I don’t think Biden needs to “spring miraculously back to life and thrash Trump in a later debate.” Because I don’t think there’s much evidence the debates matter for the election outcome in the first place. I’m frustrated that we’re in a place where someone as old and declining as Biden is the best we’ve got, but the people calling for him to step down now I think are out of their minds. There’s zero evidence anyone else would do better and the stakes are too high. Biden is doing a perfectly fine job as president now and he can always step down if that changes *during* a second term.
It's absofuckinglutely superb and fantastic, John. Some of the best political analysis I have read. Up there with Rick Perlstein's four books on the rise of the Right. I told everyone at my Substack to buy it. It's not only intelligent, it's well-written, which I hold in high regard as an author myself.
-- Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
PS: the Three Rules of Hollywood - Nobody. Knows. Anything. - apply to more than Hollywood, where the "straight to video" movie I wrote for Rogeer Corman turned into his biggest hit and a "cult classic," while the movie made from the script I wrote that everyone there thought was the big winner sank out of sight upon launch.
Jesus. These comments. OK, now I'm convinced that US Dems are so deranged and disconnected from reality that they genuinely can't see that Biden is even more unelectable than Hilary. Which, let's face it, was a pretty high bar. But apparently the will to deny reality means not so much sleepwalking to certain defeat, but a forced march, with hectoring by bullhorns. And people think the Charge of the Light Brigade was a epitome of stupidity brought about by imperial arrogance and cultural decline.
Indeed. I didn't see the loss to Hillary coming––but almost no one did, including Trump. In contrast, voters have been telling the Biden people, for over a year, that they don't want to give him 4 more years because they think he is too old. That consensus didn't change a whit.
Now that the majority view has been empirically confirmed, what is going to change the trajectory toward a loss?
I have decided that Trump's super power is to cause absolute meltdowns in Democrats, liberals, and non-nihilistic leftists. George Conaway opined this is what Republicans most like about Trump, he causes liberals to break down.
I'm seeing lots of people in pure panic mode who seem to have had all resilience stripped from them. I am seeing people who can't remember when Obama "lost" his debate to Romney or a post-stroke Fetterman "lost" his debate to Dr. Oz. The meltdowns were the same back then. Everyone melted down when Fetterman had his stroke, etc.
What is it about the broad left that exists in meltdown mode easily? Republicans reflexively support their candidate no matter what and we show our superiority by reflexively criticizing and seeking to throw someone under the bus in exchange for an unnamed Johnny or Jane Unbeatable?
As someone who was involved in "professional" Democratic politics and has been politically active since I hung door knockers for JFK when I was in high school, the Professional Bedwetters Caucus is the worst thing about the party.
In the past most people saying "Biden should step down" were eliding the fact that his replacement would almost definitely be Kamala Harris in favor of wish-casting for an unnamed Dem who fulfilled all of their policy fantasies. I resisted those calls because I thought that even an 81-year-old Biden remained a better choice than Harris to beat Trump. But after last night's debate I can't imagine she wouldn't have a better chance.
The only narrative about Biden between now and the election will be his age and infirmity. The only one. It will overshadow everything, including Trump's legal troubles and odious plans for the country.
I wasn't able to watch it in its entirety due to the pain associated with doing so, but I suspect that, if all one had available was a transcript, any sane person would conclude that it was Biden's debate. The problem is that it was televised, and Biden's age was more *physically* apparent than it has ever been. It was certainly more apparent than Trump's. Since polarization is all negative now, the question is not, "who looked *better*?" The question we need to ask is, what does the American public find more off-putting: a *doddering* old man or a *clinically insane* old man?
Trump is a dangerous lunatic with a super power to make liberals/leftist breakdown in tears. Biden sounded raspy but coherent and got some blows in. Trump actually gave a normal audience his Nuremberg Rally shit a d that can be used in attack ads.
The last time a sitting President decided not to run for President was 1968 and that was a complete disaster.
The most likely alternative to Biden is Harris but no pundit calling for Biden to step down seems to mention this. I find this revealing on many levels
Zeroing in on the institutions being as moribund as the candidate. This feels like a great time to revisit the McGovern-Fraser Commission and its negative impacts on our politics. It hollowed out the Democratic Party to the point that there is no clean way out of this current situation. Maybe it took half a century and the introduction of social media and the internet, but it does seem we've made a full transition from smoky backrooms selecting nominees to chaos politics that ends with what we saw last night.
¨The second big reaction is panic, which seems more justified, but also is typical Democratic bed-wetting.¨
Basically, Biden had a bad debate and there you go, nothing to say about that. (Reagan had a very bad debate in his first outing in 1984 - I was around for that - and he recovered.) Biden had a good state of the union, and he went out there this afternoon and gave a solid performance.
On the other hand, they are over there in the Atlantic talking about how to forcibly replace Biden and using 1968 as an example. Democrats lost in 1968 by 0.7%. If Johnson had stayed in the race he´d have won, because at no time was Johnson less popular than Humphrey. Historically, if you wanted Biden replaced purely as a campaign matter, the cold-blooded option is either assassination or for Biden to have a heart attack and drop dead on stage. That would garner enough public sympathy to overcome Kamala Harris´ handicaps, which are that she hasn´t won a primary and she hasn´t been president for any length of time (aside from aside from skin color or gender). At this point, and probably since 2021, replacing Biden involves defaulting on the election, regardless of whatever BS political columnists about respecting Biden from declaring he was going to be a one-termer or whatnot (no they wouldn´t). Recall 1992 (ha! I haven´t finished your book yet) - Ross Perot was doing fantastic in the polls, pulled out of the race, got back in and effectively lost 50% of his apparent support thereafter. Given that he finished with 19%, that was probably the difference between a candidate who had a small shot at winning and a candidate with lots of pull and no chance.
Put another way, the chance of producing a successful candidate after turning the one guy who beat Trump into a one-termer is close to zilch - the 19th century track record of (intentional) one-termers is very bad. Basically: James K. Polk. So this stuff about retrieving your election chances by muscling your guy out is purely a masturbatory fantasy - or the sort of self-defeating internecine leftist politics that´s popular on Twitter and loses most places. Americans don´t pay that much attention to politics, but they sure as shit would pay attention to that, much more so than one bad debate performance.
(I expect I might get beat up on this as an ideological matter, but I am talking in terms of pure campaigning. I didn´t pull the lever for him in early 2020, and assumed that his age and his previous track record from 85-95 would be likely make this kind of scenario likely. He has massively overperformed my very low expectations (both ideological and political) given where the actual high muckety-mucks are positioned. As you say, our democratic institutions are in fairly bad shape, given that Democrats have a functioning majority of voter support nationally, which was not the case in the 80´s and the 90´s.
As historical matter though, this is a fairly amazing case of the right perfecting their psychological warfare operations. There´s an entire formula that has been perfected across three Democratic administrations: start off by declaring the incoming D administration will be an economic disaster, strip mine events for things to get mad about, unify the right with racist propaganda, prod the left to get made about minor things and focus on fighting the rest of the party, then hump whatever scandals you can find or invent and declare the sitting President should resign. They did that with Bill Clinton, they did that with Obama (the WaPo ran an ´Obama should resign - it´ll be great!´ column seemingly every month (or every week) from 2010 to 2012, and they have been all in on this with Biden - every democrat is Jimmy Carter in 1979. ´The economy is in recession, unemployment is terrible, the world is ending, we´re going to be destroyed by random minor country X, we have to overthrow the government before we have to endure a dictatorship that will destroy us with government preschools and giving money to poor (black!) people!´
If there is something to be done here, though, Biden should sack Ron Klain - I wasn´t impressed with his performance dealing with Covid, and the administration´s performance since Klain took over as CoS has not been great, along with whomever is running their comms strategy, which seems mainly concerned with appeasing right-wingers and not making them mad, which deserves a whole lot of fuck that.
elm
that strange disconnect between reality and the imaginary worlds of social media drama
I've long held the view that Biden should not have run again, so for me the only question is: is it too late for him to quit now?
I don't understand the US system well, but AFAICT it's set up as a choice between the candidates nominated at the conventions. So, if the Dems hold an open convention there shouldn't be a problem.
Of course, that would be messy and , at least in recent history, unprecedented. But there is zero evidence that doing something messy and unprecedented (like nominating a convicted felon) is an electoral liability in the US as it stands.
A final point is that something of this kind always had to be a possibility if Biden (or Trump for that matter) died, or fell gravely ill during the campaign
Obviously hard to predict what comes next. I agree that the US political system needs reform. Weak party structure led to Trump's takeover of the Republican party, now prevents Democratic party (really any political party) from challenging an incumbent. Gerrymandering has entrenched unsupported super majorities in multiple states; the electoral college subverts the popular vote; unrepresentative senate; politicized Supreme court taking away fundamental rights... the list goes on. I think one underappreciated reason for our polarized politics is that most people feel their voices aren't being heard. And they're not wrong.
A sober and sensible take at this very depressing moment. I think you are right--Biden is Leer. But if Biden is Leer, are we condemned to be part of his tragedy, which will also, like the original, be a national one? Will the stage be strewn with corpses when the drama ends? Which Act are we in now? I ask these as serious questions.
We gotta stop pretending Trump is some uniquely unbeatable candidate, he's an old idiot who would fold like a paper tiger if actually challenged but the Dems insist on running other old idiots
I don’t think Biden needs to “spring miraculously back to life and thrash Trump in a later debate.” Because I don’t think there’s much evidence the debates matter for the election outcome in the first place. I’m frustrated that we’re in a place where someone as old and declining as Biden is the best we’ve got, but the people calling for him to step down now I think are out of their minds. There’s zero evidence anyone else would do better and the stakes are too high. Biden is doing a perfectly fine job as president now and he can always step down if that changes *during* a second term.
I know it was an obvious and easy prediction to make, but I totally called “debut as bestseller“ the second you announce the book. Great work!
Ed, I don't know how you called it! No one else seemed to think so!
It's absofuckinglutely superb and fantastic, John. Some of the best political analysis I have read. Up there with Rick Perlstein's four books on the rise of the Right. I told everyone at my Substack to buy it. It's not only intelligent, it's well-written, which I hold in high regard as an author myself.
-- Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
PS: the Three Rules of Hollywood - Nobody. Knows. Anything. - apply to more than Hollywood, where the "straight to video" movie I wrote for Rogeer Corman turned into his biggest hit and a "cult classic," while the movie made from the script I wrote that everyone there thought was the big winner sank out of sight upon launch.
Nobody. Knows. Anything.
Jesus. These comments. OK, now I'm convinced that US Dems are so deranged and disconnected from reality that they genuinely can't see that Biden is even more unelectable than Hilary. Which, let's face it, was a pretty high bar. But apparently the will to deny reality means not so much sleepwalking to certain defeat, but a forced march, with hectoring by bullhorns. And people think the Charge of the Light Brigade was a epitome of stupidity brought about by imperial arrogance and cultural decline.
Indeed. I didn't see the loss to Hillary coming––but almost no one did, including Trump. In contrast, voters have been telling the Biden people, for over a year, that they don't want to give him 4 more years because they think he is too old. That consensus didn't change a whit.
Now that the majority view has been empirically confirmed, what is going to change the trajectory toward a loss?
This is surreal to me.
I have decided that Trump's super power is to cause absolute meltdowns in Democrats, liberals, and non-nihilistic leftists. George Conaway opined this is what Republicans most like about Trump, he causes liberals to break down.
I'm seeing lots of people in pure panic mode who seem to have had all resilience stripped from them. I am seeing people who can't remember when Obama "lost" his debate to Romney or a post-stroke Fetterman "lost" his debate to Dr. Oz. The meltdowns were the same back then. Everyone melted down when Fetterman had his stroke, etc.
What is it about the broad left that exists in meltdown mode easily? Republicans reflexively support their candidate no matter what and we show our superiority by reflexively criticizing and seeking to throw someone under the bus in exchange for an unnamed Johnny or Jane Unbeatable?
As someone who was involved in "professional" Democratic politics and has been politically active since I hung door knockers for JFK when I was in high school, the Professional Bedwetters Caucus is the worst thing about the party.
In the past most people saying "Biden should step down" were eliding the fact that his replacement would almost definitely be Kamala Harris in favor of wish-casting for an unnamed Dem who fulfilled all of their policy fantasies. I resisted those calls because I thought that even an 81-year-old Biden remained a better choice than Harris to beat Trump. But after last night's debate I can't imagine she wouldn't have a better chance.
The only narrative about Biden between now and the election will be his age and infirmity. The only one. It will overshadow everything, including Trump's legal troubles and odious plans for the country.
Which makes it your job to correct every dumbassed moron who says that.
I wasn't able to watch it in its entirety due to the pain associated with doing so, but I suspect that, if all one had available was a transcript, any sane person would conclude that it was Biden's debate. The problem is that it was televised, and Biden's age was more *physically* apparent than it has ever been. It was certainly more apparent than Trump's. Since polarization is all negative now, the question is not, "who looked *better*?" The question we need to ask is, what does the American public find more off-putting: a *doddering* old man or a *clinically insane* old man?
Trump is a dangerous lunatic with a super power to make liberals/leftist breakdown in tears. Biden sounded raspy but coherent and got some blows in. Trump actually gave a normal audience his Nuremberg Rally shit a d that can be used in attack ads.
The last time a sitting President decided not to run for President was 1968 and that was a complete disaster.
The most likely alternative to Biden is Harris but no pundit calling for Biden to step down seems to mention this. I find this revealing on many levels
Zeroing in on the institutions being as moribund as the candidate. This feels like a great time to revisit the McGovern-Fraser Commission and its negative impacts on our politics. It hollowed out the Democratic Party to the point that there is no clean way out of this current situation. Maybe it took half a century and the introduction of social media and the internet, but it does seem we've made a full transition from smoky backrooms selecting nominees to chaos politics that ends with what we saw last night.
¨The second big reaction is panic, which seems more justified, but also is typical Democratic bed-wetting.¨
Basically, Biden had a bad debate and there you go, nothing to say about that. (Reagan had a very bad debate in his first outing in 1984 - I was around for that - and he recovered.) Biden had a good state of the union, and he went out there this afternoon and gave a solid performance.
On the other hand, they are over there in the Atlantic talking about how to forcibly replace Biden and using 1968 as an example. Democrats lost in 1968 by 0.7%. If Johnson had stayed in the race he´d have won, because at no time was Johnson less popular than Humphrey. Historically, if you wanted Biden replaced purely as a campaign matter, the cold-blooded option is either assassination or for Biden to have a heart attack and drop dead on stage. That would garner enough public sympathy to overcome Kamala Harris´ handicaps, which are that she hasn´t won a primary and she hasn´t been president for any length of time (aside from aside from skin color or gender). At this point, and probably since 2021, replacing Biden involves defaulting on the election, regardless of whatever BS political columnists about respecting Biden from declaring he was going to be a one-termer or whatnot (no they wouldn´t). Recall 1992 (ha! I haven´t finished your book yet) - Ross Perot was doing fantastic in the polls, pulled out of the race, got back in and effectively lost 50% of his apparent support thereafter. Given that he finished with 19%, that was probably the difference between a candidate who had a small shot at winning and a candidate with lots of pull and no chance.
Put another way, the chance of producing a successful candidate after turning the one guy who beat Trump into a one-termer is close to zilch - the 19th century track record of (intentional) one-termers is very bad. Basically: James K. Polk. So this stuff about retrieving your election chances by muscling your guy out is purely a masturbatory fantasy - or the sort of self-defeating internecine leftist politics that´s popular on Twitter and loses most places. Americans don´t pay that much attention to politics, but they sure as shit would pay attention to that, much more so than one bad debate performance.
(I expect I might get beat up on this as an ideological matter, but I am talking in terms of pure campaigning. I didn´t pull the lever for him in early 2020, and assumed that his age and his previous track record from 85-95 would be likely make this kind of scenario likely. He has massively overperformed my very low expectations (both ideological and political) given where the actual high muckety-mucks are positioned. As you say, our democratic institutions are in fairly bad shape, given that Democrats have a functioning majority of voter support nationally, which was not the case in the 80´s and the 90´s.
As historical matter though, this is a fairly amazing case of the right perfecting their psychological warfare operations. There´s an entire formula that has been perfected across three Democratic administrations: start off by declaring the incoming D administration will be an economic disaster, strip mine events for things to get mad about, unify the right with racist propaganda, prod the left to get made about minor things and focus on fighting the rest of the party, then hump whatever scandals you can find or invent and declare the sitting President should resign. They did that with Bill Clinton, they did that with Obama (the WaPo ran an ´Obama should resign - it´ll be great!´ column seemingly every month (or every week) from 2010 to 2012, and they have been all in on this with Biden - every democrat is Jimmy Carter in 1979. ´The economy is in recession, unemployment is terrible, the world is ending, we´re going to be destroyed by random minor country X, we have to overthrow the government before we have to endure a dictatorship that will destroy us with government preschools and giving money to poor (black!) people!´
If there is something to be done here, though, Biden should sack Ron Klain - I wasn´t impressed with his performance dealing with Covid, and the administration´s performance since Klain took over as CoS has not been great, along with whomever is running their comms strategy, which seems mainly concerned with appeasing right-wingers and not making them mad, which deserves a whole lot of fuck that.
elm
that strange disconnect between reality and the imaginary worlds of social media drama
I've long held the view that Biden should not have run again, so for me the only question is: is it too late for him to quit now?
I don't understand the US system well, but AFAICT it's set up as a choice between the candidates nominated at the conventions. So, if the Dems hold an open convention there shouldn't be a problem.
Of course, that would be messy and , at least in recent history, unprecedented. But there is zero evidence that doing something messy and unprecedented (like nominating a convicted felon) is an electoral liability in the US as it stands.
A final point is that something of this kind always had to be a possibility if Biden (or Trump for that matter) died, or fell gravely ill during the campaign
Obviously hard to predict what comes next. I agree that the US political system needs reform. Weak party structure led to Trump's takeover of the Republican party, now prevents Democratic party (really any political party) from challenging an incumbent. Gerrymandering has entrenched unsupported super majorities in multiple states; the electoral college subverts the popular vote; unrepresentative senate; politicized Supreme court taking away fundamental rights... the list goes on. I think one underappreciated reason for our polarized politics is that most people feel their voices aren't being heard. And they're not wrong.
A sober and sensible take at this very depressing moment. I think you are right--Biden is Leer. But if Biden is Leer, are we condemned to be part of his tragedy, which will also, like the original, be a national one? Will the stage be strewn with corpses when the drama ends? Which Act are we in now? I ask these as serious questions.
Yes, I just realized--it's Lear.
And Trump is Leer.
No, he's not. We have to face reality. A better analogy would be Iago.
Or perhaps Richard III, including the fact that, perversely (and for us, tragically), he evokes a sympathetic response in a portion of the audience.
Took me a few days, but I think I get it now. :-)
We gotta stop pretending Trump is some uniquely unbeatable candidate, he's an old idiot who would fold like a paper tiger if actually challenged but the Dems insist on running other old idiots
I’m with Heather:
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/june-27-2024?r=3ynoe&utm_medium=ios
Love you, John, but have to disagree with the hot take here.
Love, love, love your book. Well deserved best seller!
Maybe this will prove to be a bad prediction in our sharply polarized age, but I suspect the takes this morning are missing something.
Polling is going to show that Biden is no longer viable over the coming days and weeks. The levee's about to break.
"King Leer" is Donald Trump.