Although there are questions swirling about President Joe Biden's reelection campaign, ex-George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum believes that it was former President Donald Trump who exposed his significant weaknesses during Thursday night's rambling address at the Republican National Convention.
Writing in The Atlantic, Frum made the case that the Democratic Party has not done enough to proudly tout and market its successes over the last four years, which have seen a rapid economic recovery from the pandemic, massive job creation and a rapid cooling of inflation.
Despite this, he says, Biden and his administration have done little to try to educate Americans and get credit for the good news.
"[Biden] has seldom succeeded in directing the nation’s attention where he wanted to go," writes Frum. "Frequently, he did not try to do so. He worked more than Trump, but somehow mattered less. Jobs and wages might go up; voter opinions about the economy went down. By the summer of 2023, real wages were rising faster than at any time under Trump. Yet Americans continued to express negative assessments of the economy deep into 2024. The Biden presidency has too often disappeared into that gap between perception and reality, a gap that a different president might have closed."
ALSO READ: Milwaukee girded for massive convention protests. But they got something else.
Frum believes that the administration and other Democrats have been intimidated by progressive organizations who raise salience for economic and social justice issues by lodging loud and negative complaints about the state of the economy, even when there is a Democrat in the Oval Office.
"Democrats seem to be persuaded by the hope that the way to inflict the beating is to change leadership," he said, referring to calls to switch out President Biden. "But the biggest defect of the present Democratic leadership was imposed by the Democratic followership: the reluctance to accept the fact that four years of non-Trump leadership have accomplished an enormous amount that is worth defending."
And regarding the Trump-led GOP, Frum emphasized, "This crew is as beatable as any reactionary minority faction ever was beatable."
