If I was Joe Biden’s Campaign Manager

I have been thinking about how, exactly, will both candidates conduct themselves in the general election this autumn. The more I thought about possible options for Biden, the more excited I got about those possibilities.

Here are a few suggestions for Joe or his campaign manager.

1) Get out of the basement. Scout around Washington to find and rent a space that can function as a soundstage. Build out the space with the equivalent to a surgical scrub station outside the door to the set. Anyone going into the studio, must take the recommended steps to sanitize before entering. The set should be a cross between a comfortable place for three of four people to converse — at a safe distance — and a campaign headquarters. I envision lots of vintage campaign posters — FDR, JFK, Bobby, Truman as well as Obama and Clinton.

2) Have Joe travel to this soundstage every day. It’s a routine — he’s going to his job. His office would be on the other side of the set from the scrub station. Other members of his “office” staff (who may be in other parts of the building) would include the press secretary and the top campaign staff members.

3) Begin holding face to face interviews with Congressional & Senate candidates. I would hire a telegenic press secretary/interviewer — someone like Dee Dee Myers — to moderate and manage the conversation between Biden and the Congressional candidate. Live stream the whole thing. The discussion should be laser focused on the candidate’s district. What needs doing. How the Democrats would address hometown issues as compared to the Republicans. What the president may be able to do to help. A press release would go out two days before the interview to the local district media. This will get coverage before (“you can see the live stream at www.joebiden.com”) and after (“Congresswoman Smith said blah blah blah in his interview with Joe Biden, here is a clip of that interview”).

4) Then, edit the interview down to 20 minutes and buy a 30-minute television slot in the home district. This video will be a lot cleaner and tighter thematically than the live stream. Run it in prime time — twice — once shortly after the interview happens and again one week before election day. Bracket it with actual campaign ads for both candidates.

5) The convention — I have no clue about this. I only place this in the timeline because after the convention, Biden will be the actual nominee and that will allow him to pivot to discussions about what his administration would look like.

6) Start picking the cabinet. The day after the convention closes, Joe can start talking about who he would choose to fill the cabinet positions when he becomes president. This could be something of a weekly event. First, a press release. This will cause the news media to cover the choice and the pundit class to babble about the pros and cons of a given cabinet post. But three days after the press release, an interview is held between Joe and the cabinet nominee to discuss, again, what they plan on doing when they get into office. Another round of news reports and pundit babbling. You could hold the news cycle for a week with this strategy.

7) Win election because everyone in America will realize that Joe is not only sharp as a tack, but the only functioning adult running for President.

Some naysayers will claim this would be too expensive. Rent a studio for six months? Buy half hour slots on television?! How will we pay for all that? Well, as Joe would say, here is the deal. You will not have a need for a plane to fly the candidate around to rallies. You will not need to fund all the infrastructure and logistics necessary for the candidate to whistle stop through the land. And if you blow all your money on 1-minute campaign spots, you will never break through the noise. And Joe will still be in the basement, looking ineffectual.

We don’t know how long this pandemic is going to last. Maybe the country will be opened enough by September for the candidate to campaign is a semi traditional manner, but I would not bet on it. This dynamic will also work very well for the candidate. It will feel like his old Senate office. Ten or fifteen top aides working 18-hour days to push the message out to the citizens and move the ball forward.

All these suggestions would be padded out with internet ads and social media strategies. And as time went on, certain states may become the clear battleground hot spots. Biden could hold small town hall meetings in these states. Maybe the rules have relaxed enough that we can gather with 50 people by now. But it’s not going to be convention hall crowds for either candidate. And that is going to hurt Trump tremendously.

Trump has a real talent for working a huge crowd with his long, rambling, all over the place style speeches. If his campaign staff puts him in a room with 50 citizens and he starts talking like that, he is going to remind people of the bleach speech. And he will lose this election.