Is Biden Doing Enough to Protect Democracy?

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Peter Nicholas
@PeterAtlantic
Is the president doing enough to spotlight the perilous state of American democracy? I asked Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat. “No, of course not,” he said.

Is Biden Doing Enough to Protect Democracy?
Even the president’s closest allies are alarmed that he’s not making voting rights a front-and-center issue.
theatlantic.com
5:22 AM · Oct 17, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/biden-democrats-2024-election-interference/620392/


No paywall
https://archive.is/2aNLW

As a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer in the early 2000s, I once received a call from a couple of Republican campaign operatives who said they had something to show me. We met at their office in Washington, D.C., a few days later. They presented printouts of recent election records and pointed to a few cases of what they suspected were people voting illegally. One after another, their examples of voter fraud turned out to be nothing. They had flagged, for instance, a voter named John Smith who might have cast ballots on the same day in two different precincts­—discounting the possibility that more than one person named John Smith might be living in the region. Their motivation was obvious enough: They were attempting to plant stories that would delegitimize elections that the GOP risked losing. It didn’t work.

With the rising bloc of younger, more diverse voters who skew left, Republican efforts like this in recent years have mushroomed into a full-blown campaign, undercutting the bedrock notion that American voters are the ones who decide elections. Whether GOP-controlled states are drawing new district lines that would disenfranchise Hispanic and Black voters for the next 10 years or “auditing” 2020 election results that have already shown that Donald Trump lost, the goal is the same: By any means necessary, win.

Fiona Hill worked on Trump’s National Security Council and later provided compelling testimony in his first impeachment trial. I asked her if she feared for democracy's future should Trump win again. “We’re already there,” she told me. “I’m worried about it now. Millions of people are showing they don’t want any criticism of Trump. Democracy is becoming a dirty word, something that’s anti-Trump.”

“These are direct assaults on the basic underpinnings of the democratic system,” Wendy Weiser, who directs the Brennan Center for Justice’s democracy program, told me. This year, 19 states have passed 33 laws creating obstacles to the most fundamental American right, part of a “multipronged effort to sabotage elections,” she added. As the 2022 midterm elections approach, and with the 2024 presidential election not far behind, Democrats believe that President Joe Biden needs to fiercely combat the illiberal forces at work this very second in the country. And those fearing the loss of a two-century tradition of self-government in America are asking, with a hint of desperation, Where is he?

*snip*

[Elessar Zappa]

1. Biden can make voting rights a priority but

Manchin and Sinema don’t appear to be willing to save democracy and without them, a voting rights bill is DOA.

[gulliver]

2. This is a good example of what I call a "lying graphic"

People take liberties with graphics that they'd never be able to take with words. For example, "read" the graphic in the tweet as if it were a sentence. I think the the graphic says something like, "Dejected, defeated Biden turns his back on civilization, as it falls like so many dominoes on his watch."

The headline is a question, "Is Biden doing enough to protect democracy?" But the graphic just flat out says he isn't and uses a photograph of Biden taken out of context. That makes it an emotionally dishonest composite. It crosses the line of the license we allow cartoons.

Graphics incompetence and falsehood weren't as much of a problem back when creating graphics was expensive. Nowadays, any fool can throw together a symbolic graphic, so they do.