This year’s US election will determine whether truth is still sacred to journalism

So, at long last, we’re finally here. It’s taken a little over 2023 years to arrive, but it’s fair to say 2024 has not turned out as expected. Who knew that Marvel’s next crime-fighting superheroes would be a team of commissioners for ITV drama? Who also knew that I’d be writing the line “Joe Biden’s finally had a decent haircut”? 

I never expected that to happen. Not this year. Not ever. I really didn’t.

But before I reach for my style guide to haircuts for elderly gents, I want to pause a moment and talk about American movies and, specifically, Robert Redford’s The Candidate. 

I found myself rewatching this classic recently, ahead of what will be a busy year in US politics. It is always a good way to bring in the political season and remind myself that our descent into the current political hellscape was not quick in coming and that we’ve been on this path at least since Nixon, but perhaps for even longer. 

The film is the story of Bill McKay, a young liberal idealist running for the Senate in California, and it is full of the kind of messaging one would associate with Redford, being the Democratic progressive agenda circa 1972 writ large. Yet towards the end of the film, Redford has one of the oddest scenes of his career. 

Sitting in the back of a car on his way to or from yet another campaign stop, McKay starts to rehearse what at first sounds like his next speech. It rapidly descends into gibberish, a sequence of soundbites which when strung together make no sense. He then starts making nonsense sounds and finally gives a crude impression of Richard Nixon.

This is the moment when we understand that McKay has been lost to the game of politics. He has become a series of glib catchphrases and has morphed into a version of the Great Trickster himself, who Redford would of course return to expose four years later in All The President’s Men. This “breakdown” foreshadows the film’s perversely flat ending when the victorious McKay asks his campaign manager, played by Peter Boyle, what they’re going to do next. The idealist with bold ideas is gone. He is now a politician who no longer has any agency. He’s merely the mouthpiece for The Machine.

The Candidate makes ideal if slightly paranoid viewing ahead of any US election, but particularly this year and ahead of next week’s Iowa caucus, which will be followed rapidly by the New Hampshire primary on the 23rd. It’s a condemnation of the Pavlovian nature of politics, such as what we’re seeing as the Trump Machine continues to rumble forward, steamrollering anybody in its path simply because Trump’s messaging is so strong. Trump embodies the theory known by all campaign managers: that a lie repeated enough times takes on the moral bearing of truth.

The Nikki Haley/Ron DeSantis sideshow, meanwhile, has become a very premature bout ahead of the 2028 nomination, no more articulate than Robert Redford sitting in the back of that car. In their case, it’s a matter of which one can best parrot the former president. They pretty much debated themselves to a draw on Wednesday night (DeSantis edged it with some pundits), whilst Trump was soloing on Fox News where he enjoyed being feted in a town hall. The disparity is telling: the two rivals avoided mentioning the frontrunner whilst trying to mark out the same ground. Yet it’s not without interest. 

Chris Christie had just dropped out of the race which should boost Haley making a few percentage points available to her in New Hampshire, which is where we should finally get a sense of whether Haley’s Machine can make any impact on Trump’s lead as we move deeper into the primaries. Rumours that she might win in New Hampshire have increased in recent days and Trump is now targeting her with new “birther” smears, which are indicative of the threat he’s feeling. Haley won’t have been helped by Christie’s last gift to the campaign: a hot mic moment in which he said about Haley: “She’s going to get smoked…”

Will any of this matter in the long run? If Haley can build momentum and beat Trump regularly then we would have a very different political reality. Anything less than that is a more marginal call. Would closing the gap give her a chance at the VP slot? It could make it less likely. Nothing about Trump’s track record suggests he likes to share billing with anybody of any significant strength or standing. A relative unknown is still the best call. The big news to emerge from Trump’s Fox performance is that he says he’s picked his running mate but won’t reveal the name. So, news but not news: grabbing a little more attention from his rivals. Smart. Trump knows how to play the game.

On the other side, the Biden Machine has finally found first gear, albeit with a few problems but not where they should matter. The US economy continues to rebound, job figures look consistently good (despite a few downward revisions), and even some of his polling is looking better than often reported. His difficulties continue to be matters of messaging, most of which is out of his control. 

This past week he gave what many are describing as the best speech of his career. It was themed around the question “Is Democracy still America’s sacred cause?” 

If you’ve not watched it, you should. Not simply because it’s interesting in and of itself, but because it can be used as a metric of how much we are all controlled by these machines of messaging. Watch it and describe what you see. Now compare what you saw with your own eyes and measure it against the analysis in the press. 

Consider, especially, the moment at the end of the speech as he acknowledges the audience, he turns, and then looks off stage. He then appears to take half a step forward, his hands slightly raised, just before the First Lady appears. Was he waiting for her, as so often happens at the end of the most important speeches (this was effectively the launch of his 2024 campaign), or was there something else going on?

Was it, as the Daily Express suggested, that “Jill Biden rushes on stage to save ‘lost and confused’ Joe as he wanders aimlessly”?

Judge it for yourself. How you read it might well reflect on what chance you give Biden in November. It should certainly give you a sense of how hard it is to navigate around deep partisanship. Do we want to be told what we want to believe or what might happen based on the best available data?

That should not be a question that’s difficult to answer, even if it is difficult to put into practice. Or perhaps it is…

Myself, I saw a reasonably impressive performance: the rhetoric was potent, and delivered well, albeit with some typically Bidenesque stumbles. The guy is 81 years old. If he were a car, we’d be long past the stage of asking how well he runs but nodding our admiration that he is running at all. 

Biden’s biggest problem continued to be his stiffened gait (described in the White House doctor’s report as “moderate to severe generative osteoarthritic change/Spondylosis”). To my untrained eye, that turn towards the wings was the movement of somebody with moderate to severe Spondylosis. 

Yet he also exhibits some habits he could (but probably will not) change; certain facial tics that lend a tiny amount of credence to the character assassination coming from the Right. He sometimes adopts an expression in which he allows his face to fall. Sometimes he does it for comic effect but not always. It’s not a good look in still photographs and accounts for some of the headlines you read in which he’s described as “senile”. His enunciation still isn’t great but it wasn’t great in 2020 and he still won without being able to boast of four years of relative calm, economic recovery, and job growth.

The speech was, however, a sign of improvements behind the scenes. Take what is a trivial point but perhaps telling: Joe Biden’s had a decent haircut. Even in his youth, before the rumoured hair transplants took root, Biden was plagued by a strange mullet-like fringe on the back of his head. In his later years, it has made him look older as if he were unaware of the odd business going on behind his ears and nobody was going to upset “grandpa” by mentioning it. It looks like somebody has mentioned it. Biden looked more groomed than he’s looked in a while.

But does any of this matter? 

I hope it still does. Even more than it did back in 1972, it’s hard not to be lulled into the rhythms of the machines, separating reality from those illusions that some parts of the media are complicit in spreading. 

“Biden is senile” makes for a powerful headline but it’s grossly unfair. 

“Trump will be a dictator” is convincing but too naïve to be meaningful.

The messaging coming from these Machines and uncritically adopted by proxies in the media can sometimes make us blind to what we are looking at and deaf to what we hear. It’s too easy to become like Redford’s McCall, sitting in the back of the car, mouthing tired slogans as we enjoy the ride.

Biden might well be right to ask, “Is Democracy still America’s sacred cause?” What is more certain, however, is that 2024 will decide whether the truth is still sacred to journalism. That question needs to be asked today and every day up to November and beyond. Sometimes we need to ignore the machines and look at and listen to the candidates.

@DavidWaywell

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