I cut my teeth in politics during a quainter time in the early 1990s. As a matter of practice, we did not call the other guy the enemy; we called him our opponent. We did not say our opponent was a liar; we said they were mistaken or wrong. I can’t recall ever hearing the word lawfare and the only threats to democracy were from foreign adversaries.
But American politics turned a new page this week, courtesy of First Lady Jill Biden, during a widely ignored campaign moment. In supporting her husband’s reelection bid, she went on TV May 29 and told viewers to “choose good over evil,” on November 5. This exhortation struck me as one of the oddest in politics.
The dichotomy of good versus evil is rooted primarily in religion and philosophy. It is antediluvian in its contemplation and application to society. From the Old Testament of the Bible to ancient China and Greece, to the Mesopotamia of antiquity, the concept of some desirable force in opposition to some undesirable force is among the oldest of mankind, and is often couched in religious terms.
That’s what made Mrs. Biden’s comment so jarring. I’ve worked on four presidential campaigns and as a practical political matter, it is the most hyperbolic assertion I have ever heard uttered by a legitimate campaign surrogate. Barack Obama’s “bitter clinger,” remark during a 2008 campaign stop in Pennsylvania, and Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” comment during the 2016 campaign, seem tame by comparison. Obama and Clinton faced considerable backlash for their remarks and later tried to back-track from them. Not so for Jill Biden.
The First Lady’s 2022 comparison of Texas Latinos to breakfast tacos apparently wasn’t offensive enough for her so now, she describes her husband’s political rival as the personification of evil. We’ll have to wait and see whether her quip was a one-off wisecrack or part of a broader messaging strategy by the Biden campaign but either way, it assumes the mantle of desperation. It suggests contempt of religious faith and should be widely denounced.
There’s also the ironic aspect of the president’s wife using widely recognized biblical terminology to compare her husband to his opponent. God is good; so is Joe Biden. Satan is evil; so is Donald Trump. Yet it is the Biden administration that sought to infiltrate Roman Catholic churches with FBI agents for conducting mass in Latin. Team Biden has incarcerated Christians for the crime of singing hymns near abortion clinics, and wants to prohibit Bible-believing Christians from participating in foster child programs. Given the president’s disdain for people of faith, the First Lady’s good/evil claim is thick with irony.
Considering the rapid pace at which political discourse has descended into routinely vile and slanderous rhetoric, it’s likely Jill Biden will escape significant criticism for her remark. After all, Donald Trump is routinely compared to Adolf Hitler, and Joe Biden told a predominantly black audience in 2012 that Mitt Romney would revive slavery. The net-net is that a lot of us are simply desensitized to inflammatory remarks like Mrs. Biden’s characterization of Trump as evil. It’s an unfortunate but predictable response to an increasingly coarsened political landscape.
We define good and evil at an individual and societal level, and those definitions are not absolute. Slavery is considered evil in civilized cultures today yet it was almost universally practiced for thousands of years and still exists in some places. We kid ourselves into believing that acts like rape and murder are universally considered evil, but the Israeli survivors of the October 7 orgy of violence by Hamas know better. As humans, we cannot agree on what is good and what is evil. Even today, there are Americans who revere the murderous legacies of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and other dictators who might reasonably be considered evil people.
Nobody likes to view politics and elections as a choice between the lesser of two evils but that is the simple truth of it. Because there is no perfect man, there is no perfect candidate, and we’d be wise to shift gears away from Jill Biden’s good-versus-evil trope. Her comparison is outrageous and merits as much scorn as we can heap upon her.