FRANK BRUNI As both a citizen and a journalist, I have long paid close attention to presidential races, long appreciated their importance, long willed Americans to make a considered, informed choice. |
But never in my lifetime have I felt the way I do as this Election Day nears. Never has the outcome been so meaningful to me. Never have the stakes been so high. Never have my emotions been so frazzled. |
By this time next week it will be over — the voting, that is. The counting may take longer, and there could be legal wrangling and recriminations well beyond that. I described my dread of a never-ending contest in a column a few weeks ago and still I fear it, though a little less. There seems to me a greater possibility now of a commanding victory by Joe Biden, and the bigger the margin, the harder it would be for President Trump to play the cheated martyr, no matter how extensively he’s been rehearsing that role.
|
I emphasize “possibility.” There remains the very real chance that Biden will lose. Despite the optimism that many of you have detected in recent columns of mine and noted in emails to me, I am well aware that this race could end any number of ways. Here’s how my friend Doug Sosnik, who was the political director in Bill Clinton’s White House and continues to analyze voting trends and dynamics, assessed Trump’s prospects in an email to me and other journalists on Sunday: |
He continues to perform better in the battleground states that will determine the election than he does at the national level. Given the history of the 2016 campaign, Trump’s ability to turn his campaign around in the final days can’t be underestimated. Trump has a much more aggressive campaign schedule than Biden. He is drawing large crowds and is dominating local coverage in the battleground states where he is campaigning. |
Also, I haven’t forgotten that Biden, as I explained in a column in August, could need a popular-vote triumph of five or six or even eight million votes to be assured of victory in the Electoral College. It’s a nutty state of affairs, but it’s reality. And it makes his task more difficult than Trump’s. |
On top of all of that, I remember 2016. Who doesn’t? When Election Day dawned, there was enormous confidence in Hillary Clinton’s camp and among her supporters, but by midnight, everything had changed, and Americans woke up the next morning to a country that seemed almost immediately different from the one of the day before. |
I expected the Trump presidency to be a different kind of ride and quite possibly a wild one. I didn’t expect anything as turbulent and harrowing as the past four years have been. Before Trump actually took office, it wasn’t crazy to think that maybe, just maybe, he’d grow into the presidency and find a nobler dimension in his character, because how could someone not? How could someone move into the White House, with its august trappings and all that history in its bones, and not appreciate the awesome responsibility that he now had, the hallowed tradition that he was joining? How could he not feel at least a little humbled? |
Humbled. That’s a word missing from our current president’s vocabulary. That’s an utterly denuded patch of his emotional landscape. I’ve written about that, too — about how his inauguration and the events surrounding it were essentially the burial of humility. There are columns in which I got things wrong, but not that one. |
The Trump presidency has taught me a great deal, and I’ll be sifting through those lessons — in my mind and probably in a few columns, too — for some time to come. One of them is that a leader needs not just a heaping measure of confidence but more than a few dashes of modesty, because that’s what enables him or her to think hard about the perspectives and feelings of other people, to listen well to outside advice, to admit mistakes and correct course. Trump can do none of that. |
And Biden? He once possessed an arrogance that I no longer detect in him. He once played the showboat in a way that he doesn’t anymore. Age and loss have tamed and tempered him. |
As I wrote in a column about last week’s presidential debate, “What I’ve come to appreciate about Biden is that he’s not claiming greatness, not the way Trump does with just about every breath. He’s claiming good intentions. If he wins, he may be the rare president who’s not convinced that he’s the smartest person in every room.” |
First he just has to win. |
