Biden’s Long Goodbye
A surreal Democratic National Convention.
Adam Cancryn and Jonathan Lemire reporting for POLITICO (“Biden heads to Chicago for a hero’s goodbye“):
This is not the Democratic convention that President Joe Biden envisioned just a month ago.
Stepping onto the stage in Chicago was supposed to be the capstone of a half-century electoral career, a triumphant recognition of his prolific first term and hard-earned validation of the belief that he alone could once again defeat former President Donald Trump.
But a week that Biden once saw as his political pinnacle will now last just a few hours, overtaken by an extraordinary series of events that has reenergized the president’s party at the expense of his own ambitions. The deafening roars Biden receives at the United Center Monday night will communicate just as much relief as reverence from a party grateful he’s stepped away, further signaling that Biden’s exit from the race is the only reason Democrats are confident they have a shot to win in November.
And when Vice President Kamala Harris delivers her acceptance speech later this week, Biden will already have been out of sight and out of mind, on vacation far from the celebration.
“He’s going to get an incredible reception,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), a staunch Biden ally, said ahead of his convention-opening speech Monday that will now effectively double as the president’s pass-the-torch moment. “But I’m sure it’s very complicated. I know it’s very complicated.”
Complicated, indeed. By most accounts, he’s still angry and resentful that Nancy Pelosi and other leaders of his party rallied to push him out. But, reluctant as it was, his stepping down was after having secured the nomination was unprecedented and has energized a party in a deep malaise. He’ll rightly get a hero’s welcome.
The revamped convention now set to dominate the political landscape for the next four days will mirror the shifting dynamics of a Democratic Party trying to celebrate Biden’s tenure — while also eagerly preparing to move past it.
The week’s programming will be infused with talk of Biden’s accomplishments, even as they’re carefully rebranded as joint achievements with Harris, aides familiar with the planning said.
Officials want Monday, in particular, to remind Americans of the reeling, pandemic-plagued nation that Biden inherited three-and-a-half years ago and the progress he made while charting the U.S. out of a confluence of crises — from restoring relationships abroad to curbing unauthorized border crossings and crime at home, while executing on a sweeping economic agenda.
Biden’s own speech — which was still undergoing revisions in the days leading up to the convention — will also feature that recitation of accomplishments that aides have often favorably compared to the legacy of former President Lyndon Johnson. Biden and his senior advisers have fixated on the finishing touches of his career in the weeks since dropping out of the race, viewing Harris’ run as a final critical chapter of Biden’s history — and one that hinges on beating Trump and becoming the nation’s first woman president.
To that end, Biden is expected to deliver a stark warning about the dangers of another Trump term to make a forceful case for his vice president, aides said, touting Harris as an indispensable governing partner more than ready to take over the Oval Office. Harris is expected to be in attendance for Biden’s speech.
“As he likes to say, it’s an inflection point — an inflection point for our country and for his presidency and his career,” said Ron Klain, a longtime Biden confidant and his former White House chief of staff. “He made a decision [to bow out], and now he has to make that decision successful.”
LBJ comparisons are rather over-the-top. Nothing in Biden’s tenure compared to the Great Society, much less the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; those measures radically reshaped the country.
But, yes, he inherited a country in an absolute mess—exacerbated by his opponent’s attempt to steal the election by violent means. While the COVID vaccines were ready a month before he took office, there’s simply no doubt that the roll-out was far, far smoother under Team Biden than it would have been under Trump. And he certainly passed some massive spending bills under difficult circumstances, given an opposition part that woudn’t concede even a single vote.
I’m honestly rather surprised that Biden is giving a major speech in prime time, given his recent track record. It would seem far better to have him in a luxury box being feted by party leaders for his great contributions to the nation, more akin to a Kennedy Center Honors than normal convention.
Silly speculation.
How about President Biden resigns the Office of the Presidency with his speech tonight? Make vice President Kamala Harris the incumbent. She would become USA Commander in Chief #47. Then when she wins in November she would be #48. A win in 2028 would make her #49!
Disclaimer: I do not claim to predict the future.
As I said crazy speculation.
(Might give Trump a stroke. Not that I would ever wish for such a thing.)
Joe’s bruised ego….still mad at Nancy Pelosi...blah blah blah. That’s Trumpian agitprop that assumes Biden is as emotionally stunted as Trump, and is attributed to unnamed “sources” – Politico’s bread and butter. I’m personally glad that Joe stepped down because it was good for the country. The job of president is too physically and mentally demanding for anyone in the Biden-Trump age cohort. Biden showed he is capable of surrounding himself with experienced and thoughtful advisors and making tough decisions – including this one. Trump has shown he has no self-awareness and cannot be counseled by anybody on any topic. Our “elite political reporters” refuse to let Biden exit the stage gracefully…they have to insinuate that he is as petulant as the malignant narcissist carrying the GOP banner.
Just Checking.
What is the over/under on whether Trump continues to predict that Biden will take the nomination back after he gives his valedictory tonight?
I’m reminded of a scene in Forward The Foundation, where Hari and Dors discuss the imperial ambitions of the Major of Wye. Hari doesn’t understand why someone so old as the Major is still trying to usurp the throne. Dors explains it’s largely habit. That is, he’s been at it so long, it’s become an integral part of his life, maybe of his identity. Consider how many times Biden attempted to win the Democratic nomination, and that he succeeded only very late in life.
Hari then asks whether the Major won’t be disappointed should he obtain the throne, and thus no longer have the game of maneuvering for power. Dors says something like “The he can start a new game: maneuvering to keep his power.”
In the US there are presidential term limits, but pretty much the first term is largely about winning reelection. Most get there by implementing policies that prove popular, and overall keeping the ship of state in a reasonable course. Biden was successful at both. Naturally he expected a second term.
I think he may have gotten it. But after the debate disaster, he faced an even greater difficulty on the road to a second term. The narrative in the media was not favorable to him to begin with, and it only got ten times worse after the debate. Pretty much anything he did was examined, or taken, for a sign of decline and/or unfitness.
@Joe:..Trump…
Well the convention runs four days so at least that long.
Trump is so *_____ that he might take this claim all the way to election day.
*In an effort to keep the conversation civil per OTB Policies I will let the reader fill in the blank.
But, yes, he inherited a country in an absolute mess
This is just flatly not true. In multiple ways, the country being handed off to the next President is in substantially worse shape than the one Trump turned over to Biden.
While the COVID vaccines were ready a month before he took office, there’s simply no doubt that the roll-out was far, far smoother under Team Biden than it would have been under Trump.
That opinion is utterly unsupported by any evidence. The fact that more people died with COVID under Biden with a vaccine than under Trump without one would seem to contradict it. Not to mention the way the Biden Administration handled the problems of inflation, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the supply chain crisis.
There are plenty of legit reasons to trash Trump. The compulsive need to pretend the Trump years were a unique shit show worse than what we’ve seen before or since is genuinely harmful to our political discourse.
@Charley in Cleveland:
No comment. Just felt it was worth reinforcing
@Charley in Cleveland:
This should be up on billboards in every city in the country. Especially those big electronic Times Square-type billboards.
@TheRyGuy:
Again, Trump only had 10 months of Covid, Biden has had 4 years–that alone makes a huge difference. Additionally Republicans and Trump supporters made *not taking the vaccine* a political matters. Getting themselves killed to own the libs is a heck of a flex:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189939229/covid-deaths-democrats-republicans-gap-study
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate
BTW, I will noted you skipped over James writing:
Little bit of tell there.
And again, yes the withdrawal from Afghanistan was not handled well, but who set up that poison pill (and timeline for Biden)? It was literally 7 months into the new presidency–one in which Trump didn’t cooperate with the transition of power. Which get’s back to the hand-off condition of the country.
Also, though it wasn’t directly his fault, the crime spike started under Trump in 2020, so that’s another tough hand-off for Biden. I also note that we haven’t been hearing much about that recently–in part because the Covid related spike continues to resolved itself.
And let’s not get into how Trump economic policies like tariffs also helped cause inflation. Though to be fair, Biden and Harris own the continuation of those tariffs.
I’m sure you will point out that currently illegal immigration is a much bigger problem. Remind me who explicitly scuttled a bipartisan bill because he wanted to run on the Border? Oh, that’s right, Trump.
@Charley in Cleveland:
The punditry has denigrated and smeared Joe Biden and peddled falsehoods about Joe Biden’s presidency all the way through, why stop now? Once the Very Serious Fools, dependable dupes for rightwing propaganda, settle on a fake narrative (i.e. Hillary is a unlikeable, corrupt harridan) they’ll cling to it like Linus to his blanket, and even work to make it true. These people sit under the tree of knowledge, yet nary a single fruit falls in their lap.
Biden has given energetic rally speeches since his awful debate. He’ll give another tonight. The Very Serious Fools will pretend to be shocked by it, and then pivot right back to their foolishness.
What matters is that Trump is unqualified for almost any job, and clearly unfit to be president.
@TheRyGuy:
MAGA’s patholgical lying in a desperate attempt to get Americans to forget the chaos of Drama Queen Donnie’s failed presidency is indeed harmful…to the Republican Party’s ability to win elections. Hence why they keep losing them.
Unfortunately for Republicans, not enough Americans have the desired amnesia. Riots, lockdowns, the Jan 6 terror attack, record deficits, record small business failure, forced birth judges, record job loss, bodies being stacked in freezer trucks, and corrosive hate speech flowing from the commander-in-chief won’t soon be forgotten or forgiven.
The real suspense is whether they can hold it all together. We should remember, Biden was forced out the same way he forced out the Ukrainian prosecutor, by the threat of withholding money. Then Kamala was coronated with nary a by your leave to most of the party leaders much less the rank and file.
And Harris just came out as highly interventionist of the German pattern of socialism, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis going after big corporations. But the big corporations are now in the Democrat camp.
I’m just saying that “this week” is the week where anyone who doesn’t like where the last month has taken the Democratic party would make their move. After Thursday, the only play is to not show up to vote if you aren’t cowed by the Party.
Fun times.
The Hollywood thriller version would be for Biden to use his speech to ask for the nomination and make a fight of it. Not gonna happen, but it would be the way to write the movie.
@Matt Bernius:
Indeed.
@JKB:
This is quite the forced comparison.
And the real argument that got Biden to step aside was about down-ballot races and the polling showing him on a trajectory to lose. It wasn’t the “threat of withholding money” in some crude sense.
@Matt Bernius:
Bad things happened, Americans were killed by IIRC an ISIS suicide bomber, outside any arrangements with the Taliban, and people died, largely in the first days chaos. But in the end we got our own people and a hundred thousand others out in a big, efficient airlift. The thousands waiting in orderly queues weren’t as photogenic as the few falling off airplanes on the first day.
Given circumstances, it came off better than could reasonably be expected. And we were finally out.
I doubt the emotion is anger and suspect it’s sadness or melancholy. It’s almost unavoidable when you face the fact that your work is done and death is right there in front of you. I would not presume to tell Joe Biden what to feel, but he should take some comfort from the strong likelihood that history will treat him very well. He saved the country when it needed saving. And he hopefully saved it again by stepping aside when it was time.
I wish we, as a culture, had a better way to deal with aging and death. There’s something immature in our denial and avoidance. Biden has had tragedy in his life, but his life and imminent death is not a tragedy. He mattered. The world changed for the better because of him. If you can look back at your life and say that, you had a very good life.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Funny, the donor money dried up, Biden drops out, the donor money starts to flow again. Much heralded if I remember.
But I did just hear a report that the convention is all for show as Harris was already nominated by the virtual vote a few weeks ago. So the roll call for the cameras is wagging the dog.
@TheRyGuy:
Inflation–largely caused by the supply chain mess and knock-on effects of the pandemic–has returned to near-normal levels (3%). Unemployment remains low and for much of Biden’s term has been at historic lows. And we’ve apparently managed to come out of the economic mess without tipping into recession, which is sort of astonishing. The stock market has touched record highs during Biden’s term.
Are people still hurting due to stubbornly high prices? Yes, but some of those are coming down now too.
It is intellectually dishonest to label this as “substantially worse shape.” As with everything, there’s room for improvement, but that will always be true.
And, the “more people died of covid under Biden”–it bears repeating: many of whom were people who refused to get vaccinated, any guesses as to who this affected?
@TheRyGuy:
It is flatly true that the country was a mess in January of 2021.
-In the middle of pandemic.
-As Matt notes, there was a failed insurrection and its aftermath.
-Unemployment had peaked at over 10% earlier in 2020, and was coming down but was at 6.7% in December of 2020.
-The economy contracted by -2.7% in 2020.
-2020 had seen protests over racial injustice in various cities.
-And the global economy was facing supply chain issues and global inflation was about to ramp up.
So, yeah, Biden inherited a mess.
Did we then have high inflation? Yes, but again it was a global phenomenon and the US weathered better than most.
Interest rates went up, yes, but see the inflation point above.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was a mess, but I would note that the Trump administration help set up part of that mess. And, more to the point, I think it was always going to be a mess and at least we are out.
Russia invaded Ukraine, but that’s not Biden’s fault (and I hardly see Trump as a deterrent against Putin).
And Hamas attacked Israel, creating a war. Likewise, a Trump administration would not have forestalled Hamas from acting.
So, while I would wish (I choose that word specifically) that inflation never went up, that interest rates remained low, and that Putin and Hamas had not acted as they did, it is hard to blame the Biden administration for these circumstances.
On balance, the administration did a good job taking over it the middle of a pandemic and then guiding the government and economy forward in, again, what was a global context.
@JKB:
Ever watch baseball? Ever watch a pitcher swapped out for a closer? Do you call that a coup?
It’s very reassuring that this is all you’ve got. Not even a nickname. Must be tough when you start to realize your führer is just a nasty old man talking nonsense through hish shlipping falsh teesh.
@Steven L. Taylor: All of which is to say that while the next president will inherit some real challenges (as is typically the case), I would much rather by taking the oath of office in 2025 than traveling back in time to 2021.
@JKB: I am not saying money was not under discussion. I am stating that your attempt to reduce it to money, and then to compare it to ousting a corrupt politician in Ukraine is absurd and lazy.
@JKB:
Ignorant MAGA wishcasting. Harris is now the only person qualified (by DNC rules) to be placed in nomination at the convention. Because no one else chose to immolate their future career by challenging while there was still time.
@JKB: Your framing is so, uh, odd. Biden announced he was dropping out, Harris spent the next day or two calling all the delegates, who, according to DNC rules, were not legally bound to vote for anyone in particular. They all pledged to vote for her, but they haven’t voted.
You use very odd words to describe this process. Words like “all for show”, as if that didn’t apply to the Republican convention. Or “coronated” or “cowed”. Like you imagine hypothetical Democrats who don’t like what happened, or don’t have their peace with it. I have seen no sign of it.
@JKB:
First, you might want to look up what that phrase means, but I don’t think it means what you think it means. Doing a thing in broad daylight is a weird way to distract people from the thing you are doing.
Second, the roll call has a feel-good, made-for-TV moment and has been since 1972. Or have you been watching all these years with bated breath thinking the results were going to possibly be different than what was expected?
@Jay L Gischer:
He’s not wrong. The DNC delegates voted virtually a couple of weeks ago to meet some state deadlines for ballot access. That was the plan when Biden was thought to be the nominee. The convention roll call will be ceremonial. It is already a done deal.
See: DNC chair says majority of delegates have voted to give Harris the Democratic nomination
And before our local sideshow participants bring the current song and dance number* here, I’ll point out that it is normal for the outgoing party standard bearer to depart the convention and not stick around for the new candidate’s acceptance speech. It’s about passing the torch.
* A bunch of empty vessels on X are suggesting Biden’s leaving after his speech is some kind of snub or evidence he “hates” Kamala, etc.
@JKB:
Keep coming with this kind of projection. You just have the sads that this week the Democrats will nominate a ticket that has both the party establishment and the rank & file really excited, while you have to continue spending every hour of every day coming up with lame rationales for why you are happy supporting a nominee who is a convicted felon, fraud, and bigot with dementia who has been an inevitability for the GOP since Trump refused to concede in January 2021.
Indeed. What is Zwangswirtschaft to you is Schadenfreude for me.
@TheRyGuy:
I see people who support Trump say this from time to time, but the never follow up on what those legitimate reasons are.
I am genuinely curious about what you or Jack , who has said similar things in the past, are referring to when you write that.
@Steven L. Taylor:
But isn’t that the case of all modern conventions when you get down to it?
@Steven L. Taylor:..Or have you been watching all these years with bated breath thinking the results were going to possibly be different than what was expected?..
I think that he is just sharp enough to actually believe Trump’s unhinged prediction that
President Biden will reclaim the Democratic nomination at the convention tonight.
@JKB:
Are you sure? Your dear leader said that Biden is going to take back the nomination at the convention, and he says that he knows people in the Democrat Party who tell him these things. He was right when he was saying that Biden would drop out, so maybe he’s right about this.
@Matt Bernius: That was my point to JKB. But it is also the case that this year’s DNC is truly for show. The actual process has already been done.
@JKB:
Depends on what movie you are writing.
At the moment, this movie is shaping up to have a key subplot wherein the sitting president heroically steps aside for a new generation and is lauded by history for helping forestall the disastrous return of Trump to the White House.
@Jen:
It might be normal, but it’s a little disappointing. I like Joe, and think Old Man Joe beaming with pride, congratulating Kamala after her acceptance speech would be lovely.
There’s a video of the handover at BidenHQ where Biden is on speaker phone (he had Covid, in case anyone forgot, as there was a lot going on), and there was a nice moment where he said something like “I love you kid, you’re gonna do great”, and it was kind of perfect.
Oh well, if the tradition is to leave, Biden will leave, because he does love tradition.
@Steven L. Taylor: having lived for over a decade in Japan, I often had to explain U.S. politics to my co-workers and one of the strangest thing to them was the political and budget cat fights right out in the open. In fact —and I was a part of quite a few of these negotiations—in the Japanese system all the planning and negotiation is done behind the scenes and quite often carried out by people not at the top. It’s only after everyone has put their two cents in and everyone’s issues are addressed that a decision is made and then allowed to become public.
I am going to continue to believe that while the pull out from Afghanistan was flawed, it was still much better than we should have expected. We should have left during Obama’s presidency after the surge failed. We should have left during the Trump presidency. We didnt leave because the military managed to convince people and no one wanted to be in charge when we left due the likely deaths and chaos while we left plus the chaos and deaths after we left. I think we had many fewer deaths than was expected. We actually left few behind and of those we left a lot of those have some responsibility for being left.
Steve
@TheRyGuy: “The fact that more people died with COVID under Biden with a vaccine than under Trump without one would seem to contradict it.”
I find it hilarious that you Trumpies think this is some kind of winning argument, when all it says is that you have no clue about how diseases are communicated and how epidemics work.
@JKB: “But I did just hear a report that the convention is all for show as Harris was already nominated by the virtual vote a few weeks ago.”
Oh my God!!! JKB has just discovered that a political convention is all for show!!!!! Now he’s ripped the lid off the entire thing!!!
Just wondering, JKB… what did you think four days of televised speechmaking was actually for?
@Steven L. Taylor: “Depends on what movie you are writing.”
Since JKB seems not to have read a single book published after 1923, I’m assuming the last “Hollywood movie” he saw was Blood and Sand.
@TheRyGuy: The fact that more people died with COVID under Biden with a vaccine than under Trump without one would seem to contradict it.
Virtually every model that was produced by epidemiologists predicted that there would be multiple spikes in Covid deaths. There ending up being three, with the two largest occurring after Trump left office. By the way, if Trump had acted responsibly during Covid IMO he would have won re-election rather handily. All his past idiocy would have been forgiven, the media would have trumpeted how he “grew” into the job, etc.
@Kathy:
Actually that was in Prelude to Foundation.
@Steven L. Taylor: The US has had two names that we referred to when it came to the peaceful transfer of power, of putting country above self: Cincinnatus and George Washington. I don’t think it would be wrong to add a 3rd at this point, Biden. Certainly not if Harris wins.
Did he immediately do the “right” thing? No, and I’m not convinced he couldn’t have won, and gone on to have a successful second term. But it’s easy to look back hundreds or thousands of years at people who have all their edges filed off.
@Matt Bernius: he tweets mean things. That’s the only objection I’ve ever heard Trump supporters say about him.
@Grumpy Realist: I was stationed in Japan in the 80s and on our joint base with the JASDF we would have coordinating meetings with our Japanese counterparts. And it was fascinating how differently Americans and Japanese approached meetings. Americans typically have the highest ranking person start and run the meeting. The subordinates are strictly in a supporting role and wait to respond, if needed. The Japanese would have the lowest ranking member start the discussions and you could see the discussion slowly go up the chain as consensus is built. It would conclude with the ranking Japanese gives his blessing to the consensus reached.
@Scott: I think that one of my main roles working in Japan was acting like the medieval fool who is the only one able to say the truth to the king. Sat in on many meetings where we really needed to solve a bunch of problems or plan things and everyone would be too terrified of loosing face to say anything. So I would put forth some suggestions: “what about….?” Which would quickly get jumped upon with relief.
(Heck, my background is in physics. If you’re working in STEM you have to quickly learn how to disentangle your feelings from your proposed theory and watch other people try to chew it up when you present it. If it’s a good theory it will survive. If it’s a crappy theory better get it blown up as quickly as possible.)
@Matt Bernius: You know what else is a tell?
Almost no one in media mentions that Russia spent the final 18 months of the Trump presidency–massing forces and logistics for their Ukraine incursion. Large scale invasions take a couple of years of prepositioning and stockpiling.
Has anyone even asked Trump to account for his role in watching it happen…and doing or saying NOTHING?
The media is indeed failing the American people.
@Jay L Gischer:
It’s lame concern trolling. They also said Hillary was “coronated.” In actuality, the supposed lousy candidate Hillary never lost a popular vote, including in the two contests she famously lost overal — the 2008 Democratic primary and the 2016 presidential general election.
Harris-Walz has been spared the traditional two-year election gauntlet. The full slate of benefits and/or drawbacks of this are as yet unknown. On the surface, it’s fair to look askance at the types of liberals who whined in the past about candidate coronations now shrugging off Democrats tossing out 14+ million primary votes to appease poll fetishists. But Joyner is right that such concerns pale in comparison to exponentially deeper concerns about Republicans renominating the unfit, unqualified thug Trump — that his electoral defeat is priority #1.
Republicans don’t care about “coronation,” they’re trying out new attack lines because they want that neofascist thug back in power. So Democrars are rightly refusing to address their phony concern trolling. Voters don’t care either.
Never Trump.
@DK:
Oh, come on. It doesn’t require poll fetishism to see Biden’s performances in the debate and the subsequent interview as alarming–electorally and governance-wise.
I feel the need to point out that Pelosi, et al. have access to a lot more polling data than the public does–more granular, and at regular intervals, so trends are easier to identify.
Even then, I wasn’t sure what was the best move for the party and country, but largely because I was concerned about the mechanics of choosing a replacement. If it was going to result in a bunch of in-fighting and backstabbing, then I thought staying the course was likely the better option, but it was hardly a slam dunk. And that’s only if Biden made the choice to step aside. He did.
All of those votes were for an 81 year old man who had a known running mate at the time. That
You may have an argument if it ended up being Whitmer or Newsom. But it did not.
The fact is, everyone who cast that vote knew there was a higher than normal chance that Harris would be President at some point, either on an acting basis or permanently.
Moreover, the GOP has zero room to criticize, because their primary voters chose an obese 78-year-old with zero clue as who would assume the Oval Office should Trump become incapacitated before January 2029.
In that sense, Democratic primary voters had far more information about potential mid-term succession than Republicans.
Not that it matters, but:
Officially, Obama beat Clinton in the popular vote in 2008. Yes, if you add Michigan (she was the only name on the ballot) and estimates of the caucus states, she got more votes.* But officially? No.
I preferred Obama in 2008, but would have happily voted for Clinton. I preferred Bernie in 2016, but happily voted for Clinton. I preferred several candidates over Biden in 2020, but happily voted for Joe. But in the latter case, I had real concern about what 2020 would look like. And I expressed that reservation.
@Kurtz:
I was not worried about a fight because I believed Biden, if he decided to step aside, would anoint Kamala. She had access to Biden’s campaign cash, and I assumed that would be decisive. I was never concerned about anyone else making a move.
The explosion of enthusiasm for Kamala and the very impressive poll shift, plus the volunteers signed up, plus the money she’s raised on her own, IMO, puts to rest any question that this was the right move.
The narrative had to be changed. Our nice old fart vs. their toxic old fart was never going to unleash a fraction of this level of enthusiasm. The race was baked. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Now they’re defending their old fart. We turned the story into future/hope vs. past/rage. That’s a strong story, better than, ‘I have done a good job as POTUS.’
I’ve only been surprised by the degree to which this move has succeeded. And I’ve been gratified if not surprised at Trump’s paralysis in response. Trump liked the narrative, we rewrote the narrative, and Trump’s impotent rage is the proof that we did the right thing.
@Kurtz:
To me it does. The performance that matters re: governance — or that should matter, if our politics were serious and not childish, silly, and stupid — is how one governs. To this very day, Biden continues to govern the country better than anyone in my lifetime. It is ageist and totally illogical to conclude signs of aging in a debate or in an interview means that an individual who continues to govern excellently can’t govern.
“Biden can’t govern.” Except he literally is governing, and doing so with above average competence.
But given our ageism and the unseriousness of our politics, I’ll grant that electoral-alarmism was warranted. Biden would have won, but that’s water under the bridge. Trump must lose.
@TheRyGuy:
Nice try, gaslight boy. Unfortunately for your cause, we not only remember those times, we took notes. Not that we’re likely to forget the bleach and UV light recommendations from the Disaster in Chief…
@Jen:
I’m doing this from memory but recently have seen something like 75% of those over 65 who died were Republican voters and were 5 times less likely to be vaccinated than their Democratic counterparts.