It’s hard to know whether Joe Biden and his surrogates actually believe he’s up to the job of being president for another four years. My guess is that they do.
The administration’s relying on a familiar narrative which, in a nutshell, says Biden’s more than capable of executing the duties of the presidency, and that everyone would realize as much if they could spend a day “in those rooms” with him.
The problem is, we can’t. We can’t be in “those rooms” — around “those tables,” as it were. We can’t be anywhere near them. So, we’re supposed to take it on faith. We’re supposed to take their word for it.
That’d be a reasonable expectation were it not for the Biden team’s almost pathological aversion to putting this president in unscripted settings. That’s a fairly recent phenomenon. This is a man who’s served at or near the highest levels of the US government since 1973. He’s been gaffe-prone pretty much that entire time, but it never stopped him from being “out there” before. What’s the problem now? That’s a rhetorical question.
When Biden’s team insists the president’s “sharp” in meetings and demonstrates good judgment when it’s time to make weighty decisions, they’re constructing a straw man. Americans don’t necessarily doubt that 11 AM Joe Biden’s capable of understanding the gist of today’s briefing on Gaza (or whatever else). If he wasn’t, it’d be incumbent upon Kamala Harris to pull the plug. On his presidency, using the Constitutional remedy, I mean. And you can anyway pretend — which is to say govern by committee — until the end of the term.
So, the problem isn’t that voters worry Biden might wander into the Oval Office in the middle of the night and call in a nuclear strike on New Zealand. The problem is that a president who can’t reliably communicate with the public (to say nothing of the world) is a president unable to discharge his duties. Biden can’t reliably communicate. And no, it’s not his stutter. It’s not “a cold” either.
For what it’s worth, I do buy Jim Clyburn’s “preparation overload” excuse for Biden’s poor debate performance, but in some respects that just begs the question. The older you are, the lower the “overload” threshold. And anyway, Biden’s the most powerful man on the planet, not some freshman on the high school debate team. When it occurred to him that things weren’t going well (and judging by his facial expressions, it did occur to him), he should’ve just ditched the preparation and gone off the cuff. Sure, that’s a risky strategy if you’re a gaffe factory, but the guy on the stage with you’s a gas balloon, a serial liar and a recently-convicted felon. How bad can your gaffes possibly look next to that?
The Biden campaign’s push back against calls for the president to cede the nomination is couched in caustic terms. “The bedwetting brigade is calling for Joe Biden to ‘drop out,'” Rob Flaherty sneered, in a fundraising message. “Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, period. End of story,” he continued.
The “bedwetting” bit, juvenile and petulant as it is, isn’t new. But this time it feels like the Biden team’s deliberately insulting the intelligence not just of voters in general, but of committed Democrats and donors.
CBS ran a poll after the debate asking registered voters whether they thought Biden should continue in the race. Just 28% said he should. 46% of Democrats said Biden shouldn’t be running for president, down a stunning 10ppt. Nearly three quarters of registered voters said Biden likely doesn’t possess the cognitive capacity to serve. That figure for Trump is below 50%.
In that context, Flaherty’s belligerence is supremely irritating. Indelicately: “F–k you, Rob. Your guy probably wears adult diapers and somehow we’re the ‘bedwetters’ for suggesting he bow out?! And anyway, aren’t you asking me for money? You should be kissing my ass, not calling me names.”
But that’s not the most concerning aspect of this exceedingly regrettable situation. Flaherty’s “Period. End of story” rhetoric suggests Democrats are becoming the party of one man. It’s not a GOP-style personality cult, but the read-through for this election cycle’s the same: Oh, you don’t like our guy? Well that’s just too damn bad. Fall in line or else.
Ezra Klein, who made a trenchant case for an open convention back in February, seized on Gavin Newsom’s response to calls for Biden to step aside. “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?” Newsom wondered. The answer, in this case, is “a party that wants to win,” as Klein put it. From a less Machiavellian perspective, “a party that wants to nominate a candidate that the American people believe is up to the job.”
This might be news to Flaherty — and Jill Biden’s apparently forgotten it — but: This isn’t about Joe Biden. It’s not about Donald Trump either. It’s about the country. “We the people,” and so on. This is, lest we should forget, representative government. It’s a democracy. Or at least it was. If both parties in America’s political duopoly insist on running candidates a majority of voters don’t want them to run, that’s not a democracy.
Klein, in his latest, wrote that there’s “no unitary actor called ‘the party’ that can persuade [Biden] to step aside.” Maybe — and I’m just tossing this out there — Biden should take a hint from voters rather than having to be cajoled by his wife and Barack Obama.
Let’s be honest: It’s not just one post-debate poll. Survey after survey almost uniformly suggests Democratic voters have been ready for a fresh face since… well, since forever, now that you mention it. As Klein gently pointed out, Biden “didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2020 because he set the hearts of party activists aflame, [he] won because the party made a cold decision to unite around the candidate it thought was best suited to beating Donald Trump.”
Now, Biden probably can’t beat Trump. And voters don’t want him on the ticket. So what’s the case for keeping him? His approval rating’s 38% for God’s sake and, to quote Klein one more time, there’s “not a plausible way for Democrats to convince voters that the man they saw on Thursday’s stage should be president three or four years from now.”
The bottom line is that top Democrats are behaving vis-à-vis Biden like the GOP behaves vis-à-vis Trump. A majority of voters — including nearly half of Democrats — don’t want Biden to be president. But Biden’s determined to stay in the job anyway. Sound familiar?
Wouldn’t it be amazing if Biden eventually succumbs to the pressure to drop out and the Supreme Court decides against Trump today, ultimately leading to Republicans nominating someone else?
I know- I am delusional 🙂
…but one can dream.
“… but one can dream.” Yes sir.
Wouldn’t it , couldn’t it be SOMETHING?!!
Aw, dude! You jinxed it! Now look what happened!
Nailed it once again.
It comes from the top. In a long interview with CNN Less than two months ago, Biden claimed that he is the most qualified person in the country to be president. Really?
Listened to Howard Dean give an interview to public radio this morning. Cringe, as the kids put it.
The Dem leadership has always been this stupid. They have no incentives to change, they’re doing fine. They are blind to what is obvious at a very fundamental level.
Googled “Howard Dean” and “NPR” just now without restricting the time. This came up:
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/04/575579698/howard-dean-calls-for-a-new-generation-of-democratic-leaders
All I can think of is Mayor Quimby declaring: “I have decided to FLIP-FLOP!”
+1
“Fall in line.”
I got that feeling around Super Tuesday, 2020. Cut off a lot of useful debate.
What’s the over-under that either of these guys will be alive and stable in four years? I’m betting the under on one.
Remarkable. I came here this morning because not 10 minutes ago the thought struck me that for the last few days Democrats are behaving just like Republicans, putting fealty to a man above all else, absolutely blind to what’s important to anyone but themselves, willing to sink the ship if they don’t get their way, letting his family influence his decisions instead of his constituents, and outright insulting those they disagree with, now not because the disparagement was deserved, as has long been the case behind the rightful insults towards Trump orcs, but simply because they disagree with them, as a tactic to try to intimidate them in to falling in line. And I thought, “I gotta go see if Heisenberg has anything to say today.”
Heisenberg Report: I came for the finance analysis, but I stay for the sanity.
Today the news is full of fallacious scripted talking points like “He’s still way better than the other guy” and “only one man has ever beaten Donald Trump” and “Biden is the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump“ and “you can’t give up on him just for one bad debate, who does that?”. (And just because I’ve been dying to say it to someone: Excuse me, Admiral Stockton had a bad debate. That is not the problem here.) Democrats qua Democrats as a party lost me a long time ago but this is the first time I’ve ever felt like they were just insulting my intelligence. Given them bragging up the supposed economy while so many thousands of experienced professionals like myself have now been out of work so long that we’re staring straight down the barrels of homelessness, this is the final straw for me. My complete disillusionment from the Democratic Party took over 25 years but they have finished the job. I grew up believing the Democratic Party had my interests at heart. These people have nothing to offer me at all except “look at what a baboon the other guy is, though”. They let things get to this point—and that’s partially a response to todays Supreme Court rulings, too—and now they’re determined to let them get even worse. It’s like they haven’t the foggiest idea how not to fail. As recently as two days ago, I almost accidentally referred to the Democrats as “we”, but the collective news reports of the last four days have finally extinguished the very last of my identification with “we’re still better than a baboon” as a driving political ideal. I still believe a bunch of them probably have their hearts in the right place, but they have zero leadership or governing skills. Zero. They let the dominoes fall to where this morning an activist Supreme Court moved this country far closer to autocracy, and they’re marking the date by doubling down on the same pigheaded ineptitude that let the country go down this road.
I agree with a lot of your points on this comment. I’ve raised similar arguments in discussions with friends who still self identify as progressives or hard core Dems, they dismiss any view that the Democratic party (at least its leadership) has become as reactionary and entrenched in some of their flag poles as the GOP is on theirs. It is almost as if we get two sides of the sane coin, pulling citizens and voters constantly to the extremes and dismissing the notion that there is still a decent number of independents and centrists in our country and that many voters can actually think for themselves and will react against paternalistic attempts by either party to make everyone fit a predetermined model. I am done with the “vote for me because the other guy is worst” option, I realize that might contribute to Trump’s return but I am resigned to that future, our political class needs to learn a lesson (or two).
I’ve said this before, and definitely will again, but my feeling is at this point, an addiction metaphor works. A lot of people will coddle a loved one who is an addict because things will get so much worse in the short term if they don’t. That’s called being an “enabler“, it enables the problem to get worse in the long term by continually avoiding short-term pain. Trump only had a viable shot at the White House at all because Democrats were content voting for second-worst for so many years, it created a race to the bottom by which the worst could get incrementally worse and all the second worst had to do was lag slightly behind. Remember when GWB seemed like the worst guy imaginable? If we keep saying 2nd worst is acceptable, 12 or 16 years from now we’ll have someone in office who makes Trump look as benign as Trump made GWB look.
But for an addict to recover, they have to hit bottom first. And by helping them avoid that, you’re not helping them, you’re just prolonging the problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I viscerally don’t want to see Trump in the White House again. I could never stomach taking any action that at all benefited him and his hordes of orcs. So this whole viewpoint is, of necessity, theoretical, I recognize that it presents a grave conundrum. But it is definitely something I think about.
For a long time there were third-party candidates I could hold my nosr and vote for, because they legitimately did represent my views better than either mainstream candidate did, without anything toooooo odoriferous accompanying it. This election, that’s not the case, either. Kennedy has that frustrating mix of 60% no bullshit/straight talk that nobody else will give you, plus, 200% crazy somehow crammed into the remaining 40%.
There’s no reason for the Biden campaign to flinch until there’s legit polling that they can no longer be accused of being negligent for ignoring. That’ll take a couple weeks. There’s probably folks in democratic leadership who are now preparing for a trump victory, and therefore, with no regard for our system of government and the office of the presidency, their political calculation is really based on managing the optics of sticking with Biden in a lost election, or pivoting to another candidate at this late hour, in a lost election. Polling will drive the MSM coverage which will likely drive which of our collective thoughts on Biden’s fitness the party leadership is allowed to say out loud. Assuming the polling is not off the charts bad, then there’s certainly an argument that if the campaign can survive this public pressure onslaught until the convention, everyone would then rally back around for the sake of beating trump.
They’ve already preemptively blamed the media for the possibility of any polling drop.
I do think that this isn’t necessarily a deathknell, yeah, there is a chance to recover from it, but, how many votes of no-confidence, before he’s even been inaugurated, do you wanna let a guy into office with? Few people wanted him as the candidate to begin with, he lost my vote for sure before this even happened (because he’s been talking up a much different economy than I am suffering through), and now people are even less confident in him. It’s possible he may recover in terms of numbers, but I don’t see how he ever recovers in terms of reputation. He’s asking a lot of independents and undecideds to willingly put someone in office they know they’re not going to be happy with for 4 years, or even terribly confident will be competent and able to serve for four years, and, even though the widespread justification among the public for many candidates has been “he’s still better than the other guy”, this is the first time “at least I’m better than the other guy” has been the candidate’s own messaging. That’s a hell of a lot to ask people outside the unwavering Dem base to willingly vote for, and even if he wins, it’s a bleak and pessimistic way to start a presidency.
Explanations for Biden’s pathetic debate appearance mean nothing. Biden was dead on his feet yet I’m unable to say about the next debate, “There’s nowhere to go but up.” Biden can never erase the belief held by many that he is cognitively impaired and the upcoming ads will ensure voters don’t forget.
About 20 years ago, Cass Sunstein wrote, “Why Societies Need Dissent.” Biden’s handlers should read it and act on it by bringing onboard a few former Republican operatives to help revise the Biden camp’s strategy. Completely. Choose the best way to make a transition to one or more new candidates. Unfortunately, the egos on Biden’s “team” preclude a reasonable assessment of risk. They don’t want to admit they’re wrong. If they somehow squeak out a win, e.g. if Trump keels over, keeping Biden in the race was still a very bad decision.
This will be a trainwreck, but when, and how, are unknown. We only know it will happen.