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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 3/7/20

Joe Biden today may sound like a normal person

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Cottle says that Team Biden now faces the challenge of "convinc[ing] potential supporters that his candidacy is not simple nostalgia." In my estimate, Team Sanders also faces a comparable challenge with respect to nostalgia for his 2016 primary campaign against former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Cottle thinks that Team Biden needs to prepare Joe Biden to speak less defensively in the future than he did in the early televised debates about his son Hunter Biden's "work for Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board he sat."

By now, many Americans know that Trump tried to bribe the then-new president of Ukraine into announcing an investigation of the Bidens by holding up the release of military aid funds to Ukraine that Congress had authorized. In the end, Ukraine did not announce such an investigation, and in the end, Trump finally released the funds to Ukraine. But his holding up the funds for Ukraine prompted the Mueller investigation and report, which in turn prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach President Trump, which in turn was not ratified by the U.S. Senate. In any event, if Biden were to emerge as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 2020, Trump would almost certainly renew his attacks on the Bidens.

Cottle says that "family is touchy territory for Mr. Biden as one might expect of a man who has had to bury two children and he clearly has trouble approaching the issue [of Hunter Biden's work for Burisma] rationally."

Cottle advises Joe Biden to "[w]ork on the defensiveness." Which is good advice, but it may be easier said than done.

Cottle singles out Warren for her "rhetorical precision" the kind of rhetorical precision that characterizes the news stories, feature stories, editorial, and op-eds in the New York Times. But Cottle correctly notes, correctly in my estimate, that Biden is not known for such rhetorical precision in the 2020 primary campaign.

Cottle says, "Mr. Biden likes to talk, a lot. And he tends to wander off on tangents, switch directions and erupt in non sequiturs. Every time he speaks, Democrats hold their breath. This isn't necessarily the fatal flaw that many political and media types [but not Cottle] think. Plenty of Americans like a president who sounds like a normal person. It makes them seem less condescending and more authentic."

Cottle's observation is worth reflecting on a bit further. Did Warren's "rhetorical precision" perhaps prompt many Democrats to see her as not being "like a normal person"? In other words, does "rhetorical precision" make many Americans see the speaker as condescending and inauthentic or at least not "like a normal person"?

At the end of her op-ed, Cottle returns to saying that the Biden campaign was dead in her estimate. She says, "The Biden campaign has indeed resurrected itself. But it could still use some intensive care."

But Biden's campaign does not have the luxury of time for intensive in the coming weeks, as Sanders tries to revive his own struggling campaign in the upcoming primary elections -- at the expense of Biden's campaign.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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