"Joe Biden’s most effective campaign strategy has been to lie low and let people vote for whatever imagined version of Joe Biden congealed inside their heads."

"On Friday, he went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss the Tara Reade allegations. It was not a good argument for changing this strategy.... In the face of mounting evidence that Reade’s allegations are more than the baseless smear his campaign has dismissed them to be, Biden has mostly faded into the background, while his surrogates, supporters, and some pundits went to bat for him, deploying timeworn canards about sexual assault victims and what circumstances justify disbelieving them, or dismissing Reade outright before a fuller picture sees daylight.... [C]olumnists from the New York Times to the Nation stepped up to discredit her, and politicos from Stacey Abrams to Nancy Pelosi reaffirmed their support of the vice-president. Even Kirsten Gillibrand, who drew ire from within the Democratic Party when she pushed for Al Franken to resign after evidence of his misconduct surfaced in 2017, doubled down on her support.... [Biden is] largely staying true to the strategy that’s guided his campaign since early on, which holds that the winningest Biden is one to be imagined, not seen, heard, or even thought about too hard. His staff recognizes that the less its candidate speaks, the less opportunity his supporters have to neglect evidence that undermines their faith — in his competence, his election odds, and, increasingly, his innocence. If there’s one thing for which the Democrats have yet to punish Biden this cycle, it’s his silence in the face of lingering doubt. To change that now would be to change the very foundation of his campaign’s success."

From "Tara Reade Is Making It Harder to Hide Joe Biden" by Zak Cheney-Rice (in NY Magazine).

I don't think Cheney-Rice mentions the coronavirus lockdown that's helping Biden hide. Biden doesn't have the option to come out of hiding by doing events surrounded by supporters who make him seem comfortingly normal. He can only do that face-in-the-camera sort of appearance from his basement, and he's not that great at that — and, in fact, no political candidate is good at campaigning like that.

"Trump is going to try dampening black voter enthusiasm for Biden by contrasting the two men’s criminal justice records."

"The framing will be simple: Trump signed a bipartisan criminal-legal reform bill, the First Step Act, and has been generous with his pardon powers toward unjustly imprisoned black people, like Alice Marie Johnson.... ...Trump’s status as a self-styled reformer is laughable, [but] Biden’s record is grotesque. Most of its lowlights occurred in the 'tough on crime' 1980s and 1990s... [when] he viciously characterized people who commit crimes as sociopathic 'predators' who are beyond rehabilitation. He cast then-President Bush’s escalation of the War on Drugs as lacking 'enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.' He authored the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act [that]... expanded the death penalty, eliminated education funding for imprisoned students, created harsher sentencing guidelines for a wide range of crimes, and increased funding for local police departments and corrections departments....  Perhaps more than any other official of the era, he embodied the Democratic impulse to outflank Republicans from the right by locking more people in jails and prisons. He helped catalyze the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. He said he was 'not at all' ashamed of his involvement as recently as 2016...."

From "On Criminal Justice, Biden Has No Moral Standing Over Trump" by Zak Cheney-Rice (New York Magazine).

... the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country... — I don't think I'd ever seen the word "carceral" before — "the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country." But it's a word that the OED traces back to the 1500s. It means what you can easily see it means — relating to prisons. Nabokov used it in "Invitation to a Beheading" (1960), describing the opening of a prison door: "... suddenly the key scraped in the lock and the door opened, whining, rattling and groaning in keeping with all the rules of carceral counterpoint." That is, opening the prison door sounded exactly like opening a prison door.

ADDED: This magazine essay is larded with assurances that Trump is awful on criminal justice too, so it's only that Biden will have trouble gaining an advantage here. Biden can't get "moral standing over Trump," but why doesn't Trump have moral standing over Biden?

"It’s true that black voters may not think there’s anything particularly unelectable about Harris. But surely she’s played some role in her own troubles."

"Besides that one viral debate moment, which, as Ed said, briefly sent her into the stratosphere, she has been quite shaky on policy (her answers on health care are all over the place) and vision (seems to be synthesis of everyone else’s). If she had been more consistent, isn’t it plausible that she’d be in more direction [sic] competition with Biden by now?"/"Maybe, though Cory Booker has been more consistent and has some authentic appeal to African-Americans, and he’s in much worse shape than Harris."/"The best thing Harris had going for her was being inspiring and historic. This just doesn’t seem to be an election where majorities of voters, black voters included, are especially invested in being inspired or making history."

I'm reading "Why Is Kamala Harris Struggling With Black Voters So Much?" at NY Magazine. It's 3 guys — Zak Cheney-Rice, Benjamin Hart, and Ed Kilgore — just guessing at stuff.

These articles about the election must be cranked out, and I'm only blogging this one because it is so absurd. Kamala Harris was "briefly sent... into the stratosphere"?! She briefly polled in the teens, and then slipped back into the single digits. Instead of an article asking why she's not more popular, ask yourselves how you ever got caught up into assuming that she was supposed to be so popular. You assume something should be true, then you proceed to inquire why it isn't. How about speaking honestly about your own assumption?

"Calls for 'civility' in politics are as likely to elicit ridicule as they are plaudits these days..."

Oh, yes, I've been ridiculing what I call "civility bullshit" for years.

... due in large part to their repeated deployment in the face of escalating state violence. 

What?! I'm trying to read "Why ‘Civility’ Protects Dan Crenshaw But Not Ilhan Omar" by Zak Cheney-Rice (NY Magazine), which looked like it was right up my alley but up my alley and off somewhere I wouldn't go.

What "state violence" is Cheney-Rice talking about? His next paragraph is about whether harassing former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is acceptable because the government has been "locking children in cages." He weasels a semi-generalization:

Where one falls on this spectrum in any given instance is often, but not always, a partisan calculation.

My point is that it's always bullshit. "Civility" is not your value. It's a fake value, presented as real when it serves your partisan interests and subordinated whenever it doesn't.

Cheney-Rice has something to say about the Ilhan Omar business, and it's too complicated to attempt to excerpt here. Somehow "civility" is supposed to be in play when people are simply harshly criticizing Omar for sounding insufficiently somber about 9/11. There's a very strained effort to equate vigorous criticism with the incitement of violence, so that saying Omar sounded almost as though she were laughing at 9/11 is the same as saying that Omar ought to suffer physical attacks. We're told that she gets death threats, and that seems to be offered as a reason why she should be spared verbal attacks responding to the public statements that she chooses to make. Her antagonists would be fools to stand down either because of the phony "civility" argument or because her proponents display a willingness to connect public verbal opposition to her to these unsourced death threats.

Congressman Dan Crenshaw criticized Omar, and then Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Crenshaw. Somebody else pushed Ocasio-Cortez back for incivility to Crenshaw, and Cheney-Rice says, "Bad-faith outcries about civility aimed at deflecting from Republican misdeeds are the order of the day." Yes, and what else is new? Bad-faith outcries about civility are the only kind of outcries about civility we ever get in American politics — this day or any other day, from Republicans or Democrats or anybody.

Cheney-Rice has not explained "Why ‘Civility’ Protects Dan Crenshaw But Not Ilhan Omar." Civility doesn't "protect" anyone. Civility is just a transitory condition that might make some people feel better when it's blowing in their direction, but it's nothing you can rely on, and you ought to assume it's there only because those who are blowing it think it's good for them. The prevailing winds of civility may favor Crenshaw over Omar at the moment, but civility bullshit is subject to constant change. I see that Cheney-Rice would like to force the change, and of course, he's free to bullshit about bullshit.