Biden Must Win. But How?

Like many Democrats, I’m stuck on a doomsday merry-go-round: Joe Biden shouldn’t be running for president. Joe Biden is running for president. Donald Trump shouldn’t be running for president. Donald Trump is running for president.

But this isn’t 2020. Biden cannot run the same campaign he did last time, when all he had to do was appear normal. Back then he still had some of the Obama sheen; today, he and his vice president are both unpopular. Little in his first term seems to be serving him well. Though he’s done a good job as president and the economy is thriving, few give him credit. And multiple polls show him running behind Donald Trump.

Most troubling, he’s too old and he looks tired. My brain wants to delete everything it’s heard from people who have spent time in his presence in the last year. (It’s not encouraging.) Only 23 percent of voters, according to a January NBC poll, say Biden is better than Trump on “having the necessary mental and physical health to be president,” a statistic that, no matter which way you bend it, doesn’t mean anything good.

If Biden is going to convince America that he has the drive to fight for their interests for the next four years, he has to show that he has four years of ideas and the wherewithal to carry them out left in him.

So how on earth can Biden energize an electorate that tunes out the moment he starts speaking?

What must Biden do to win?

He needs to go against his own political instincts — both in terms of how he’s run in the past and in how he governs. Forget nuance, forget reasonableness, forget complicated facts, forget humility and homilies and old-timey yarns. He should retire the unfortunate phrase “finish the job,” which sounds dispiritingly like tidying up loose ends before keeling over. Keeping it simple will not only help prevent him from mussing things up, it will also help voters absorb the stakes.