I'm late (I was distracted from Joe Biden's aging by my mother's 100th birthday), but I want to drop back and talk about the book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, and in general the blame-Biden movement. A typical take was provided by Ezra Klein on his podcast, in an episode titled How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-Elected Trump.
Klein and Jake Tapper traverse many moments in which Biden's struggles seemed evident, starting with his questioning in a classified-documents case by prosecutor Robert Hur in October 2023. Hur concluded he ought not to prosecute Biden for mishandling documents because a jury would likely regard him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The White House and the Biden campaign (as well as many news outlets, such as Tapper's CNN and MSNBC) found this outrageously pejorative, a bald attempt to help get Trump elected. As Tapper emphasizes, we can see now that it was a sober statement of fact.
I was unimpressed by the alleged evidence of Biden's decline, because I always had a scathing assessment of his verbal and logical skills. Long ago I created a user clip on C-Span, showing Biden's questioning of Samuel Alito at the latter's confirmation hearings, surely the least competent SCOTUS examination ever attempted. During the 2020 campaign, when Tapper and Klein appear to think that Biden was "as sharp as ever," he was amazingly incoherent all the time. My idea was that he hadn't declined that dramatically, but that people suddenly decided to notice that he wasn't making sense.
Looking back, he’d declined even from the incoherence of his earlier phases. And Tapper's book (written with Alex Thompson of Axios) does indicate a concerted attempt to conceal Biden's then-current condition from the nation long enough to get him elected. The events that followed were problematic in various ways: the sudden imposition of Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate without any sort of selection process; her subsequently truncated campaign; Trump's shockingly thorough victory; all the shit that Trump is doing now with his mandate.
Tapper generously doesn’t directly blame Biden (much); he blames Biden's staff, essentially. And he should be even more focused than he is on the uncritical media that let this stuff slide for months or years and then suddenly turned as one.
Let me express my skepticism. I don't think that Biden's cognitive decline or his late withdrawal made a decisive difference in the outcome. And I think the direct claim that it did, as in Klein's headline (the "cover-up" "re-elected Trump") is self-serving in a familiar way. Also in a way that indicates that Democrats will find it difficult to absorb useful lessons from their 2024 disaster.
When one of the major parties loses a presidential election, it goes into a paroxysm of disingenuous self-reflection. Presented as attempts to assess what went wrong and how we can do better next time, they focus instead on deflecting blame and figuring out how to make the most minor changes possible.
Traditionally, this means a focus on "messaging": a party nearly always concludes that they had the best positions and pretty darn good candidates, but that their "messaging strategies" went awry. Then they spend the next few years, as the next election looms, gathering focus groups together to try out some new phraseology. The whole of their self-reflection consists in the question of how they can improve their advertising strategies to be more effectively manipulative than those of their opponents. This in turn is liable to consist in mimicking very closely what did win, that is, in imitating the people you oppose.
But here’s a new strategy: it's Biden's fault for not withdrawing. Oh no, I don't blame Biden! He's a sympathetic, well-meaning, forgetful old buffer. I blame the people around him! But the spirit is the same: surface adjustments, adjustments of presenters and presentations, are enough to assure our long-term victory. After all, we’re obviously right, and people who disagree with us must be under some sort of misapprehension.
I don't think that the Democrats would’ve won in 2024 if Kamala had had more time to run. I agreed with those commentators who at the time argued that the compressed schedule might be an advantage for her. I don't think that there are good reasons to believe that if there had been a full-fledged or compressed primary and the Democrats had nominated Buttigieg or Shapiro or Whitmer that they would’ve done any better. Harris was as plausible a candidate as any, and ran a fairly competent campaign. The Democrats are fooling themselves if they stick to Biden's dementia as their explanation, and that without a more honest assessment, they're liable to lose again.
Going into Election Day, everyone on both sides and in between seemed to agree that 2024 was "a referendum on Trump." I think, by and large, that's just what it was, and that a variety of factors had the whole country, essentially every region and every demographic group, trending to Trump by Election Day. I don't see any reason to believe that it would’ve been any different with Gretchen Whitmer.
Trump is an overwhelming personality who'd become even more overwhelming after his 2020 loss. It's hard to focus on anything else while he's there, yapping and thrashing away. Maybe there wasn’t even exactly a rightwards sing in 2024, but rather a swing to Trump, which isn’t ideologically defined except perhaps as a sort of screeching nationalism.
The Democrats should think more about their aesthetics, and about their safety-first orientation (embodied by a run of candidates from Al Gore and John Kerry to Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris). They should think about how they can speak more directly and humanly and even idiosyncratically. And if they don't have to run against Trump again, they should thank their lucky stars.
My mom's memory is slipping too. It's not her fault! Maybe the Dems should stop blaming poor Joe.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell