There are two competing narratives about mainstream press coverage of President Biden’s disastrous debate performance and its aftermath. The first is exemplified by Rebecca Solnit‘s Guardian column, “Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?“
I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
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Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent. Quite a lot of them have been running magical-realism fantasy-football scenarios in which it is fun and easy to swap in your favorite substitute candidate. The reality is that it is hard and quite likely to be a terrible mess. Nevertheless, this pretense is supposed to mean that telling a presidential candidate in mid-campaign to get lost is fine.
The main argument against Biden is not that he can’t govern – that would be hard to make given that he seems to have done so for the past years – but that he can’t win the election. But candidates do not win elections by themselves. Elections are won, to state the obvious, by how the electorate turns out and votes. The electorate votes based on how they understand the situation and evaluate the candidates. That is, of course, in large part shaped by the media, as Hannah-Jones points out, and the media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss. The other term for that is a Republican victory. Few things have terrified and horrified me the way this does.
The other is exemplified by Olivia Nuzzi‘s New York essay “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” which I referenced in my Friday post “Is Joe Biden Fit to Serve?” Her colleague, Jane Mayer, amplifies it on the platform formerly known as Twiter and adds:
There are 2 conversations in Washington right now. The public one is that Biden’s ok. The private one is the same people telling reporters it’s a disaster. Biden fans are blaming reporters but the press is just letting the public in on what’s really being said.
It’s possible, of course, that these aren’t competing narratives at all. Maybe longtime Democrats Nuzzi and Mayer are in on the plot to convince the public that, despite all evidence, Biden is not up to the job of being President and we must therefore re-elect Donald Trump. Or, at the very least, trying to bring the evergreen dream of a brokered convention true because it’s good for business. (To be sure, speculation about blitz primaries and the like are good fun.)
Solnit is certainly right that questions about Biden’s age were there in 2020. And, given that he was aiming to become the oldest-at-inauguration President in American history, that was hardly unreasonable.
There was always talk that Biden’s role would be to right the ship after the disaster of the Trump presidency and then gracefully step aside for Kamala Harris or an open primary. But that was just never going to happen: nobody who has achieved the lifetime ambition of attaining that office has ever given up a chance for re-election unless it was absolutely clear they would fail.
Despite his claims to the contrary, his performance in the debate was not a one-off. His public appearances routinely show a man who has lost several steps.
Solnit is also right to point out that Biden has been a pretty effective President, especially given the lockstep opposition of Republicans and the challenges of getting then-Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on board. But it’s also rather clear that his staff and family are stage-managing him in a way we haven’t seen in a very long time. We simply have to take their word for it that, behind the scenes, Biden is sharp as a tack. And we’re now getting a whole lot of reports—anonymously sourced ones, as is almost always the case—telling us that things are not good.
Where I’m most aligned with Solnit and others in her camp is that the incessant focus on Biden’s frailties takes the focus off his opponent. While Trump is decidedly more energetic than Biden in public appearances, he’s rather obviously also suffering cognitive decline. And, whereas Biden’s manifests in losing his train of thought, Trump’s manifests in fascist and racist rants. These are, to say the least, not equivalent.
But that works both ways. If Trump’s re-election threatens American democracy or, at the very least, the civil liberties of groups not favored by the MAGA base, then extraordinary measures are required to safeguard against that threat. If that requires sacrificing the political ambitions of a past-his-prime octogenarian, so be it.
It’s also worth noting that it’s not just “the media” who are on the “push Biden out of the race” bandwagon. A goodly number of members of the Democratic Establishment are publicly calling for him to leave. It’s fair to assume that many, many more privately wish he would do so.
