The week began with Mr. Biden trying to halt the slide in key battleground states over Mr. Trump’s modestly effective convention of blaming Democrats for ongoing social unrest.

You know me. You know my heart, and you know my story, my family’s story. Ask yourself: Do I look to you like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” 

The problem is we do know Mr. Biden. We don’t know his heart, but we can judge his actions. I highly doubt that Mr. Biden personally is in favor of socialism. Nor do I think he likes rioting. But I have little confidence that he will stand for principles that I care about in his pursuit of power–that he’s willing to stand up against the radicals in his party for a good cause. This is a man who for decades supported the Hyde amendment prohibiting federal taxpayer funding for abortion. But to secure the nomination, he jettisoned this long-standing position in his capitulation to the radical left of his party. They call the shots–not Mr. Biden. His political career is one of shifting sands to stay in the middle of wherever the party is, and as the party has lurched left, Joe has pivoted right along with them. Further, and most importantly, we don’t get Mr. Biden if he is elected. We get a Biden administration, which will be filled with socialist agitators, some of whom do hate this country, or at least hate many of the features of this country that I and other conservatives love.* Some of those protesters will be given the levers of power, since its Mr. Sanders party now. And those progressives have a scary agenda, like the continued indoctrination of our children in public schools to hate America more.** The riots we are having in Portland and elsewhere didn’t just come out of nowhere, and are certainly not simply about racial inequities in police treatment.

Further, we don’t know his story. Indeed, if you read up on Mr. Biden, you’d wonder if you could believe anything he said about himself. One of Mr. Biden’s original sins was the appropriation of British socialist Neil Kinnock’s life experience for his own 1988 campaign; this adaptation in large part knocked him out of his first presidential run. But much more troubling is his story about the tragic loss of his wife and daughter, something that is truly horrific regardless of the circumstances. Yet Mr. Biden has claimed for years that it was at the hands of a drunk driver, but evidence does not support that. You can draw your own conclusions, but I find this troubling. Regardless, Mr. Biden’s history of embellishments make it impossible to say we really know anything about him–at least from his public statements about himself.

Mr. Trump has his own history and his own self-characterization that are highly questionable as well, but that gets to my main point. For me, this election is not about personality, as much as both Mr. “It’s all about me” Trump and the “We really, really, really, despise Mr. Trump” Democrats want it to be. What policies will come out of a Trump vs a Biden Administration? That continues to be my concern.

* I’ll write a post soon outlining this. One of my biggest angers at young protestors is their lack of historical perspective, and most of all what it leads to, their shocking ingratitude to the blessings we have in this country.

** If Mr. Adams is reading, I’d love to hear your perspective on the 1619 project in the comments section.