Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes follow up their post-mortem book on Hillary’s failed 2016 campaign, Shattered, with this new book, reviewing Biden’s successful 2020 campaign defeating Trump in Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. As middling as Shattered was, Lucky isn’t even as good as that and I found it an often frustratingly tedious read.
Compared to the drama of the plague year that was 2020 - the pandemic, record unemployment as a result of said pandemic, the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing race riots, Trump pouring gasoline on everything - the Democrats’ political campaign was very milquetoast.
Allen/Parnes recount the crowded primaries with Bernie Sanders emerging as the frontrunner - until Super Tuesday when progressives’ hopes were thoroughly dashed. And this was the main reason I wanted to read this book: to find out whether Obama put his thumb on the scale, which was the theory, enabling Biden’s rise and Bernie’s fall? The answer, disappointingly, is yes. Fucking Obama. A mediocre and vastly overrated president, a faux progressive, and a company man through and through - he’s as corrupt as the worst of them. Bernie could’ve beaten Trump too and the country would be the better for having him in charge. Well, we’ll never know now - thanks for rigging the primaries, Barry, wouldn’t want the people to actually make the choice themselves democratically, would we?
Once Biden is established as the Democratic candidate, it’s a dreary slog to the general election with mountains of dreary detail covering, really, nothing much. Biden was stuck in his basement the whole time, occasionally slipping up (telling Charlamagne tha God, a black radio host, 'If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black'), and relating strange, rambling stories about nothing (remember Corn Pop?) when he wasn’t calling voters “fat” or “lying dog-faced pony soldiers”!
In particular, there’s so much dross surrounding the VP pick. It’s hella dull. And the end result is Kamala Harris, only marginally less unpopular than Biden was in the primaries, and an authoritarian and corrupt candidate, going by her record as DA in San Francisco and AG of California.
It turned out to be a very close election but I don’t think you could say that that means America is populated with MAGA racists, etc. who supported Trump. I think it speaks to the choices the Democratic establishment went with: Biden and Harris, two career politicians with abysmal records, who ran a poor campaign, and had nothing substantial to offer people in terms of practical policy. “Restore the soul of America” - what the hell does that mean?! I wouldn’t be tempted to vote for them on the basis of that empty wishy-washiness and, if I’m a non-partisan voter, and I saw something specific Trump was offering, compared to the vagueness of Biden, I’d vote for Trump too.
But America has become so saturated in identity politics for some time now that the Democrats didn’t need to offer up policy specifics, they just had to be not-Trump for the people who didn’t like Trump. Virtue-signal by putting up a non-white woman and an old man who appeared calmer than Trump, and cross your fingers. Identity politics is so wretched and it harms everyone in the end.
The Trump parts were the only entertaining moments in the book. Trump was such an unbelievable trainwreck. His coronavirus briefings were unhinged (suggesting people inject themselves with bleach to cleanse themselves of the virus), ranting about how mail-in ballots were rigged, telling racist groups to “stand by”, deploying police so he could have a photo op outside a church near the White House where he held up a Bible. Trump was his own worst enemy - he couldn’t stop shooting himself in the dick throughout 2020.
Because it was Trump’s election to lose - never Biden’s to win. If Trump had taken the coronavirus pandemic more seriously, he’d still be in the White House. Instead he went completely mental - denying it was real, underplaying the severity of it, glossing over the staggering loss of life - and then failing to meet the challenges of that fallout. Millions of unemployed Americans suffered as they lost their jobs and couldn’t pay the bills (a great many still can’t - good work, Joe!) and showed his ineptitude as a leader by causing further division during the George Floyd race riots when he should have tried for unity.
But all of that is dependent on Trump not being Trump, so of course he lost. That doesn’t mean America wins in the end as the pandemic is still a real threat, the economy is still weak, and police continue to murder ethnic minorities. Biden’s barely a band-aid to the deep problems in the country and neither he nor Harris are capable, or seem interested, in fixing these.
If you followed the election like me then you’re going to be especially bored reading this as there’s little here that’ll be new to you. Only seriously nerdy political junkies could possibly get anything out of the minutiae of detail that make up the majority of this book. Allen and Parnes are objective for the most part though and, to those who didn’t experience it, this is a good summary of the election, even if it’s overloaded with too much detail.
I’ve enjoyed reading books on US political campaigns ever since I read John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s brilliant overview of the 2008 election, Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House, but Lucky is nowhere near as gripping to read. A thoroughly dry and thuddingly bland read, this is basically the Biden administration as a book: unrewarding to pay attention to.
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