better off with a president who can offer some kind of moral leadership. Our current president offers none.

4) I assume that you’re a patriot, as am I. It is possible that you have become alarmed by the way contemporary American progressives, especially those with academic connections, are talking about our country. You’re well aware of the fact that America is not a perfect place. You know that the more perfect union is a work in progress. Still, it sometimes feels to you that those on the left who cry “Defund the police!” and “America was founded in anti-Blackness!” are expressing their concerns in a language suggesting that they don’t, in fact, love America and are uninterested in creating a more perfect union. I see things slightly differently from you, but I get where you’re coming from. You’re afraid that if you vote for Biden, you’ll be empowering strident radical voices and helping to transform America into a place where you no longer belong. I think you’re wrong about this — but not for the reason you believe. I think that four more years of Donald Trump will actually lead to further radicalization of a sort that will dismay you even more thoroughly than you’re currently dismayed. Biden, on the other hand, will cool things down. He’s no fool. He’ll do what you and I may have thought Trump was going to do, which is tack towards the center. He’ll create a somewhat more congenial space in which you and I can have a conversation about the things that count.

5) If you trust nobody else, trust the generals. Trust James “Mad Dog” Mattis. I am not in the habit of quoting Marine heroes. I grew up during the peacenik 60s. My late father, Alan Gussow, was a delegate for George McGovern at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. I come from that sort of Blue State family background. But I ask you, as you deliberate about whom to vote for, to join me in attending to the warning leveled by Mattis, Trump’s former Defense secretary.

6) I happen to believe that climate change is the great existential threat of our time. I’ve been moving in this direction for a while; David Wallace-Wells’s bestselling The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming put me over the edge. Here I suspect that I’m quite a bit more progressive than you. But perhaps not. Perhaps the recent bout of insanely destructive wildfires in California and Oregon have finally got you wondering whether there’s something to thing whole climate-change “thing.” And here, the contrast between President Trump and Joe Biden is clear. Trump has, with respect to climate change, done what I did as a 12-year old when I took the governor off a 4 horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine before I put it on my go-kart. Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, and he’s too short-sighted to realize that the American economy can, in fact, prosper and grow even while we as a nation take concrete steps in the direction of green energy. Biden, here, offers hope. Trump offers no hope whatever. You and I both care about that phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” We should care, together, about helping our nation act in a way that offers us at least a little hope of handing down a livable planet to our children and grandchildren. Trump has neither the slightest inclination to address the climate crisis nor the attention span required to do so.

7) Finally, there’s the pandemic. Here again, the promise, such as it was, of a Trump presidency has been squandered. Nobody who honestly assesses his performance as the chief executive manager of the COVID-19 crisis, it seems to me, can say that he has done a good job, much less an excellent one. Forget about the fact that Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow love to hate on him. Forget about Nancy Pelosi and the whole impeachment thing. Just let that all go. Instead, judge President Trump by his own standards. If he were a contestant in “The Apprentice” and you were sitting in the CEO’s chair, would you really say, “Great job, Donald!”? Hell no. You would say what he said to the losers for so many seasons: “You’re fired!”

So that’s my pitch — and thanks for listening to it! We don’t need to see eye to eye. I’m quite sure we don’t with respect to many issues. But I also suspect that we have the basis for an interesting conversation. This may surprise some of my friends, but I admire your independence and your willingness to rethink.

Your vote is needed in this election. I don’t blame you for being leery of both sides. I am too. I urge you to remain skeptical of those who seek to manipulate you. I’ve tried here not to manipulate you, and certainly not to sneer at you or condescend to you, but to speak to you as a fellow citizen.

Moral suasion. Remember that? A few of us still do.

Thanks for your time. Please share these thoughts with others, if you’re inclined to do so. And good luck! I’ll see you on election day.