This is Not A Reality Show. This Is Reality.

President Barack Obama is known for his eloquence. But that’s due to more than word choice and cadence or even clarity. He is incisive. In his first speech since the convention, his incisiveness sliced and diced the trumpery and landed square upon the central element at issue in this election. 

 He spoke about the Covid crisis and other individual issues, and cut to the chase of competence and problem-solving, which are not within the realm of the Trump. “This is not a reality show. This is reality,” he said, “ and the rest of us have had to live with the consequences of him proving himself incapable of taking the job seriously.”

 Concerning the Covid crisis he said:

" We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook that would have shown them how to respond before the virus reached our shores. They probably used it to I don’t know, prop up a wobbly table somewhere. We don’t know where that playbook went. Eight months into this pandemic, cases are rising again across this country. Donald Trump isn’t suddenly going to protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself."

 On the economy: "Donald Trump likes to claim he built this economy but America created 1.5 million more jobs in the last three years of the Obama-Biden administration than in the first three years of the Trump-Pence administration. How you figure that? And that was before he could blame the pandemic. Now, he did inherit the longest streak of job growth in American history but just like everything else he inherited, he messed it up. The economic damage he inflicted by botching the pandemic response means he will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to actually lose jobs."

   Healthcare: " Now, they’re trying to dismantle your care in the Supreme court as we speak as quickly as they can in the middle of a pandemic with nothing but empty promises to take its place. It’s shameful. The idea that you would take healthcare away from people at the very moment where people need it most, what is the logic of that?"

  He talked about basic competence and the basis for democratic governance:" Our democracy is not going to work if the people who are supposed to be our leaders lie every day and just make things up. And we’ve just become numb to it. We’ve just become immune to it."

   He called for a return to common American values. “We have to get these values back at the center of public life.” 

 But then he got to the heart of it. He talked about how things would change with a return to those values under Joe Biden. "We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who doesn’t support him or threaten them with jail. That’s not normal presidential behavior.... We wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a coach. We wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker. We wouldn’t tolerate it in our family, except for maybe a crazy uncle somewhere. I mean, why would we expect and accept this from the President of the United States?"

" And why are folks making excuses for that? “Oh, well, that’s just him.” No. There are consequences to these actions. They embolden other people to be cruel and divisive and racist, and it frays the fabric of our society, and it affects how our children see things. And it affects the ways that our families get along. It affects how the world looks at America. That behavior matters. Character matters. “

 And that is turning out to be the central issue of this campaign: character. Voters are frightened by the covid crisis, alarmed about the economy, the prospect of losing healthcare, and issues from racial justice to the climate crisis. But they are sick to death of a loud lying egomanical cartoon psychopath in the White House. And millions of them are eager to reject him, while millions more are quietly willing to reject him. 

 I’ve read reporters in the field who see this. I noted it in a story about the first day of early voting in Wisconsin—a reporter was lucky enough to interview a woman who said she literally did not know who she would vote for when she got into line. She no longer wanted Trump, but somehow she felt that she would betray her Christian religion if she voted against him. But in the end she did, and she told the reporter it was because Joe Biden has empathy, and Trump has none.

 And that in the end is going to make the difference. Because character matters. And this is not a reality show anymore. It is reality. 

Video of Obama's speech in Philly is here.  A transcript is here.

 One More Thing....

The poll numbers continue to show Biden with a strong lead: nationally just below or above 10%, which if it holds will guarantee victory. (The New York Times analysis says that even if the polls are off as much as they were in 2016, Biden would still be getting 309 electoral votes.) But apart from the head-to-head numbers (with three PA polls showing a 7 to 10 point lead for Biden) I spotted two intriguing findings in Wednesday’s batch. 

 A new Pew Research poll shows that only 4% of voters surveyed said they planned to vote for the presidential candidate of one party and a candidate for the federal Senate or House from another party. So-called “ticket splitting” used to be fairly common, but this suggests a huge wave in either blue or red. (This poll also found Biden has a 10 point lead nationally, 52-42. Which by the way is the minimum of what I expect.)

 A new CNBC/Change Research poll finds 91% of likely voters nationally say they are “extremely motivated to vote,” including 92% in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that is further evidence of probable high and even record-breaking turnout, at least before things like voter suppression and interference, both foreign and domestic.