Joe, Hunter and the right’s heartlessness

The other night on his Fox News show, Sean Hannity played a 2018 voicemail that Joe Biden left for his son, Hunter. In what was originally a private message, the elder Biden expresses unconditional love and anguished concern for his only living son, who was then struggling with drug addiction.

The reason Biden left such a voicemail seems self-evident, and apolitical: He is a father who loves his adult son and is powerless to help him. Sadly, many parents of every political orientation can understand that well enough.

The reason for Hannity’s airing of the voicemail as part of what was supposed to be an attack on Biden is less clear.

Whatever one thinks of Hannity, he is generally quite successful in engaging his audience. So, why did he think that Biden’s 2018 voicemail to his drug-addicted son would prove a slam-dunk against the president’s character, rather than a testament to it?

It’s not because the voicemail was left on the same day that Hunter lied on a handgun application. And it’s not because Republicans find it difficult to relate to the horror of loving a drug addict.

No, the real reason Hannity played that heart-wrenching voicemail is articulated at the end of the interlude, when he says, “by the way, replace the name ‘Biden’ with ‘Trump’ and imagine how the mob and the media would be covering all of this.”

Indeed.

So, two wrongs – or, to be precise, a wrong that didn’t actually happen, answered with one that did – now make a right? That’s not what I’m teaching my children. But, apparently, it’s what a seasoned salesman assumes will sell in the party of “family values.”

The anger and “whataboutism” that drives today’s right is understandable, to a point. In just 10 years, we’ve gone from a 51-year-old Democratic president who evolved into supporting gay marriage to a 79-year-old Democratic president who cannot provide a hard number on exactly how many sexes there are (lest he upset the urban teachers’ unions that seem to consider it more important to teach their predominantly poor and minority students about gender theory than to instruct them in reading).

Culture is upstream of politics, and the traditional “family values” preached by politicians on both the right and the left such a short time ago seem to have disappeared into the ether overnight.

This is why it should be easy for the right to win the hearts and minds of some centrists like me — as in, the kind of person who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but had to hold my nose quite hard to do it, given the extent to which he capitulated to the nonsense being spewed by the leftist fringe of his (and my) Democratic Party. But instead of focusing on the kind of return to decency that might inspire centrists and independents to make common cause with them, post-Trump GOP politicians and talking heads mostly do the opposite.

I was exasperated by how some Senate Democrats treated Amy Coney Barrett during her confirmation hearings and equally exasperated by how some Senate Republicans treated Ketanji Brown Jackson during hers. I know I’m not the only one. I also know, as do a lot of similarly non-ideological people (my fellow pro-life Democrats being just some) that the right is, well, more or less right about some important things.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to be right. After all, winning hearts and minds begins – in the phrase as in the reality it denotes – with hearts.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.