WASHINGTON—It can be hard to remember there’s a U.S. presidential election going on. Just ask Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who is struggling with fundraising and reaching out to local news affiliates in an attempt to reach voters up to their eyeballs in coronavirus news from national outlets.

Under normal campaign conditions, he’d be holding rallies and delivering speeches to grab his share of headlines. The stay-at-home orders, fear and death toll of the pandemic have cancelled all that. Next to what President Donald Trump recently called “the plague,” news of Biden’s search for a running mate seem mundane, even petty.

Someone who hasn’t lost focus on the election is Trump. After years of barely ever holding formal media briefings, Trump has transformed his daily coronavirus talks into a substitute for campaign rallies. He abuses reporters, blames Barack Obama and foreigners and the deep state for things, praises himself, keeps fact-checkers busy and soaks up headlines with the same stream-of-consciousness flair he often brought to packed arenas. The informational value of the briefings is low. The exposure value is high — as Trump was happy to tell you, the ratings rival a finale of The Bachelor for viewership.

Ratings of his performance may differ. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal telephone poll, only 36 per cent of respondents said they trust Trump when he talks about the virus, compared with 52 per cent who said they don’t trust him. The thing is, that’s nothing new for Trump, really. The same poll shows his net approval rating on the handling of the coronavirus is -8 — 44 per cent approve versus 52 per cent who disapprove — which is very close to the -10 rating of how people feel about him in general. The general approval numbers have barely moved over the course of his term. He hasn’t gotten any sustained, rally-around-the-flag bump from the pandemic, but the bottom hasn’t fallen out of his support either.

Meanwhile, asked the same question about trusting what Biden says about the virus, the largest group of people — 42 per cent — were either not aware of or had no opinion on what he says.

Leadership is defined by crisis. The ability to manage one is a defining characteristic by which a candidate ought to be judged. Almost no president gets to govern based on their platform, because the biggest issues they face in office usually aren’t foreseen. Terrorist attacks, wars, hostage crises, recessions, pandemics — God laughs at leaders’ carefully laid-out plans, and they must respond.

The view of how well Trump is responding depends, it seems, on what people already thought of him. But few people are unaware of what his response is. Biden, meanwhile, is struggling to be heard.

He gave it a shot this week with an appearance on James Corden’s “Late Late Show.” There, he articulated a critique of Trump’s performance: he didn’t invoke the Defense Production Act soon enough, didn’t get testing protocols going fast enough, didn’t reopen health insurance enrolment, hasn’t collected enough data. Biden pointed to a late-January newspaper op-ed that appeared under his byline that called for action. “I’d take responsibility,” he said. “Whose the hell (job) is it if it’s not the president’s?”

Fair enough, and familiar enough, as far as second-guessing Trump goes. Biden invoked the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “The American people can handle anything, but you have to tell them the truth.” Trump, he said, doesn’t tell the truth.

But raising Roosevelt’s name, and his response to the earlier crisis during which he was elected — the Great Depression — suggests what may be missing. As a candidate, FDR said the crisis was a “call to arms” and pledged himself to a “new deal for the American people.” As president, he’s remembered most for that New Deal. Then, a crisis that exposed not just Herbert Hoover’s shortcomings as a leader but the deep cracks in American society was an occasion to reshape the government to alleviate suffering and make the country more just.

The coronavirus crisis has similarly exposed America’s underlying fragility — the gap between rich and poor, the lack of physical and policy infrastructure and preparation to manage foreseeable problems, the inadequacy of the health-care system, the injustice of the compensation and working conditions of people whose work has been fully revealed as essential. There may be some hunger in the U.S. to respond to the pandemic not just by limiting its spread and treating its victims, but by tackling the fractures in the country it has exposed.

In his interview with Corden, Biden inched to the point of acknowledging this. “We’ve taken the blinders off. All of a sudden we’re realizing there’s a lot of incredible people out there who are making six, seven bucks an hour, who are in fact, out there making sure we continue to be able to eat.” He said it frustrated him, and he was proud of how such people were “standing up.” But he didn’t say, specifically, what he thought should be done in response, other than getting those people protective equipment.

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He displayed, as he famously does, deep empathy. And admiration. “We’re now seeing, every day, the soul of America,” he said. “The country is standing up, people are — they’re making real sacrifices.” But he didn’t quite articulate what actions that glimpse of the country’s soul should inspire.

Empathy is useful, and Biden’s good at it. Criticism of Trump is necessary for someone in Biden’s position. Those may even be, according to polls, enough for him to win the election. But for a leader hoping to rise to the moment, to respond in a way that history will celebrate, Biden is not just to be struggling to be heard, but struggling to find a message equal to the crisis.

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