I feel for the guy. But I also can't help but feel that if he had announced after the '22 midterms "after an extremely productive legislative session, and an election where my party held up well, I feel it's time to step aside and allow a new generation to step in" he'd be going down as like, an American Cincinnatus.
This isn’t really on Biden, but the people around him. People who are sundowning often don’t have good insight into how bad it is. I feel bad for him too.
I think this is an underrated part of this whole thing. Biden has a very very tight circle of people who he trusts, and that circle is full of old people whose last grasp at true political influence was through Joe Biden. So it was just advantageous for them to keep plodding along and keep him in the race.
It's not just his old brain trust. I won't mention a name here, but there's someone I greatly respect, who is a journalist with a long track record as both an investigative journalist and a blogger with strong Dem connections and an orthodox Dem point of view. I will call him John Doe
And John Doe, even last night, remained resistant to any notion of changing Biden out. He acknowledged, barely, what everyone saw, but said don't worry, long campaign, debates don't matter anyway, etc. He had earlier reacted very negatively to Ezra Klein's suggestion that Biden should step aside. He makes all the same points- the President is always the nominee, when you primary or knock the President off the ticket you lose, etc.
There are plenty of John Does out there. A few of them finally woke up last night, but there's still plenty who haven't and are continuing the party line that this is no big deal, just a hiccup, everyone needs to calm down and stop giving Trump ammunition by focusing on this rather than Trump's lies, etc.
At the end of the day, the John Does are the problem. Not just Biden's tight circles. There's just a whole bunch of people in Democratic politics who have convinced themselves that chaos is bad and the establishment candidate needs to be backed and to face as little resistance as possible. They hated Bill Bradley for running against Gore. Despised Nader (of course). Decried Bernie Sanders. Were outraged at the story that Hillary cleared the field or her people stopped Biden from running. They are always there with a column or a comment that we all have to squelch our objections, that there's only one way to do things, and we must not have any chaos.
And these John Does have influence. They are in the media (as my John Doe is). They are strategists. They are pundits. They are advisors to politicians.
And if you are a John Doe, your outlook is to always rationalize the situation, blame the media if negativity gets featured (my John Doe does that all the time too), do some Poll Trutherism, and say that anyone who is pointing out that there are serious flaws or roadblocks must be deluded and needs to stop harming the effort.
In other words, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a rather foundational political text in party presidential politics.
In 2016, Bernie was paper, Clinton was scissors, and Trump was rock. Clinton was a bad bad match-up with Trump, and it had nothing to do with Bernie. The so-called "Bernie Bros" were never gonna vote for Hillary. She was a terrible candidate, and everyone but the Democratic Kool-Aid drinkers knew it.
Hillary was not a terrible candidate. She *won* the popular vote. A plurality of all the people in America preferred her over Trump. That she came up short in appealing to 80,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin whose voting priorities changed largely in response to the relative salience of culture war vs economic issues *does not* negate that victory. I will crucify myself on this cross.
Just say *you* don't like Hillary and let that be enough.
In 2016 the entire media landscape and party apparatus was against Trump and he won anyway. The prime decision maker in this situation was Biden. Once he decided to run, there were no good alternatives. You could run against Biden, but if you did so and lost (which was likely) then you've spent a lot of money and time for nothing. Everyone made logical and rational decisions after Biden made his call.
It's clear he made the wrong call. Maybe he did it because his advisors didn't advise well. Maybe he did it because he's a stubborn, proud, politician. Maybe he did it because he thought he was a better choice than Kamala Harris. At the end of the day: it doesn't matter. Biden doesn't listen to those John Does: he listens to his gut, his advisors, and his family.
I have to admit you are right, though I wish there was some way to get him off the ticket. I was a supporter of Dean Phillips and he was a reasonable good pol, but I think there is a groupthink phenom that you have to support the front runner. Where the GOP has elevated anarchy to a team sport, perhaps the Dems need a little more. Now, that might have been the problem in 2016, surely in 1968 when Dem divisiveness hurt, but this in 2020 should not have been an ideological issue, but just the ability to be honest, and see Biden's terrible poll numbers, and not try to sneak him through knowing that most voters, of both parties thought he was too old.
I thought Biden was a stronger candidate this time around than HRC was in 2016 but I was wrong.
The stay the course people defending Biden are right about one thing: right now none of the options look ‘better’ in the polls. Which is true, but Biden is losing! If Biden were winning like he was in 2020 then I wouldn’t budge at all. I was ok with Biden because he rose to the occasion, at least enough, in big moments to be fine. He had a good state of the union. He’s looked good in speeches, I figured he’d be fine in the debates and a fine performance is enough to beat Trump. But Biden wasn’t fine he was awful. Sure, another democrat starts in a similar place to Biden right now, but another democrat right now is way more likely to pivot and change the race than Biden. All Biden can do is not slip more, or hope Trump fucks it up. That isn’t a good bet anymore.
I dunno. The whole "but his people are egging him on to stay in" thing seems like a poor excuse. This isn't Weekend at Bernie's. Biden, old as he his, as agency. He is the President, for chrissakes. He has agency. Part of the job is listening to your advisors and, with all due respect, saying "no, for the good of the country, I am going to reject your advice and step down".
For sure. Biden is an adult, he can make his own decisions. But there's also a lot of good reporting that has shown the impact of his advisers on his decision making process. It would've been nice if they didn't put their professional interests ahead of the country's.
TBH, the utter mendacity of advisors who would cling to a ray of hope that Biden might win, under these circumstances, is one of the biggest indictments against Biden. *He picked these people*. Where I work (NVIDIA) we have the concept of Pilot In Command. That means the person most responsible takes.... responsibility. Delegating and blaming on your staff is the weakest of weak sauce arguments you can make.
Every leader creates the conditions under which her or his team will convey difficult truths. Biden has clearly fostered an environment where nobody will do so. It doesn’t matter whether Biden selected people who cannot assess the situation or ones who see it clearly but won’t tell him — it’s his fault.
Keep in mind that this is a person who spent eight years watching Obama regularly and systematically seek out contrary views, but he was often the “last one in the room” who delivered them.
And you don't think those old people know a lot of young, up-and-coming Washington staffers whom they can recommend to Biden? For all I know, the older you are, the more experienced you become at recognizing young talent and intelligence.
Biden justifiably believes he is up to the job of being President. I think he probably still is. Unfortunately, as Matt points out, the job of being a strong candidate is different, and he is clearly not up to performing that role.
I’m going to call out the ageism in your remark about “folks that age”. As an old person I can clearly see how bad it is. In terms of those surrounding Biden, blind loyalty or even opportunism isn’t an unusual characteristic in people of any age who either want to advance or extend their careers.
Edited accordingly. Apologies! The comment was about Biden specifically, not his staff/family, and was definitely a generalization. My mother is currently hyper aware of and frustrated by her lapsing memory.
It still grates to this day that the 2020 team strongly implied he only wanted one term, then turned around acted like those were just rumors. If they were really taking that seriously, and assuming Trump would still be a factor in 2024, I don’t see Harris getting chosen as VP.
It was very weird! I was always the one telling my friends, have you seen him actually give a speech? He’s still kind of got it! Don’t trust the videos… I got clowned very hard for that take and I was wrong.
The part that really confuses me is that I saw clips of him talking to a crowd after the debate and he was perfectly fine and plenty energetic! Which makes me think even if he himself might still "have" it, he's being prepped and advised horribly (which is the impression I've gotten from a lot of campaign decisions lately)
There is a huge difference between thinking on your feet (which was seen in the debate) and giving a rah rah speech to acolytes as you’ve done thousands of times in your 50+ year career.
People in their 80s are often cognitively fine at some times and foggier at other times. I’ve seen this firsthand with aging relatives. A presidential candidate unfortunately needs to be “on” close to 100% of the time. (Ironically, it’s probably less of an issue for governing, although it will become one as it gets worse.)
As with being ill, being elderly has its better days and its worse days. He really did give an acceptable State of the Union speech but clearly last night was not acceptable. Now we really know.
The problem with last night was, he couldn’t call in sick to the debate. He can do the job—I’m sure any President who’s ill can have a surrogate stand in for him in meetings—but can’t campaign with a cold. A younger candidate can sound a little hoarse and muscle through it, but someone Biden’s age needs to take the night off (which is not option for a high stakes debate).
I'm right there with you, Ben. I thought he looked mostly good at SOTU and genuinely thought that he would put the talk to rest last night. But that was obviously wrong
If he’s anything like my relatives, he might have good and bad days. You can catch him sounding quite sharp one day, or totally incoherent the next. And each side zeroes in on those instances that serve their purpose.
Some prominent ex-pols like Claire McCaskill are already doing that. I suspect that current officeholders are mostly expressing their concerns privately for now. (And even a number of those like Angie Craig and Ro Khanna pretty frankly acknowledged that the debate performance was really bad/concerning.)
They are likely doing this privately. Publicly, they wouldn't dare. And I think that's fine. They want him to leave with his dignity. However, in two weeks, this could change
- She's well below "replacement-level". She's unappealing to many people. Trump will clobber her.
- I don't see her winning an open vote at the convention. If these people are choosing between Josh Shapiro, Big Gretch, and Kamala, who exactly is voting for Kamala?
If Obama is going to be the heavy and tell Joe it's over, he should tell Kamala as well.
If you're in it to save democracy, save democracy. No half measures.
This is what I mean about wishcasting though. If you aren’t ready to accept Harris, then don’t assume that Obama has some magical power to orchestrate party nominations. The system doesn’t work like that. I would hope that the convention picks someone else, but realistically if it’s not Biden it will probably be Harris. So make sure to think about where you stand on that.
As a political outsider, to me the “hard problem” requiring high activation energy would be the convention nominating someone other than the incumbent president who won the primary race. Once you’ve crossed that hurdle, the act of picking whoever polls best as his replacement seems very marginal by comparison.
Why would this matter to anyone who doesn’t owe her some kind of personal fealty? The point is to beat Trump, not cater to Harris’ ego. This sounds like it would be a tough conversation for Biden personally, a blow to her and her personal staff, and totally irrelevant to literally everyone else.
It's not a marginal problem though to pick someone else. It would be easy enough for Biden to step down and let Harris virtually automatically take his place - that's literally her role as VP.
But trying to pick someone else introduces a whole new set of problems. First, there's no agreement on who else would be better, so right there you split and put the party at war with itself. And, it's bad enough having major party so visibly in disarray by sitting President step down. But also dumping the one who's officially next in line, wouldn't have the advantage of incumbency, and then following that up with a big public fight over who to pick instead is just not feasible. And the chaos might also embolden and encourage some states or lawsuits to start playing games with ballot access trying to block the late-picked replacement from the ballot, so then they might also have win in some places as a write-in. The sooner this idea is dropped the better. It's right up there with the idea of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin as a huge waste of time and distraction.
I disagree about the "chaos" mattering in and of itself--that seems like 24-hour news cycle stuff (does anyone really expect the Republicans to pay an electoral price for their ridiculous extended speakership debacle?)--but I think you make a lot of other very good points about non-Kamala candidates representing coordination problems. I can't speak to the ballot issues but if those are are substantial risks then yes, that certainly seems like a big deal.
(Personally I'd probably just use flat out polling to try to solve the coordination issues, if feasible. Try to precommit at the convention to whoever has the best chance in the general. But easier said than done.)
To be fair it isn't really clear how the "system" works in this situation. We already had a primary so it is just on Biden and the Democratic party to figure out their nominee(him or otherwise) and present a justification.
If democrats want people to line up and get excited about the nominee then having "elites" pick their favorite is probably not going to help with that goal.
I think they are *allowed* to pick for whoever if Biden drops out.
Her _profile_ --a prosecutor with immigrant parents -- was great. It's her positions and performance since that is the problem. She's been _part of_ the Warren Sanders Administration, not the opposition.
What about arguing that she should be disqualified on the grounds that she was part of the same administration and staff that covered up his true infirmity and did nothing to convince him to stand down?
This is *WHY* she'll be the nominee. Biden is not a fool. He knows that if he quits now, and is not replaced by his VP, it'll be open season on him and his administration. Him gracefully passing the batton to his chosen successor, is his one way to exert some control over the situation, and retain some sense of dignity
Read through your comment again. Biden *is* the nominee. He has the pledged delegates - the rules of the convention say no one can even challenge him until a second round that isn't going to happen. You need him to step away to kickstart the process of finding another candidate. The idea that you would need to attack Harris for standing by Biden, either because she covered up his infirmity or because the administration is too unpopular, is exactly why Biden is gonna want her to be his successor. He is not going to go along with a process where is cast as a failed president that his party had to run against to beat Trump.
Isn't Harris underrated at this point? People have written her off so much for so long now that it would only take replacement-level performance to generate positive surprise and good vibes. And her main task would be to attack Trump - she might even be good at that.
Yep. I think with little more than a month to go before the convention Biden really HAS to announce he's standing down from the re-election along with an explicit endorsement of Kamala. There is at least a reasonable democratic veneer to that decision...she did "win" a general election as the person second-in-line to the presidency.
An open convention in 2024 would feel both anarchic and undemocratic. What candidates would they be choosing from? Who are these delegates anyway? And even in a "best case" scenario where that process selects a Whittmer it's a lot to hope the party could rally around a relative unknown a mere 2 months before the election.
For those of us who want a Democratic president, it feels to me the best path is to hope Kamala surprises us. She's been in the White House for 4 years. She'd have her pick of competent Biden people. She's got an OK story on immigration. She's got a great story on abortion. She might be able to thread the needle and take credit for the good parts of the Biden administration (jobs, crime) while distancing herself from the bad (inflation).
I'm talking myself into her as I write this and will be watching what she does over the next few weeks to see how she behaves and whether there is any consolidation of a movement behind her.
I'm not sure they can do that - there are lots of ambitious people already in the race, and Kamala was not especially beloved here as AG among insiders.
Agreed. Harris isn't a magic bullet, but she would very likely be the choice. In the last 48hrs, I have gotten ok with that. She also has time to select a strong running mate from the bounty of talent out there. She would also have access to Biden's cash and advisors. Biden can't fight. Kamala can. It would seriously shake up the race AND the Trump team would struggle to pivot strategically
Jill Biden is the person who can tell Joe to drop out, not Obama, because Joe still feels some type of way about Obama (allegedly) telling him not to run behind the scenes in 2016.
I don't think this proves anything. Of course you have your partner's back in public right after they delivered a bad performance. What matters is what she will say in private.
Don't underestimate how much being contrasted with Trump would boost her favorability. It cannot be overstated: Trump is extremely unpopular, and also a pretty inept politician in many ways. If he'd been up against a vanilla democrat last night, the news cycle would be endlessly droning on about how bad Trump looked.
This is part of the reason people are talking so much about Biden right now. The narrative is very much "How awful do you have to be to lose so badly against THAT Trump performance?"
Maybe Matt has access to secret polling suggesting her numbers are a lot stronger than presumed? /s
If Kamala Harris is inevitably going to be the nominee—if Democrats simply cannot find a way to settle on someone who's likely to be a lot more competitive vis-a-vis Donald Trump—I'd personally be tempted to say the best path forward would be for Joe Biden to resign the presidency, and at least give Kamala Harris a few months to gain stature. Because yes, it appears terrifyingly likely that Trump would indeed "clobber her."
They are fake but it's also not clear which way they would shift once she became a candidate. "Generic Dem" isn't doing so badly in polling. She should find some staff who are better at their jobs than the ones she had in 2020 though
Right, how said transfer takes place probably has an effect. She maybe gets a narrow window to reintroduce herself, or the Democrats and Groups all jockey in a factional circular firing squad.
I was thinking maybe she’d be satisfied with being president for a few months and would realize that the moment demands a much stronger Trump opponent.
Seems logical to me that if one side can put forward a treasonous convicted felon, then the other can put forward the one capable person in this country who could immediately rescue us from this shitshow. Nominate Obama, fight it in the courts with some BS defense (which could drag out well past 2028), and hellishly campaign like it’s 2008 again. Pretty sure “Hope and Change” would sell right now. If Trump has taught us one thing, it’s that rules, norms, and precedents are meaningless.
No, it would not drag out well past 2028- it would be handled via an immediately issued injunction before being dismissed rapidly on preliminary motions. It wouldn't require oral arguments, it wouldn't take up any time in any appellate court, and SCOTUS would never bother with it. The constitution is not ambiguous on this point- Obama is constitutionally ineligible.
Ha! I've actually been thinking about that ever since I saw people claiming that the SCOTUS ruling that a federal statute was needed to enforce the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment meant that Trump could run for a third term since there's no enforcing statute for the 22nd Amendment.
I don’t think it’s too late for Kamala to reinvent herself politically. The whole Democratic Party was in a he throes of a woke/socialist haze during Trump’s presidency- she can still pivot to the center. She put criminals in prison for a living!
My too-hot-for-main take is Kamala Harris should do a big speech celebrating the progress of America on the issue of race. After all, she could be the second Black president in four tries! Marginal voters (old white people) would appreciate getting credit for their evolved opinions on racial issues, and it is in fact true that America is substantially less racist than it once was, and one of the most racially integrated and harmonious countries on Earth, and those are good things. Of course there would be acknowledgement of future challenges but she should strike an optimistic and patriotic tone. My friends think this is crazy because it could alienate core constituents but she’d be running against Trump after all- I think she could keep most of those votes and it really seems like Haley voters could be persuaded away from Trump.
An underrated risk of dropping Biden is that the party will select somebody so far to the left that 2024 becomes McGovern 2.0. Those with power — the actual delegates — are overrepresented by the progressive left.
The dump Biden discussion has fixated on picking the ideal replacement. But there is no mechanism to make that happen. The idea that the candidates to replace Biden will be limited to Harris and a few moderates like those you listed is a fantasy.
The rationale for Harris is that she could clear the field and avoid a free for all for the nomination. Because she’s VP, Biden would have endorsed her, and her demographics, the barriers to opposing her will be steep. If Biden drops out and doesn’t endorse Harris, chaos reigns. It’s possible that the convention picks a better candidate than Harris. But it’s just a likely they choose somebody worse. And, if I had the unilateral power to choose, I’d heavily weight people with substantial national campaign experience and who have been vetted for VP. Think of how many “looks good on paper” governors and senators have badly flamed out in presidential primaries.
The real choice is a) Biden runs, b) Biden runs and endorses Harris, who runs, and c) Biden runs and anything is possible ranging from nominating the perfect Trump-beater to somebody who shits the bed.
I say all this while thinking that Harris is incredibly weak. But in terms of the odds of beating Trump, I’d handicap it as
- Biden 15%
- Harris 40%
- Open the field 5% - 60%, depending on the candidate.
I still think this election is being driven by who people hate more, and to that end, I'd give Biden (even a substantially diminished Biden) much higher chances than that.
Watch her win an open vote at the convention, then.
I myself have no pony in this fight. Never voted for her, never been a gigantic fan. But she is the sitting vice president of the United States and the current nominee’s running mate.
She would win the nomination if Joe stepped aside, barring some scandal we don’t know about. If some do not understand this now, it’s because they do not want to understand it.
It’s so sad. The time to do this was after getting the Inflation Reduction Act through, which was an amazing triumph. He could have had a nice ceremony on the White House lawn, saying he defeated Trump, ended our forever wars, and righted the country’s direction to face some serious (but solvable!) problems and now he would step aside for 2024. And of course he couldn’t have known that then, but it would have freed him up to focus way more on some very serious foreign policy issues that were coming without having to worry about political considerations. When will, people learn from Ruth Bader Ginsberg- so much better to go out on top on your own terms.
Progressive lawyers have totally gone and made a cult hero out of her, just like RBG without the nickname and movie. She gets a ton of validation that she’s indispensable. Ugh.
My hot take is that Roe distorted this entire generation’s self conception. They thought of themselves as heroes valiantly defending it, and that led them to constantly making strategic errors that ultimately undermined both Roe and the party as a whole while maintaining themselves as the heroic centerpieces.
The more realistic version of this might just be that their relationship with Roe is emblematic of their broader failings but not a cause in and of itself.
I think it’s much more banal than this: it’s a lot more fun to be a current justice of the Supreme Court than a former justice of the Supreme Court. None of them wants to have the long quiet retirement out of the spotlight of Sandra Day O’Connor.
i'm sure i believe this because i am not the sort of person who becomes a SCOTUS justice anyway, but being an ex-justice seems like way more fun. be a pundit or a writer or go on the speech circuit and take vacations to the south of France. you can do basically anything you want. vs sit in office and achieve very little since your faction is in the minority and you are a replacement liberal?
What are you basing this on? A lot of SCOTUS Justices retire and ride off into the sunset and seem to engage in plenty of meaningful, fulfilling activities that seem highly rewarding. Do you have anything to point to that shows that they actually regretted retiring and wished they'd kept working until their deathbed days, or are you just assuming it based on the fact that the public is more interested in sitting Justices?
This feels like a miss from you. You were very supportive and it now looks like you were wrong.
"The campaign, though, did not take my advice" this isn't how I remember your advice.
" I think it was correct to withhold judgment until we saw the debate." I think this is overconfident. We knew he was weak and it turns out he was weaker than we thought. It's tempting to say "ex ante I was right" but it robs me of my learningns.
I think you were wronger than Ezra Klein and Nate Silver and it's probably valuable for you to yourself to do that update sooner rather than later.
If we're to take seriously the idea that Matt should use his fame and credibility in the Democratic party to try to convince Joe Biden to step aside, then this article isn't for you, it's for Biden and his close confidants, and saying, "I was wrong this guy was a bozo who should never have been allowed on the debate stage" doesn't seem to me like it's maximizing his persuasive power to that audience.
I think this is right. Matt is not-very-secretly one of the most influential pundits among Dem elites, who all made exactly the same judgement error Matt made. It makes way more sense to be "hey guys, I'm one of you, we really did what was best with the information available at the time but there's new information and it's time to change course."
This is one of the most frustrating things about Matt. You can never really be sure if he's doing genuinely reasonable think pieces, gaslighting political advocacy or a thing to convince a few particular people he know read him.
Why does it matter what his internal mindset is? I'm not friends with the guy, so I could care less about why he's writing what he writes. It's either persuasive, informative, and well written or it isn't.
As much as I'd like to have the ability to fully weigh Matt's arguments, the fact is that I don't do policy or political strategy analysis for living and therefore have to give his arguments a degree of credibility based on trusting him as an expert. Therefore, it *does* matter what his internal mindset is because his value to me is very much based on me trusting him.
Because I pay to read this and I'd rather not waste my time reading partisan drivel not to mention his standards for accepting facts and narratives don't seem entirely consistent across the different genres
Counterpoint: If anyone had seriously tried to get Biden replaced on the ticket without last night's demonstration of his ineptness, it would have been a death knell for the Democratic presidential campaign. It would simply not have mattered that other candidates would be better, there would have been too much doubt and speculation about behind-the-scenes power games and such. It just was not on the table.
Last night gives them the political cover and justification to push hard for it.
Yes, other commentators saw the reality of the situation more clearly than Matt, and he should own up to that. He was wrong about Biden’s fitness for office (or “fitness to run for office” as he likes to put it). Identifying one’s mistakes is an important part of not repeating them in future!
I'm ok with Matt not being contrarian enough while other notable contrarians played that role. The argument was that Biden was better than Harris or chaos which may well still be true. If you trust Nate Silver, he had the race informally at a toss up before he released his model in favor of Trump. In a 50/50 situation you go for low risk small wins to tilt things your way. Post debate Biden is a big enough underdog, long shot alternatives are now defensible.
Biden and his team should have seen this coming. Matt is probably fine for fearing Harris.
I think Democrat elites know more than you give credit for. That Democrats weren’t ever going to win with inflation, especially in swing states. That Trump only (in bidens words) legislation was a tax cut. That 2028 is the election that matters and they want a good chance at 8 years with a better chance of the house/senate vs the opposite with a good MAGA implementer and a trifecta. Thinking the long game, for selfish reasons, without anyone wanting the nominee.
If the Democratic party and its surrogates can mislead itself from its most trusted inside sources on basic facts like the ability of the president to handle a debate, until it blows up on TV, what else is it misleading itself on?
Matt, Klein, and Silver had similar assessments of Biden’s probability of winning, but differed in how they saw the risk of dumping him. Klein saw it as low, causing him to see supporting Biden as riskier than a change. Silver saw it as riskier, but was barely on the keep Biden side. Matt saw it as the riskiest, making supporting Biden as the best choice.
What changed is that Biden’s performance made it clear that his chance is lower than leaving it to the convention to pick somebody new.
Personally, I think that Klein radically discounts the risk of the convention nominating a super-progressive culture warrior who Trump would annihilate. I’m closer to Silver, but now also think that staying with Biden is pointless. Everybody is making honest judgments without very imperfect information. Instead of pushing people for their interpretation, how about celebrating them for changing their mind.
It’s probably harder for him to know than for anyone else. Especially when, almost Trump-like, everyone has been telling him that only he can save democracy.
I don't really blame Biden for thinking he's the best guy for the job, but people should ask themselves what else high-ranking Democrats close to the president are misleading or outright deceiving their party and media allies on for political purposes.
So, your position is that the patriotic thing for the office of the president to do, would be to out the leader of the free world as incompetent? You occasionally voice some of the oddest ideas....
"You shouldn't lie to the country about whether your preferred leader is unfit to do the job" is a pretty conventional idea, I don't think this is complicated. It's fascinating how terrified Republicans and Democrats are of drawn-out competitive primaries with their party's activists involved. But it doesn't negate my position. It's not patriotic to put an unfit man in a job requiring diligence and stamina during a 72 hour cuban missile crisis scenario.
Once the mainstream calls for his withdrawal start, it’ll be a torrent. I’m honestly relieved (as well as livid that it got this far - maybe the public didn’t have enough information to make a judgment, but the staff did).
This has been baffling me for months. What was happening in those conversations where no one could state the obvious? I mean, it's the most important job in the world and no one can say, "Guys, we have to take his keys."
Seeing all of Matt, Tom Friedman, and Nicholas Kristof all calling for a center-left Democratic presidential candidate to step down within the same 24 hour period is pretty shocking— but consequently, a lot more people are probably going to feel emboldened to speak up.
Krugman is also surprising because he’s straightforwardly a middle-of-the-party Democratic loyalist, but the moderates saying that Biden should resign is shocking to me in a way that say, the Current Affairs people posting the same thing is not precisely because he’s the moderates’ guy and has been for a long time.
This is certainly the optimistic take (unbelievably).
Slightly less optimistic take is that the Biden campaign realizes he needs to do tons of availabilities and interviews to put this to bed. And sinks or swims before the convention.
The least optimistic take is that they continue to do limited availability safe stuff hoping this blows over, then a similar performance happens again later, and it's too late
If I had to bet, I would say the least optimistic take is the most likely because it ultimately comes down to Biden and his campaign agreeing to step aside. They're the people who were most aware of Biden's deficiencies prior to entering the debate last night, and they're the ones who most doggedly insist that what we saw last night isn't disqualifying or a big deal.
What I think makes it even worse is that there will be a very public split of democrats who advocate for him to step aside and others who defend him on his record, so the party limps along with a weak candidate who refuses to recognize that he has no chance of winning.
What could anyone have done? It is not relevant whether the *staff* knows this. Unless *Joe Biden* acknowledges this reality, all of this other stuff is just fanfic.
I think we all need to stop pretending that we know what conversations anyone has had behind closed doors about this. But if you were one of Biden's aides, and tried to convince him to consider stepping down, and he refused to consider it, what are your choices? You could:
- commit political suicide, and probably also destroy the party's chances, by doing a tell all
- do your best to prep him and hope he is up to the task
I think we should also give the party credit for having this debate so early. Sure is starting to look like they needed to "prove" his fitness (or not) early on in order to make this conversation even possible.
Like many here I’m dismayed by the situation. Personally I feel that Biden was the best president the country had in decades, and Trump is a genuine threat to democracy. But I’d like to contribute with a point on another matter: our ability to assess truth in the age of polarization. For months now Biden showed on what— to me —were obvious signs of senility *repeatedly* on camera. The WH press office spinned this as “cheap fakes”. That they did so is fair enough. It’s their job. That most msm including NYT and AP and so-called “misinformation experts” bought it and promulgated the obvious lie is not. Anyone judging the videos (edited or “original”) could see Biden is showing his age in a bad way (as I pointed out here a couple of times in the past). Yet many here argued agaisnt the facts. How to explain the mass delusion? The apparent power of polarization to make people dismiss the manifest is terrifying.
We have normalized lying as a campaign tactic, to our detriment.
More worrying to me is how the media has abdicated their responsibility to hold power to account and pursue truth even in the face of difficult conclusions. They've been acting as campaign surrogates, careful not to push too hard on the President for fear of helping Trump.
Huh? The media has consistently run "Biden Is Too Old" takes for the better of the part of a year, maybe even the last 18 months. It's probably second biggest topic covered in the media-sphere next to AI.
Lying in campaign is probably inevitable to some extent. But I agree with you that the problem is when the media and some experts abdicate their role due to political bias. What is worse (?) is that many of them perhaps aren’t even fully aware that they’re doing it.
Agree 100%. It’s been so bizarre talking about this issue with family members — intelligent people who I greatly respect and whose values I largely share. They have consistently maintained that all evidence of Biden’s decline is fake news & genuinely believed that he was as sharp as ever, and have even been kind of upset with me for having a different opinion. (I haven’t spoken to them since last night’s debacle; I’ll be interested to see what they made of it.)
One very frustrating thing for me is that, when I say something like “I think Biden isn’t mentally fit to be president,” they apparently hear “I think Trump isn’t so bad,” when in fact these are entirely separate issues.
I think that they’re used to hearing this argument from people so consistently mendacious that they update their beliefs against anything those people say. Really dangerous dynamic.
Yes, I think that’s right — “if it’s on Fox News it can’t be true.” One big problem with that attitude — and I consciously try to keep this in mind when I encounter to my own betes noir — is that it gives your ideological enemies complete control over your empirical beliefs. Super dangerous, as you say
The misinformation/fact-checking industry is such a travesty. Falsehoods said by Biden get “partially true,” whereas true things said by Trump get “misleading” or “true, but needs CONTEXT.”
Trump lies all the time. You don’t need to exaggerate how much he lies!
Whether Biden should be replaced or not is a complex question (and certainly was so months ago) without an objective answer. What videos do or do not show is far less subjective , and the NYT ran a piece by its “misinformation” expert claiming confidently that it’s all bs, despite the fact that the very meager (highly curated) evidence they used to make their case was totally unconvincing. Hence they proved either unable or unwilling to assess basic facts. A huge failure on the “news” side of the paper which has been consistently weaker than the opinion section for a while now.
I have family in Pennsylvania. And there was a similar though less extreme phenomenon with Fetterman. It worked with Fetterman so I guess there was a possibility it would work with Biden.
I mean... they kind of are, though? Everyone is talking about how Trump lied, rambled, and was incoherent, and that this is why it was such a staggering failure that Biden *still* could not win this debate.
He absolutely should pardon his son -- after the election -- or strike a deal with Harris that he'll resign and give her a chance to run and then she'll do it after the election.
The only reason Hunter Biden is being prosecuted is because he's the President's son, and under a very arbitrarily and selectively enforced statute that has serious constitutional problems under the Second Amendment. That's not equal justice under the law; it's banana republic persecution.
If it has serious constitutional problems, and he thinks its a statue we shouldn't have, then repeal the statute. I'm sure Republicans would agree to this(in general)
If he thinks the law should stand, then it should stand.
I'm curious what serious constitutional issues you see with this? Its pretty settled that lying on a federal form such as this is a felony. Even if you don't think the question should be asked, the legal way to address that is to answer correctly and then when denied, to take that to court.
It impermissibly burdens exercise of a fundamental right, by conditioning the exercise of it on filling out a questionnaire about compliance with unrelated federal statutes. Imagine if exercise of the right to publish a newsletter was conditioned on filling out a federal form about whether you complied with unrelated federal statutes. The non-violent crime of using a controlled substance is not a permissible basis to strip a person of their fundamental right to keep and bear arms, as the Fifth Circuit has ruled, and following the same logic the Third Circuit has found that the non-violent crime of welfare fraud is not a permissible basis.
If Hunter Biden objected to exercising a fundamental right that was conditioned on filling out a questionnaire, then he could have sued for injunctive relief relief prior to filling out the form. If he objected to a particular question on the form, he could have completed the form accurately, and then sued when he was rejected due to his answer to that question. But there is no right to answer falsely on a federal form.
Quote from a recent judicial opinion by Judge Frank Easterbrook :
"Many decisions of the Supreme Court hold that false statements may be punished even when the government is not entitled to demand answers—when, for example, compelling a truthful statement would incriminate the speaker. The word "material" in § 922(a)(6) does not create a privilege to lie, when the answer is material to a statute, whether or not that statute has an independent constitutional problem."
I didn't say Hunter Biden did everything right; I said the statute has serious constitutional problems. I don't know if the statute would be facially unconstitutional, but it is most definitely unconstitutional as applied to millions of Americans, including most prominently the large number of people who have legally used marijuana and also purchased a gun. Marijuana is widely available legally under state law and is de facto legal under federal law when purchased legally under state law, so it's not a lie for those people to say on the form that they are not an illegal user of a controlled substance. Yet because marijuana remains nominally illegal everywhere under a dead-letter federal law that has sunk into desuetude through lack of enforcement, they nonetheless remain at least theoretically exposed to arbitrary and spurious prosecution under this law. That's an unconstitutional chilling and burdening of a fundamental right, not just in my opinion, but under a growing number of judicial opinions.
I think your conflating marijuana use with what Hunter was using which was cocaine. Use of that is legal in no jurisdiction in the US that I'm aware of.
I'm with you here. Gun control requires actually prosecuting violations of gun laws. I'm shocked by how many people ordinarily in favor of stricter gun control want to give Hunter Biden a pass for lying to buy a gun and possessing said gun while an extremely heavy user of crack cocaine.
"We don't need new gun control, we need to actually enforce the laws we have now" is a very common (and frankly, somewhat correct) argument by opponents of gun control. Joe pardoning Hunter will be Exhibit A for anyone making this argument for the next decade.
You can be for gun control and "enforcing the laws we have on the books" while also recognizing that *this* law is almost never enforced and it's only being enforced here because of who the perpetrator is. As I pointed out below, if you are smoking weed in a state where it is legal, you either have to lie on the 4473 form, or not get a gun.
I see claims that this law is rarely enforced, but I never see numbers.
I'm also curious about the difficulty of enforcement. It seems difficult to prove that someone is a drug user unless they do something like write an autobiography containing admissions to heavy drug use during the time they possessed a firearm.
Marijuana in a legal state and crack cocaine are very, very different things on several dimensions; I don't see a huge problem with making the former a lower priority than the latter.
There's a lot of daylight between "we should more aggressively pursue traffickers and straw-purchasers" and "the president's son lied on a form that likely a majority of gun purchasers also lie on; throw the book at him and prosecute this crime that is never ever prosecuted otherwise!"
And I think many don't understand the negative impact a pardon would have on the gun control debate: this will further crystallize the view that gun control proponents are fighting a culture war rather than sincerely trying to keep guns away from people who shouldn't have them.
I'm also surprised that Yglesias brought up a pardon and not commuting a prison sentence. Even if we accept for argument that Hunter's prosecution was politically motivated, Hunter absolutely did that shit. And I don't see the convictions as that big of a deal to Hunter; with or without them, Hunter isn't going to be practicing as a lawyer or sitting on corporate boards at this point. A lengthy prison sentence would be a big deal, however.
Joe should just wait. Hunter won't be sentenced until October/November; it's possible that he gets sentenced to house arrest or brief confinement in a camp (and he's unlikely to report to any confinement immediately). In that case, it's probably best to just let the punishment stand. If Hunter gets an unreasonable harsh sentence and Joe decides that he wants to do something, his aides can pull together a list of people who have also gotten unreasonable sentences for the same crimes and Joe can mass-commute all of their sentences to 12 months in minimum-security facilities or something.
You are completely correct morally, but if you really want him to step aside there's a realpolitik case to be made that Democrats should start acquiescing to the impeachment/Biden crime family push.
Sure, I'm not saying there is any "there" there. Just gaming out what might actually pressure Biden do resign if he can't be convinced to otherwise. Cornering him into pardoning his family might do it, not that applying that kind of pressure would be just or moral.
I don't actually think Harris is a competitive, "replacement level" candidate (neither is Gavin Newsom, really just avoid California). Biden needs to both drop out, and throw her under the bus. The point is to win and she is simply not electable, even if she's a moderately less terrible speaker than Joe is at this point.
Harris is a much better speaker and can hit Trump effectively just by being quicker and more coherent. Trump does not lack for weaknesses. Harris' best moments were at the hearings when she was in senate and that one debate attacking Biden.
She also can throw Biden under the bus for all the things people are unhappy with and take credit for all the things they like.
She cannot throw Biden under the bus. She has Biden's baggage and would also be identified with San Francisco and its perceived liberal overreach and out of control crime. She would be better than Biden, but Meg Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, or Gina Raimondo would be much stronger candidates.
i don't really think it's that hard for her to say "wow san francisco has gone downhill a lot since i stopped being top cop, we need someone to get smart on crime", though she probably isn't willing to say that
So her disastrous polling numbers are meaningless? I'm open to the case that they are, mind you. Maybe in a heads up race against Trump she'd rise to the occasion. And needless to say I like and admire VP Harris and feel she has what it takes to be an effective president. But Matt seems to be urging us to drop a competitive candidate who lost a debate for a much less competitive candidate who's displayed zero talent for national politics.
If Democrats are going to to do this, then do it right: either let her become POTUS now (so as to prove to voters she can do the job) or absolutely make sure the Chicago convention is a level playing field where non-delusional delegates can pick us a winner. Bowing out to give the nomination on a silver platter to a *weaker* candidate is lunacy in my view.
There are Democrats other than Kamala Harris who can "hit Trump effectively."
If Biden did decide to step aside, I think the odds that Harris will rise to the occasion, once she's the sole star in the limelight and not second fiddle, make that a much better bet than throwing it open to a chaotic and divisive free-for-all. And I agree that if Biden were to step aside he should do it by resigning as President so she can run as the incumbent with all the trappings that go with that.
Harris was in the winning lane (the not-Sanders lane) to get the 2020 nomination and quite possibly would be President now had Biden not cut in and bumped her out of contention.
Based only observing from afar, it seemed like Harris had a lot more energy and fun as a candidate -- which is infectious and a winning ingredient -- before it became pretty clear by the end of the summer of 2019 that she and everyone else in the race who were not-Biden and not-Sanders were basically relegated to going through the motions as also-rans. So I'm not convinced her performance after that point is really indicative of what she's capable of.
> Harris was in the winning lane (the not-Sanders lane) to get the 2020 nomination and quite possibly would be President now had Biden not cut in and bumped her out of contention.
She dropped out in early December 2019 before Iowa. Her polling numbers were pretty abysmal the entire campaign.
One big issue with these polls is that you are only looking at top choice, what you care about is approval voting (and net approval). No one loves Harris, but if she is the Democratic nominee I would expect her to easily consolidate a larger base than Biden.
If we are comparing Harris and Biden I think her poll numbers are not any worse than his.
If you want a different nominee fair enough, but they will have to "jump the line" over a Black Woman and no one really has a clear justification for doing so. Given we are past the primary no one other than Harris has a clear claim to be the Biden successor.
That's a subsection of the larger problem. Anyone other than her who jumps into this is risking his or her own political career on what is now looking like a long shot, last minute gambit. Who wants to be the failed savior that loses to Trump?
I've not been one to panic, but don't mind saying I agreed with MY but am now proven wrong. What a disaster.
Also maintains continuity of control over the U.S. military, federal law enforcement, etc. in connection with post-election stuff. (As I've noted before when arguing that Biden should run this year, if you are concerned about possible pro-Trump coup attempts, you want an incumbent President to minimize "confusion" about who is Commander-in-Chief on January 20, 2025.)
At baseline she is a vastly less electable figure than Joe Biden. She has to be not merely less bad a speaker than the president, she would have to be dramatically better in a way she's never shown to be capable of.
I agree that she hasn't demonstrated electability in any real way given her primary performance but on the specific issue of speaking clearly and attacking Trump energetically I think she has her strengths.
Sure, but given the existence of OTHER Democrats who can speak clearly (Beshear, Kelly, Whitmer, Shapiro, Brown, etc) doesn't it make sense to avoid a candidate with perilously weak approval numbers AND a close association to the current White House.
Democrats can't "ditch" Biden. He has to go willingly. But if he bows out, I really hope he simply releases his delegates, and solemnly tells his Vice President that, for the good of the country, he's going to stay neutral and let the delegates decide. Again, I like and admire the Vice President, and I'd be thrilled is she became the nominee AND went on to win this November. But she's not owed the nomination. The national interest has to come first. And my sense is there are stronger nominees available.
I wish there were evidence Kamala Harris is likely to perform more strongly against Trump than Biden is. But I think the evidence suggests the opposite.
If she becomes the candidate, she should demand 3 debates. She would destroy him. Former DA and a great speaker. Her poll numbers are simply evidence that she has been largely invisible for four years. Is she the one we want? No. Is she the one we need right now? Yes?
The problem is that any Democrat who is not Harris and could plausibly benefit from being a fresh face probably won't want to step up and run what is likely a losing campaign to Trump.
Because Trump is ahead, the new candidate would be undefined and could be defined negatively by Trump and Republicans, especially if they get tied to the current administration and voters' negative perceptions of Biden.
And some of the polling we have done at Blueprint finds that voters simply trust Trump more/prefer his approach on most issues, which makes this election an uphill battle for any Democrat. Now perhaps the fact that the generic ballot and Senate polling shows Democrats in a much stronger position than Biden is against Trump means that a new nominee could do much better. I think in expectation a new nominee would increase the chances of winning. But I think they'd still be the underdog, especially given the optics of switching candidates.
I think the optics of switching candidate went from "ugly" before last night to "good, actually" after it.
Before last night, there would have been lots of speculation about behind-the-scenes power grabs and such. After last night, it is obviously the smart move.
The most ruthless thing for Harris to do would be to run a campaign stressing she was in the room, was unable to do much as VP, and saw the mistakes made in real time and will make sure it doesn't happen again. This would be the pivot on the immigration, foreign policy, and economy issue. Even better, keep the details vague of how you'd do it differently, just stress you would.
The problem is there is basically no evidence in her political career that she would run such a ruthless campaign that upsets others in the party; just like Biden, she's more or less wherever the center of the party is.
Stepping down as president isn't neccesary, in my view. The message should be "I will stay in office to provide a steady hand working on pressing issues like Ukraine and Israel-Palestine while Kamala will be our nominee"
If you are the sort of person who runs for president you are the sort of person who thinks you can turn this situation around. Also if you lose to Harris in the not-a-primary, or even if you challenge Biden publicly but he stays in place, you get to be the person who would have won if only they'd listened.
This argument doesn’t really make sense to me— Biden has been polling very close to parity with Trump, and another moderate Democrat would have very similar issue positions but not have a distinctive personal disqualification which voters have consistently signaled that they care a lot about. Why would you expect say, Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro to lose?
I mean, I guess my fear is that if Biden drops out that the convention will come down to who WANTS it. Which is probably Gavin and Kamala. This only works if the party is willing to TELL someone that they're the person. Of the 5-6 people that person could be I don't actually imagine any of them ducking the chance to go after Trump and I'm actually mostly confident any of the Polis/Whitmer/Shapiro/etc group have better odds in the general than any of Biden/Kamala/Newsom. The party has to actually do some leadership on this not just line up behind whoever wants to say it's their turn.
Whitmer and Shapiro have better odds than Harris and Newsom who have better odds than Biden. But all of them would still likely be underdogs against Trump. Perhaps for Whitmer or Shapiro it's a 40% chance of beating Trump vs. 35% for Harris or Newsom and, say, 30% for Biden. That's still a deal I'm more than willing to take. But we should be realistic about the odds here.
It’s a question of whether democracy is at stake though. If the democrats in question really believe that Trump winning would be the end of democracy then there’s no point in not going for it. It sounds like you’re saying that many don’t.
I'm surprised you assess the odds that way given that Trump seems a fairly weak candidate and a new nominee (not Harris) would in theory be able to distance themselves from Biden's inflation issues.
Yes, but *he's* not popular. In fact, he's very unpopular despite having policies that are popular. That would seem to be the definition of a weak candidate.
edit - which may be your point. His policies are so popular they overcome him being unpopular, in a reverse of 2012 where I believe Romney had positive approval ratings, but his policies definitely did not.
Under the bus unless she wants to drive it, running as a anti-Sanders/Warren Democrat. The question is who can run that kind of campaign most effectively.
I’m glad we’re all here now, but it’s time to let go of the “stuttering” point. That spin has long since lived past its usefulness. We are not here and we did not reach here because of stuttering.
As a lifelong stutterer, I can assure you that the stutter isn't helping. Stressful situations exacerbate disfluency. But I take your point- all things equal, a 71-year old Biden would have handled this much better.
I’ve been there for months, but kept hearing “but Kamala…” and “but who else is there…”
That’s always been absurd. Harris would have lost an open primary to Kelly, Polis, Bashear, Whitmer…we have plenty of competent, normal democrats in the senate and governorships. Any of them are fine in a contest against Trump.
I have nothing against Biden. I have total contempt for the staff, family, and DNC leaders who followed the momentum or delusion this far.
I think the argument is that a significant minority of the Dem base is going to feel that's undemocratic and complain a ton. It also gives the Republicans an attack angle for the disaffected/low-information types- 'it's undemocratic to not have a primary, they rigged it and just chose Kamala, same thing as Hillary in 2016', etc. etc. Maybe 98% of Dems ultimately pull the lever for her. But these elections are decided on the margins
The point is that we did have one, the results appeared to be that the voters wanted Biden as the nominee. To now replace him would seem to subvert that.
If instead he had decided to be a 1 termer they could have had a real primary with all the decent candidates and we wouldn't have to guess who would be the best replacement.
'I have nothing against Biden. I have total contempt for the staff, family, and DNC leaders who followed the momentum or delusion this far.'
I literally don't understand this perspective. You're mad at some staffer or other who couldn't or didn't persuade the literal actual President to quit, but not at the President himself?
Do many people share this opinion that it's an easy task to get an incumbent president to decide to quit when he clearly doesn't want to, and that all was needed was a bit of effort and elbow grease? Because it seems mad to me.
People who are sundowning often aren’t aware of it. They don’t realize they told the same joke three times in one meal. Or that they’re meandering in conversation. Lack of insight is a symptom of cognitive decline.
I definitely don’t think the staff and Jill had an easy task at all. Nobody who’s had to pry the car keys away from an aging parent would think that. Still their responsibility.
Exactly! This whole time, I've been thinking about how our family just had to make that choice, because my dad was incapable of seeing it. We really cannot blame Biden.
I had to persuade my great-aunt to stop driving when she couldn't see over the steering wheel any more, I've experienced this. But one pretty obvious difference is my great-aunt couldn't fire me for suggesting it.
It’s because deep down everyone know Biden is not running the show, which is why he isn’t to blame. I had the same thought listening to the Politix podcast. Brian was going off about the bad advice Biden got, and it’s like this guy is the literal president. He is responsible for what he says and does. And clearly he is not competent to be president.
I could do some I told you so's about this, because unlike Matt I thought it obvious Biden couldn't campaign effectively and that's the reason they were hiding him (along with their campaign's wrongheaded notion that Trump was so obviously bad after 1/6 that the public would never vote for him again and the Biden campaign wouldn't really have to do anything). Seriously, nobody turns down a Super Bowl interview. That's so obvious.
But this is well written and hopefully joins a loud enough chorus to pressure Biden to do this, so I am just glad Matt wrote it.
Exactly. Also, even if he was secretly capable of campaigning effectively, he wasn’t doing it. The lack of interviews and press conferences is just embarrassing.
Totally off topic: I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but I really like and respect your comments and thinking (here and on Twitter) but often think of your contrarian views on the Amanda Knox case and I think it would be interesting if you wrote a longer post laying out your case and addressing some of the counter arguments.
Ms. Knox has a lot of fans and is also aware of me and sicced them on me once!
But to be brief, my biggest problem is really that people think there was no evidence at all of her guilt and her prosecution was somehow made up out of thin air and was some police vendetta against American exchange students or something.
There was, in short:
1. Evidence of her blood mixed with the blood of the victim at the crime scene.
2. Evidence of her DNA on the handle of a potential murder weapon with the victim's DNA on the blade.
3. Evidence that Kircher was killed by multiple attackers (thereby negating her favorite talking point- that they "got the murderer and he served prison and it wasn't Knox").
4. Evidence that she falsely told the police that someone broke into the apartment, when the break-in was in fact staged.
5. Evidence of an extensive clean-up of the crime scene, and evidence that she and her boyfriend had purchased cleaning fluids the morning after the murder and lied about it to police.
6. She turned off her cellphone the night of the murder (a la Jodi Arias) and turned it back on the next morning, the only time she ever did that in Italy.
7. Her false accusation of her former friend Patrick Lamumba of being involved in the murder, which resulted in him spending a week in jail and Knox making no attempt to get him out until the police determined on their own he had an alibi. She even admitted she was the reason he was in jail.
8. Her admission to the police that she was at the crime scene the night of the murder.
9. Incriminating statements by her boyfriend to the police (this is important because she claims that her own statements were coerced by the police, a claim that even courts sympathetic to her have repeatedly rejected, but nobody claims his statements about her were coerced).
10. Evidence she knew Rudy Guede, the person who nobody doubts was involved.
There's also a lot of suggestive evidence such as evidence she had a bad relationship with Kircher and her demeanor at the crime scene when the police were called the day after the murder.
The point is, the police collected a lot of evidence against her, and that's why they charged her and her boyfriend with murder. You can make perfectly sound arguments that she wasn't proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but that wouldn't get her a career as a podcaster and media celebrity-- she needs to be actually innocent with no evidence of her guilt. So she has a ton of people going around convinced by her that there was not a shred of evidence that implicated her and that she was just an innocent girl who got caught up in a foreign judicial system she didn't understand by anti-American cops and prosecutors who exploited her linguistic difficulties. And THAT narrative- the one that really sustains her career as an innocence advocate is, as our President might say, malarkey. Doesn't mean the Italians proved her guilt-- although several courts over there found this to be sufficient evidence of murder, you could see a case like this leading to an acquittal in the US on reasonable doubt grounds. But there's plenty of evidence she was involved somehow or at least knows a lot more about what really happened. And for her to have all these fans in America who buy her version of this and think there wasn't a shred of evidence against her at all is perverse.
It's not at all obvious to me that it would have been better if Biden had dropped out of the race a year ago. Primaries are bruising and could have resulted in an unelectable "progressive" being elected. There may now be an opportunity for the party to choose an electable candidate, and to do so without a bruising primary.
Letting the party be paralyzed in fear of "bruising" is what GOT us here. We stagnated and let problems fester instead of airing them out and starting the process of memory-holing the worst parts. [Ed: Say what you want about the GOP, at least they are locked in a constant deathly power struggle with each other and they all understand that as the table stakes of the game -- and it allows their memory hole to work so damned well.]
Also, with Warren and Bernie aged out, it's "not at all obvious" that there even WOULD have been the same sort of lefty policy one-upsmanship that happened in 2020. I mean, think about the likeliest frontrunners: Harris, Buttigeig, Whitmer, Shapiro. Literally all centrists!
Harris might have run left and/or tried to use her identity as a cudgel, but doing so would have made her LESS viable to win the critical Black vote in South Carolina [ed: which Biden's 2020 run taught the party mainstream to understand as the final say on whether the party's Black base actually agreed with any particular claim being made RE race/identity].
One of the 2020 lefties might have rerun out of spite, like Castro, but the 2024 primary debate stage would have been 4 centrists teeing off against 1-2 lefties, not the 10v10 scrimmage we had last time. And they'd have a winning-ass argument: "Look at the four years we just had. Despite the inflation, Joe Biden got a lot of shit done by governing as a moderate. And the American people demonstrated right now that they don't want Democrats going on a drunken spending spree, they want someone who can save us from Donald Trump's insane plans."
I'm praying along with you that we don't have a "bruising primary" here, but the worst-case is that a contested convention incentivizes all the players to unleash their most brutal knockout blows. The MOST dangerous thing would be if Harris' ego gets the better of her and the wrong people get into her ears, goading her into a scorched-earth dead-ender campaign of alleging that anything short of a nomination for her would be a crime against Black women.
Yes I am anxiously on board with this take! After burying my head in the rug for a while last night I feel weirdly relieved and optimistic about this opportunity.
This sucks. I honestly expected better from Biden. People were claiming Biden seemed old, even senile, based on clips deceptively edited by people who were incentivized to deceptively edit them. But the debate showed me that he isn't sharp. I don't think he's senile, but responding quickly and well is part of the job and he did not do that.
Like many, I now wished he had dropped out earlier. Would make things much easier. But as the expression goes: the best time to do it would be a year ago. The second best time is now.
>> People were claiming Biden seemed old, even senile, based on clips deceptively edited
What are your grounds for that? Specifically, yes, the clips were edited, but “deceptively”? I.e. did you watch the originals and were honestly convinced “nothing to see here”?
They were deceptive in terms of being cherry picked, especially early on. It isn't that slip ups didn't happen, they just didn't happen all that much and not in ways that you would think undercut the point of what he was saying if you saw the longer version of the clip. He was still very sharp in 2020 but many people's perception of him were that he couldn't string two words together.
The problem is that what you describe as “cherry picking” is recognizable to people who’ve had elderly family members in decline as “good days and bad days.” In many families you see the same dynamic, where those in denial point to the good days. But the bad days just keep getting more common.
I agree. There is also the cannibal reference. That was so incredibly over the top (as in, no one who is president should make such a bizarre statement). Also, if someone is going to follow this up with something about Trump making bizarre statements, I concede this in advance.... he is odd and not ethical enough to be president. That still does not excuse blaming cannibals for your uncle's disappearance.
In 2020 he was in a much better state. These past few months though? I wouldn’t say the evidence is that he is totally gaga. Far from it! But it *did* show repeated moments of visible confusion and him falling asleep repeatedly under the public gaze. In other words, showing his age to the point that it clearly detracts to * a certain extent* from his ability to do his job. Should that disqualify him? No! Especially not given the alternative.
BUT my point is that the media did not express a nuanced view. It claimed that there is nothing to see here and that all those clips are total bs *purely* down to deceptive editing. It is this fact that the so called misinformation debunker have *themselves* spread misinformation that concerns me here. For me , at least, it goes without saying the Biden was, and remains, and infinitely preferable candidate to Trump. But I’m making a point here about another issue- the media and indeed epistemic environment in which we now live.
This may just be a difference in media we consume. I mostly consume NYT and other newspapers, where I felt like they were over reporting on Biden being old and I hadn't seen any articles denying that. I don't watch TV news but got the impression from my YouTube suggestions that that coverage was much the same. I've generally had the impression that "the media" didn't want Biden to be the nominee, but that may just be the stuff I read.
Republican influencers have been deceptively editing clips to make Biden look senile for 5 years now. One the main reasons he won in 2020 was because Republicans painted him as someone who could barely speak without drooling and he easily surpassed their expectations during the 2020 debates.
I feel for the guy. But I also can't help but feel that if he had announced after the '22 midterms "after an extremely productive legislative session, and an election where my party held up well, I feel it's time to step aside and allow a new generation to step in" he'd be going down as like, an American Cincinnatus.
Just not a great day.
Alas.
This isn’t really on Biden, but the people around him. People who are sundowning often don’t have good insight into how bad it is. I feel bad for him too.
I think this is an underrated part of this whole thing. Biden has a very very tight circle of people who he trusts, and that circle is full of old people whose last grasp at true political influence was through Joe Biden. So it was just advantageous for them to keep plodding along and keep him in the race.
It's not just his old brain trust. I won't mention a name here, but there's someone I greatly respect, who is a journalist with a long track record as both an investigative journalist and a blogger with strong Dem connections and an orthodox Dem point of view. I will call him John Doe
And John Doe, even last night, remained resistant to any notion of changing Biden out. He acknowledged, barely, what everyone saw, but said don't worry, long campaign, debates don't matter anyway, etc. He had earlier reacted very negatively to Ezra Klein's suggestion that Biden should step aside. He makes all the same points- the President is always the nominee, when you primary or knock the President off the ticket you lose, etc.
There are plenty of John Does out there. A few of them finally woke up last night, but there's still plenty who haven't and are continuing the party line that this is no big deal, just a hiccup, everyone needs to calm down and stop giving Trump ammunition by focusing on this rather than Trump's lies, etc.
At the end of the day, the John Does are the problem. Not just Biden's tight circles. There's just a whole bunch of people in Democratic politics who have convinced themselves that chaos is bad and the establishment candidate needs to be backed and to face as little resistance as possible. They hated Bill Bradley for running against Gore. Despised Nader (of course). Decried Bernie Sanders. Were outraged at the story that Hillary cleared the field or her people stopped Biden from running. They are always there with a column or a comment that we all have to squelch our objections, that there's only one way to do things, and we must not have any chaos.
And these John Does have influence. They are in the media (as my John Doe is). They are strategists. They are pundits. They are advisors to politicians.
And if you are a John Doe, your outlook is to always rationalize the situation, blame the media if negativity gets featured (my John Doe does that all the time too), do some Poll Trutherism, and say that anyone who is pointing out that there are serious flaws or roadblocks must be deluded and needs to stop harming the effort.
In other words, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a rather foundational political text in party presidential politics.
Real talk, if Bernie doesn't run, HRC probably wins in 2016
Berners are out parroting lies about the DNC rigging elections again after this debate. They loathe democracy.
My RFK Jr. friend says this exact same thing. Socialism is not popular! It's not a giant conspiracy.
In 2016, Bernie was paper, Clinton was scissors, and Trump was rock. Clinton was a bad bad match-up with Trump, and it had nothing to do with Bernie. The so-called "Bernie Bros" were never gonna vote for Hillary. She was a terrible candidate, and everyone but the Democratic Kool-Aid drinkers knew it.
Hillary was not a terrible candidate. She *won* the popular vote. A plurality of all the people in America preferred her over Trump. That she came up short in appealing to 80,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin whose voting priorities changed largely in response to the relative salience of culture war vs economic issues *does not* negate that victory. I will crucify myself on this cross.
Just say *you* don't like Hillary and let that be enough.
In 2016 the entire media landscape and party apparatus was against Trump and he won anyway. The prime decision maker in this situation was Biden. Once he decided to run, there were no good alternatives. You could run against Biden, but if you did so and lost (which was likely) then you've spent a lot of money and time for nothing. Everyone made logical and rational decisions after Biden made his call.
It's clear he made the wrong call. Maybe he did it because his advisors didn't advise well. Maybe he did it because he's a stubborn, proud, politician. Maybe he did it because he thought he was a better choice than Kamala Harris. At the end of the day: it doesn't matter. Biden doesn't listen to those John Does: he listens to his gut, his advisors, and his family.
I have to admit you are right, though I wish there was some way to get him off the ticket. I was a supporter of Dean Phillips and he was a reasonable good pol, but I think there is a groupthink phenom that you have to support the front runner. Where the GOP has elevated anarchy to a team sport, perhaps the Dems need a little more. Now, that might have been the problem in 2016, surely in 1968 when Dem divisiveness hurt, but this in 2020 should not have been an ideological issue, but just the ability to be honest, and see Biden's terrible poll numbers, and not try to sneak him through knowing that most voters, of both parties thought he was too old.
Loyalty sometimes advances stupidity.
Similar group think aided HRC in 2016
I thought Biden was a stronger candidate this time around than HRC was in 2016 but I was wrong.
The stay the course people defending Biden are right about one thing: right now none of the options look ‘better’ in the polls. Which is true, but Biden is losing! If Biden were winning like he was in 2020 then I wouldn’t budge at all. I was ok with Biden because he rose to the occasion, at least enough, in big moments to be fine. He had a good state of the union. He’s looked good in speeches, I figured he’d be fine in the debates and a fine performance is enough to beat Trump. But Biden wasn’t fine he was awful. Sure, another democrat starts in a similar place to Biden right now, but another democrat right now is way more likely to pivot and change the race than Biden. All Biden can do is not slip more, or hope Trump fucks it up. That isn’t a good bet anymore.
I dunno. The whole "but his people are egging him on to stay in" thing seems like a poor excuse. This isn't Weekend at Bernie's. Biden, old as he his, as agency. He is the President, for chrissakes. He has agency. Part of the job is listening to your advisors and, with all due respect, saying "no, for the good of the country, I am going to reject your advice and step down".
For sure. Biden is an adult, he can make his own decisions. But there's also a lot of good reporting that has shown the impact of his advisers on his decision making process. It would've been nice if they didn't put their professional interests ahead of the country's.
TBH, the utter mendacity of advisors who would cling to a ray of hope that Biden might win, under these circumstances, is one of the biggest indictments against Biden. *He picked these people*. Where I work (NVIDIA) we have the concept of Pilot In Command. That means the person most responsible takes.... responsibility. Delegating and blaming on your staff is the weakest of weak sauce arguments you can make.
Fuck. I need a drink
Basically, the “Feinstein staff” problem.
Every leader creates the conditions under which her or his team will convey difficult truths. Biden has clearly fostered an environment where nobody will do so. It doesn’t matter whether Biden selected people who cannot assess the situation or ones who see it clearly but won’t tell him — it’s his fault.
Keep in mind that this is a person who spent eight years watching Obama regularly and systematically seek out contrary views, but he was often the “last one in the room” who delivered them.
And you don't think those old people know a lot of young, up-and-coming Washington staffers whom they can recommend to Biden? For all I know, the older you are, the more experienced you become at recognizing young talent and intelligence.
Biden justifiably believes he is up to the job of being President. I think he probably still is. Unfortunately, as Matt points out, the job of being a strong candidate is different, and he is clearly not up to performing that role.
https://x.com/AlexThomp/status/1806580390573818073
Oh God. I physically cringed. Why is she talking to him like a toddler?
I’m going to call out the ageism in your remark about “folks that age”. As an old person I can clearly see how bad it is. In terms of those surrounding Biden, blind loyalty or even opportunism isn’t an unusual characteristic in people of any age who either want to advance or extend their careers.
Ageism is a fine heuristic. How many 4 year olds would you want to be president?
Edited accordingly. Apologies! The comment was about Biden specifically, not his staff/family, and was definitely a generalization. My mother is currently hyper aware of and frustrated by her lapsing memory.
Kamala covering for this is frankly disqualifying for her as well.
What was she supposed to do last night, throw him under the bus?
Its not last night, its the last year that is more concerning.
Sundowning. This sounds totally correct, having watched my mother-in-law deal with this at the exact same age. What a shame
It still grates to this day that the 2020 team strongly implied he only wanted one term, then turned around acted like those were just rumors. If they were really taking that seriously, and assuming Trump would still be a factor in 2024, I don’t see Harris getting chosen as VP.
Yeah, like, obviously his team has been running interference. I'm a fan of the guy, and I had no idea he was that bad on stage.
It was very weird! I was always the one telling my friends, have you seen him actually give a speech? He’s still kind of got it! Don’t trust the videos… I got clowned very hard for that take and I was wrong.
The part that really confuses me is that I saw clips of him talking to a crowd after the debate and he was perfectly fine and plenty energetic! Which makes me think even if he himself might still "have" it, he's being prepped and advised horribly (which is the impression I've gotten from a lot of campaign decisions lately)
There is a huge difference between thinking on your feet (which was seen in the debate) and giving a rah rah speech to acolytes as you’ve done thousands of times in your 50+ year career.
People in their 80s are often cognitively fine at some times and foggier at other times. I’ve seen this firsthand with aging relatives. A presidential candidate unfortunately needs to be “on” close to 100% of the time. (Ironically, it’s probably less of an issue for governing, although it will become one as it gets worse.)
As with being ill, being elderly has its better days and its worse days. He really did give an acceptable State of the Union speech but clearly last night was not acceptable. Now we really know.
The problem with last night was, he couldn’t call in sick to the debate. He can do the job—I’m sure any President who’s ill can have a surrogate stand in for him in meetings—but can’t campaign with a cold. A younger candidate can sound a little hoarse and muscle through it, but someone Biden’s age needs to take the night off (which is not option for a high stakes debate).
I'm right there with you, Ben. I thought he looked mostly good at SOTU and genuinely thought that he would put the talk to rest last night. But that was obviously wrong
If he’s anything like my relatives, he might have good and bad days. You can catch him sounding quite sharp one day, or totally incoherent the next. And each side zeroes in on those instances that serve their purpose.
When are Democratic senators and governors going to go on TV and demand Biden step aside?
Some prominent ex-pols like Claire McCaskill are already doing that. I suspect that current officeholders are mostly expressing their concerns privately for now. (And even a number of those like Angie Craig and Ro Khanna pretty frankly acknowledged that the debate performance was really bad/concerning.)
They are likely doing this privately. Publicly, they wouldn't dare. And I think that's fine. They want him to leave with his dignity. However, in two weeks, this could change
If it happens, sure. But will it?
Matt is misjudging Kamala in two important ways:
- She's well below "replacement-level". She's unappealing to many people. Trump will clobber her.
- I don't see her winning an open vote at the convention. If these people are choosing between Josh Shapiro, Big Gretch, and Kamala, who exactly is voting for Kamala?
If Obama is going to be the heavy and tell Joe it's over, he should tell Kamala as well.
If you're in it to save democracy, save democracy. No half measures.
This is what I mean about wishcasting though. If you aren’t ready to accept Harris, then don’t assume that Obama has some magical power to orchestrate party nominations. The system doesn’t work like that. I would hope that the convention picks someone else, but realistically if it’s not Biden it will probably be Harris. So make sure to think about where you stand on that.
As a political outsider, to me the “hard problem” requiring high activation energy would be the convention nominating someone other than the incumbent president who won the primary race. Once you’ve crossed that hurdle, the act of picking whoever polls best as his replacement seems very marginal by comparison.
Not to her! Him saying “the person who becomes president if I die shouldn’t be the nominee to replace me” could be the end of her political career.
Why would this matter to anyone who doesn’t owe her some kind of personal fealty? The point is to beat Trump, not cater to Harris’ ego. This sounds like it would be a tough conversation for Biden personally, a blow to her and her personal staff, and totally irrelevant to literally everyone else.
Exactly. People who can’t steel themselves to say or hear that news don’t belong in positions of national leadership anyway.
It would not be irrelevant to thousands of African Americans in the Biden coalition that are absolutely needed to win the election.
It's not a marginal problem though to pick someone else. It would be easy enough for Biden to step down and let Harris virtually automatically take his place - that's literally her role as VP.
But trying to pick someone else introduces a whole new set of problems. First, there's no agreement on who else would be better, so right there you split and put the party at war with itself. And, it's bad enough having major party so visibly in disarray by sitting President step down. But also dumping the one who's officially next in line, wouldn't have the advantage of incumbency, and then following that up with a big public fight over who to pick instead is just not feasible. And the chaos might also embolden and encourage some states or lawsuits to start playing games with ballot access trying to block the late-picked replacement from the ballot, so then they might also have win in some places as a write-in. The sooner this idea is dropped the better. It's right up there with the idea of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin as a huge waste of time and distraction.
I disagree about the "chaos" mattering in and of itself--that seems like 24-hour news cycle stuff (does anyone really expect the Republicans to pay an electoral price for their ridiculous extended speakership debacle?)--but I think you make a lot of other very good points about non-Kamala candidates representing coordination problems. I can't speak to the ballot issues but if those are are substantial risks then yes, that certainly seems like a big deal.
(Personally I'd probably just use flat out polling to try to solve the coordination issues, if feasible. Try to precommit at the convention to whoever has the best chance in the general. But easier said than done.)
Especially if Biden himself endorsed that person
To be fair it isn't really clear how the "system" works in this situation. We already had a primary so it is just on Biden and the Democratic party to figure out their nominee(him or otherwise) and present a justification.
Can’t the delegates just vote however they like?
If democrats want people to line up and get excited about the nominee then having "elites" pick their favorite is probably not going to help with that goal.
I think they are *allowed* to pick for whoever if Biden drops out.
If Biden bows out, yup pretty much.
This is not wishcasting.
It's asking the question: When it comes down to it, how many Kamala-stans are there? Enough to win a vote at the convention?
I understand that people like her profile, but the party wants to win.
The party is in a near-death position at the moment, and that creates a moment of clarity.
This moment is most similar when the party fell into line behind Biden to stop Bernie from winning.
Her _profile_ --a prosecutor with immigrant parents -- was great. It's her positions and performance since that is the problem. She's been _part of_ the Warren Sanders Administration, not the opposition.
You don't have to be a "stan" to vote for her. Ultimately it's the contrast with the orange opponent
What about arguing that she should be disqualified on the grounds that she was part of the same administration and staff that covered up his true infirmity and did nothing to convince him to stand down?
This is *WHY* she'll be the nominee. Biden is not a fool. He knows that if he quits now, and is not replaced by his VP, it'll be open season on him and his administration. Him gracefully passing the batton to his chosen successor, is his one way to exert some control over the situation, and retain some sense of dignity
That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Read through your comment again. Biden *is* the nominee. He has the pledged delegates - the rules of the convention say no one can even challenge him until a second round that isn't going to happen. You need him to step away to kickstart the process of finding another candidate. The idea that you would need to attack Harris for standing by Biden, either because she covered up his infirmity or because the administration is too unpopular, is exactly why Biden is gonna want her to be his successor. He is not going to go along with a process where is cast as a failed president that his party had to run against to beat Trump.
I think you're being too clever by half here. People make really unpredictable decisions in situations like this.
Nope!
Isn't Harris underrated at this point? People have written her off so much for so long now that it would only take replacement-level performance to generate positive surprise and good vibes. And her main task would be to attack Trump - she might even be good at that.
Yep. I think with little more than a month to go before the convention Biden really HAS to announce he's standing down from the re-election along with an explicit endorsement of Kamala. There is at least a reasonable democratic veneer to that decision...she did "win" a general election as the person second-in-line to the presidency.
An open convention in 2024 would feel both anarchic and undemocratic. What candidates would they be choosing from? Who are these delegates anyway? And even in a "best case" scenario where that process selects a Whittmer it's a lot to hope the party could rally around a relative unknown a mere 2 months before the election.
For those of us who want a Democratic president, it feels to me the best path is to hope Kamala surprises us. She's been in the White House for 4 years. She'd have her pick of competent Biden people. She's got an OK story on immigration. She's got a great story on abortion. She might be able to thread the needle and take credit for the good parts of the Biden administration (jobs, crime) while distancing herself from the bad (inflation).
I'm talking myself into her as I write this and will be watching what she does over the next few weeks to see how she behaves and whether there is any consolidation of a movement behind her.
It seems like Gavin/the party could offer to clear the primary in the next governor's race in Cali.
I'm not sure they can do that - there are lots of ambitious people already in the race, and Kamala was not especially beloved here as AG among insiders.
If you make it clear the national party and Gavin will move heaven and earth to help you your odds are pretty good.
If you can't win the primary with that support you were never going to be president.
THANK YOU.
Honestly, I feel like people who can’t grasp this are mistaking party politics for K-pop stan debates.
Agreed. Harris isn't a magic bullet, but she would very likely be the choice. In the last 48hrs, I have gotten ok with that. She also has time to select a strong running mate from the bounty of talent out there. She would also have access to Biden's cash and advisors. Biden can't fight. Kamala can. It would seriously shake up the race AND the Trump team would struggle to pivot strategically
Jill Biden is the person who can tell Joe to drop out, not Obama, because Joe still feels some type of way about Obama (allegedly) telling him not to run behind the scenes in 2016.
About that.... this: https://x.com/AlexThomp/status/1806580390573818073
does not seem like a person who is about to drop the charade.
I don't think this proves anything. Of course you have your partner's back in public right after they delivered a bad performance. What matters is what she will say in private.
This is political fanfic basically.
Don't underestimate how much being contrasted with Trump would boost her favorability. It cannot be overstated: Trump is extremely unpopular, and also a pretty inept politician in many ways. If he'd been up against a vanilla democrat last night, the news cycle would be endlessly droning on about how bad Trump looked.
This is part of the reason people are talking so much about Biden right now. The narrative is very much "How awful do you have to be to lose so badly against THAT Trump performance?"
Maybe Matt has access to secret polling suggesting her numbers are a lot stronger than presumed? /s
If Kamala Harris is inevitably going to be the nominee—if Democrats simply cannot find a way to settle on someone who's likely to be a lot more competitive vis-a-vis Donald Trump—I'd personally be tempted to say the best path forward would be for Joe Biden to resign the presidency, and at least give Kamala Harris a few months to gain stature. Because yes, it appears terrifyingly likely that Trump would indeed "clobber her."
According to 538 she does have better approval numbers than Biden. Not good, but better.
Those numbers might be fake since she is the VP and doesn't have to do much at the moment.
They are fake but it's also not clear which way they would shift once she became a candidate. "Generic Dem" isn't doing so badly in polling. She should find some staff who are better at their jobs than the ones she had in 2020 though
2019 Kamala is better guide for "presidential candidate Kamala" than VP Kamala approval polling.
I would put very little weight on Trump v. Harris horserace polling from 2019
Not Trump v Harris. Harris v Harris. She is a catastrophe of a national candidate. Looking at her VP approval ratings is wildly overestimating her.
Right, how said transfer takes place probably has an effect. She maybe gets a narrow window to reintroduce herself, or the Democrats and Groups all jockey in a factional circular firing squad.
I was thinking maybe she’d be satisfied with being president for a few months and would realize that the moment demands a much stronger Trump opponent.
Now that you mention it,
Obama 2024?
*Michelle* 2024?
Michelle?
I think she might have even polled better in 2020 than Harris did when people would include her for whatever reason.
She benefits somewhat from the McConaughey effect, a celebrity who is generally liked because hasn’t had to do hard issue taking.
Although her association with a Dem president obviously limits that a bit, I think that’s what’s at play with her polling.
I feel like being the Democratic nominee is going to tie her to the Dems either way.
But yeah, she is young(er) smart and likeable. And people liked her book.
She's never held office, as far as I know any office. The only other president I can think of whom that describes is Trump 16
Seems logical to me that if one side can put forward a treasonous convicted felon, then the other can put forward the one capable person in this country who could immediately rescue us from this shitshow. Nominate Obama, fight it in the courts with some BS defense (which could drag out well past 2028), and hellishly campaign like it’s 2008 again. Pretty sure “Hope and Change” would sell right now. If Trump has taught us one thing, it’s that rules, norms, and precedents are meaningless.
No, it would not drag out well past 2028- it would be handled via an immediately issued injunction before being dismissed rapidly on preliminary motions. It wouldn't require oral arguments, it wouldn't take up any time in any appellate court, and SCOTUS would never bother with it. The constitution is not ambiguous on this point- Obama is constitutionally ineligible.
Oh great, and open the door wide open for a 3rd term of Trump with a Trump-appointed supreme court.
Obama should have run in the primary just so that SCOTUS would have to set a precedent by DQing him.
Ha! I've actually been thinking about that ever since I saw people claiming that the SCOTUS ruling that a federal statute was needed to enforce the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment meant that Trump could run for a third term since there's no enforcing statute for the 22nd Amendment.
Is the limit on 3rd terms explicit about being 3 in a row or just 3 in total?
Just 3 in total. The language is "no more than twice".
I don’t think it’s too late for Kamala to reinvent herself politically. The whole Democratic Party was in a he throes of a woke/socialist haze during Trump’s presidency- she can still pivot to the center. She put criminals in prison for a living!
My too-hot-for-main take is Kamala Harris should do a big speech celebrating the progress of America on the issue of race. After all, she could be the second Black president in four tries! Marginal voters (old white people) would appreciate getting credit for their evolved opinions on racial issues, and it is in fact true that America is substantially less racist than it once was, and one of the most racially integrated and harmonious countries on Earth, and those are good things. Of course there would be acknowledgement of future challenges but she should strike an optimistic and patriotic tone. My friends think this is crazy because it could alienate core constituents but she’d be running against Trump after all- I think she could keep most of those votes and it really seems like Haley voters could be persuaded away from Trump.
An underrated risk of dropping Biden is that the party will select somebody so far to the left that 2024 becomes McGovern 2.0. Those with power — the actual delegates — are overrepresented by the progressive left.
The dump Biden discussion has fixated on picking the ideal replacement. But there is no mechanism to make that happen. The idea that the candidates to replace Biden will be limited to Harris and a few moderates like those you listed is a fantasy.
The rationale for Harris is that she could clear the field and avoid a free for all for the nomination. Because she’s VP, Biden would have endorsed her, and her demographics, the barriers to opposing her will be steep. If Biden drops out and doesn’t endorse Harris, chaos reigns. It’s possible that the convention picks a better candidate than Harris. But it’s just a likely they choose somebody worse. And, if I had the unilateral power to choose, I’d heavily weight people with substantial national campaign experience and who have been vetted for VP. Think of how many “looks good on paper” governors and senators have badly flamed out in presidential primaries.
The real choice is a) Biden runs, b) Biden runs and endorses Harris, who runs, and c) Biden runs and anything is possible ranging from nominating the perfect Trump-beater to somebody who shits the bed.
I say all this while thinking that Harris is incredibly weak. But in terms of the odds of beating Trump, I’d handicap it as
- Biden 15%
- Harris 40%
- Open the field 5% - 60%, depending on the candidate.
I still think this election is being driven by who people hate more, and to that end, I'd give Biden (even a substantially diminished Biden) much higher chances than that.
Watch her win an open vote at the convention, then.
I myself have no pony in this fight. Never voted for her, never been a gigantic fan. But she is the sitting vice president of the United States and the current nominee’s running mate.
She would win the nomination if Joe stepped aside, barring some scandal we don’t know about. If some do not understand this now, it’s because they do not want to understand it.
It’s so sad. The time to do this was after getting the Inflation Reduction Act through, which was an amazing triumph. He could have had a nice ceremony on the White House lawn, saying he defeated Trump, ended our forever wars, and righted the country’s direction to face some serious (but solvable!) problems and now he would step aside for 2024. And of course he couldn’t have known that then, but it would have freed him up to focus way more on some very serious foreign policy issues that were coming without having to worry about political considerations. When will, people learn from Ruth Bader Ginsberg- so much better to go out on top on your own terms.
Ahem, Sonia…
I like her very much, but she is almost 70, diabetic, and travels with a medic.
The sheer selfishness and ineptitude of the current generation of Democratic senior leaders is just staggering.
Progressive lawyers have totally gone and made a cult hero out of her, just like RBG without the nickname and movie. She gets a ton of validation that she’s indispensable. Ugh.
My hot take is that Roe distorted this entire generation’s self conception. They thought of themselves as heroes valiantly defending it, and that led them to constantly making strategic errors that ultimately undermined both Roe and the party as a whole while maintaining themselves as the heroic centerpieces.
The more realistic version of this might just be that their relationship with Roe is emblematic of their broader failings but not a cause in and of itself.
I think it’s much more banal than this: it’s a lot more fun to be a current justice of the Supreme Court than a former justice of the Supreme Court. None of them wants to have the long quiet retirement out of the spotlight of Sandra Day O’Connor.
i'm sure i believe this because i am not the sort of person who becomes a SCOTUS justice anyway, but being an ex-justice seems like way more fun. be a pundit or a writer or go on the speech circuit and take vacations to the south of France. you can do basically anything you want. vs sit in office and achieve very little since your faction is in the minority and you are a replacement liberal?
What are you basing this on? A lot of SCOTUS Justices retire and ride off into the sunset and seem to engage in plenty of meaningful, fulfilling activities that seem highly rewarding. Do you have anything to point to that shows that they actually regretted retiring and wished they'd kept working until their deathbed days, or are you just assuming it based on the fact that the public is more interested in sitting Justices?
Correction. She *is* 70- her birthday was 3 days ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor
Grazi!
This feels like a miss from you. You were very supportive and it now looks like you were wrong.
"The campaign, though, did not take my advice" this isn't how I remember your advice.
" I think it was correct to withhold judgment until we saw the debate." I think this is overconfident. We knew he was weak and it turns out he was weaker than we thought. It's tempting to say "ex ante I was right" but it robs me of my learningns.
I think you were wronger than Ezra Klein and Nate Silver and it's probably valuable for you to yourself to do that update sooner rather than later.
If we're to take seriously the idea that Matt should use his fame and credibility in the Democratic party to try to convince Joe Biden to step aside, then this article isn't for you, it's for Biden and his close confidants, and saying, "I was wrong this guy was a bozo who should never have been allowed on the debate stage" doesn't seem to me like it's maximizing his persuasive power to that audience.
I think this is right. Matt is not-very-secretly one of the most influential pundits among Dem elites, who all made exactly the same judgement error Matt made. It makes way more sense to be "hey guys, I'm one of you, we really did what was best with the information available at the time but there's new information and it's time to change course."
This is one of the most frustrating things about Matt. You can never really be sure if he's doing genuinely reasonable think pieces, gaslighting political advocacy or a thing to convince a few particular people he know read him.
Why does it matter what his internal mindset is? I'm not friends with the guy, so I could care less about why he's writing what he writes. It's either persuasive, informative, and well written or it isn't.
As much as I'd like to have the ability to fully weigh Matt's arguments, the fact is that I don't do policy or political strategy analysis for living and therefore have to give his arguments a degree of credibility based on trusting him as an expert. Therefore, it *does* matter what his internal mindset is because his value to me is very much based on me trusting him.
Because I pay to read this and I'd rather not waste my time reading partisan drivel not to mention his standards for accepting facts and narratives don't seem entirely consistent across the different genres
Counterpoint: If anyone had seriously tried to get Biden replaced on the ticket without last night's demonstration of his ineptness, it would have been a death knell for the Democratic presidential campaign. It would simply not have mattered that other candidates would be better, there would have been too much doubt and speculation about behind-the-scenes power games and such. It just was not on the table.
Last night gives them the political cover and justification to push hard for it.
Yes, other commentators saw the reality of the situation more clearly than Matt, and he should own up to that. He was wrong about Biden’s fitness for office (or “fitness to run for office” as he likes to put it). Identifying one’s mistakes is an important part of not repeating them in future!
I think specifically *fitness to run* has been Nate Silver's big thing recently.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/if-biden-cant-run-a-normal-campaign?utm_source=publication-search
I think the debate questions whether he's fit to be president right now. He needs to step down.
I'm ok with Matt not being contrarian enough while other notable contrarians played that role. The argument was that Biden was better than Harris or chaos which may well still be true. If you trust Nate Silver, he had the race informally at a toss up before he released his model in favor of Trump. In a 50/50 situation you go for low risk small wins to tilt things your way. Post debate Biden is a big enough underdog, long shot alternatives are now defensible.
Biden and his team should have seen this coming. Matt is probably fine for fearing Harris.
I think Democrat elites know more than you give credit for. That Democrats weren’t ever going to win with inflation, especially in swing states. That Trump only (in bidens words) legislation was a tax cut. That 2028 is the election that matters and they want a good chance at 8 years with a better chance of the house/senate vs the opposite with a good MAGA implementer and a trifecta. Thinking the long game, for selfish reasons, without anyone wanting the nominee.
But Trump is an unbelievably weak candidate. The Republicans are very likely to put up someone much stronger in 2028
Democrats were never going to win with this inflation history. Regardless of weak candidate or not.
Democratic, please
If the Democratic party and its surrogates can mislead itself from its most trusted inside sources on basic facts like the ability of the president to handle a debate, until it blows up on TV, what else is it misleading itself on?
Matt, Klein, and Silver had similar assessments of Biden’s probability of winning, but differed in how they saw the risk of dumping him. Klein saw it as low, causing him to see supporting Biden as riskier than a change. Silver saw it as riskier, but was barely on the keep Biden side. Matt saw it as the riskiest, making supporting Biden as the best choice.
What changed is that Biden’s performance made it clear that his chance is lower than leaving it to the convention to pick somebody new.
Personally, I think that Klein radically discounts the risk of the convention nominating a super-progressive culture warrior who Trump would annihilate. I’m closer to Silver, but now also think that staying with Biden is pointless. Everybody is making honest judgments without very imperfect information. Instead of pushing people for their interpretation, how about celebrating them for changing their mind.
I simultaneously feel bad for the guy and am also pretty upset with him.
It’s probably harder for him to know than for anyone else. Especially when, almost Trump-like, everyone has been telling him that only he can save democracy.
I don't really blame Biden for thinking he's the best guy for the job, but people should ask themselves what else high-ranking Democrats close to the president are misleading or outright deceiving their party and media allies on for political purposes.
So, your position is that the patriotic thing for the office of the president to do, would be to out the leader of the free world as incompetent? You occasionally voice some of the oddest ideas....
"You shouldn't lie to the country about whether your preferred leader is unfit to do the job" is a pretty conventional idea, I don't think this is complicated. It's fascinating how terrified Republicans and Democrats are of drawn-out competitive primaries with their party's activists involved. But it doesn't negate my position. It's not patriotic to put an unfit man in a job requiring diligence and stamina during a 72 hour cuban missile crisis scenario.
We should be grateful this trainwreck was so obvious, so decisive, and so early.
If his performance was better, or it happened later (after the convention), we would have limped into a loss.
The party needed a decisive event to force it into doing the thing that should have been done long ago.
I suspect things will move quickly now, and Biden will announce retirement within 10 days.
Once the mainstream calls for his withdrawal start, it’ll be a torrent. I’m honestly relieved (as well as livid that it got this far - maybe the public didn’t have enough information to make a judgment, but the staff did).
This has been baffling me for months. What was happening in those conversations where no one could state the obvious? I mean, it's the most important job in the world and no one can say, "Guys, we have to take his keys."
Seeing all of Matt, Tom Friedman, and Nicholas Kristof all calling for a center-left Democratic presidential candidate to step down within the same 24 hour period is pretty shocking— but consequently, a lot more people are probably going to feel emboldened to speak up.
Also Krugman (which shocked me more than Friedman or Kristof who are basically considered fascists by the on-line left these days): https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/06/25/opinion/thepoint#krugman-biden-must-withdraw
Krugman is also surprising because he’s straightforwardly a middle-of-the-party Democratic loyalist, but the moderates saying that Biden should resign is shocking to me in a way that say, the Current Affairs people posting the same thing is not precisely because he’s the moderates’ guy and has been for a long time.
Agreed. The staff knew better and did nothing.
This is certainly the optimistic take (unbelievably).
Slightly less optimistic take is that the Biden campaign realizes he needs to do tons of availabilities and interviews to put this to bed. And sinks or swims before the convention.
The least optimistic take is that they continue to do limited availability safe stuff hoping this blows over, then a similar performance happens again later, and it's too late
If I had to bet, I would say the least optimistic take is the most likely because it ultimately comes down to Biden and his campaign agreeing to step aside. They're the people who were most aware of Biden's deficiencies prior to entering the debate last night, and they're the ones who most doggedly insist that what we saw last night isn't disqualifying or a big deal.
What I think makes it even worse is that there will be a very public split of democrats who advocate for him to step aside and others who defend him on his record, so the party limps along with a weak candidate who refuses to recognize that he has no chance of winning.
What could anyone have done? It is not relevant whether the *staff* knows this. Unless *Joe Biden* acknowledges this reality, all of this other stuff is just fanfic.
I think we all need to stop pretending that we know what conversations anyone has had behind closed doors about this. But if you were one of Biden's aides, and tried to convince him to consider stepping down, and he refused to consider it, what are your choices? You could:
- commit political suicide, and probably also destroy the party's chances, by doing a tell all
- do your best to prep him and hope he is up to the task
I think we should also give the party credit for having this debate so early. Sure is starting to look like they needed to "prove" his fitness (or not) early on in order to make this conversation even possible.
Lots of Trump aides left and called him out
Like many here I’m dismayed by the situation. Personally I feel that Biden was the best president the country had in decades, and Trump is a genuine threat to democracy. But I’d like to contribute with a point on another matter: our ability to assess truth in the age of polarization. For months now Biden showed on what— to me —were obvious signs of senility *repeatedly* on camera. The WH press office spinned this as “cheap fakes”. That they did so is fair enough. It’s their job. That most msm including NYT and AP and so-called “misinformation experts” bought it and promulgated the obvious lie is not. Anyone judging the videos (edited or “original”) could see Biden is showing his age in a bad way (as I pointed out here a couple of times in the past). Yet many here argued agaisnt the facts. How to explain the mass delusion? The apparent power of polarization to make people dismiss the manifest is terrifying.
We have normalized lying as a campaign tactic, to our detriment.
More worrying to me is how the media has abdicated their responsibility to hold power to account and pursue truth even in the face of difficult conclusions. They've been acting as campaign surrogates, careful not to push too hard on the President for fear of helping Trump.
Huh? The media has consistently run "Biden Is Too Old" takes for the better of the part of a year, maybe even the last 18 months. It's probably second biggest topic covered in the media-sphere next to AI.
Lying in campaign is probably inevitable to some extent. But I agree with you that the problem is when the media and some experts abdicate their role due to political bias. What is worse (?) is that many of them perhaps aren’t even fully aware that they’re doing it.
Agree 100%. It’s been so bizarre talking about this issue with family members — intelligent people who I greatly respect and whose values I largely share. They have consistently maintained that all evidence of Biden’s decline is fake news & genuinely believed that he was as sharp as ever, and have even been kind of upset with me for having a different opinion. (I haven’t spoken to them since last night’s debacle; I’ll be interested to see what they made of it.)
One very frustrating thing for me is that, when I say something like “I think Biden isn’t mentally fit to be president,” they apparently hear “I think Trump isn’t so bad,” when in fact these are entirely separate issues.
Polarization rots people’s brains!
I think that they’re used to hearing this argument from people so consistently mendacious that they update their beliefs against anything those people say. Really dangerous dynamic.
Yes, I think that’s right — “if it’s on Fox News it can’t be true.” One big problem with that attitude — and I consciously try to keep this in mind when I encounter to my own betes noir — is that it gives your ideological enemies complete control over your empirical beliefs. Super dangerous, as you say
The misinformation/fact-checking industry is such a travesty. Falsehoods said by Biden get “partially true,” whereas true things said by Trump get “misleading” or “true, but needs CONTEXT.”
Trump lies all the time. You don’t need to exaggerate how much he lies!
Do you have examples to cite to?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/first-presidential-debate-2024-fact-check/
To be fair to the NYT, a few folks over there (e.g., Ezra Klein) have been telling us to ditch Biden for many months.
Whether Biden should be replaced or not is a complex question (and certainly was so months ago) without an objective answer. What videos do or do not show is far less subjective , and the NYT ran a piece by its “misinformation” expert claiming confidently that it’s all bs, despite the fact that the very meager (highly curated) evidence they used to make their case was totally unconvincing. Hence they proved either unable or unwilling to assess basic facts. A huge failure on the “news” side of the paper which has been consistently weaker than the opinion section for a while now.
"White House press core" refers to the journalists assigned to the White House, not the White House presss office.
My bad. But I’m glad I was nevertheless understood. Will fix
Edit: now fixed. Thanks!
This is me. Like the fundraiser video - you can spin a lot but why the hell was Obama guiding Biden by the wrist????
I have family in Pennsylvania. And there was a similar though less extreme phenomenon with Fetterman. It worked with Fetterman so I guess there was a possibility it would work with Biden.
But ultimately Fetterman got better, right?
Sigh. The whole travesty is that Trump and Republicans are held to no standards.
I mean... they kind of are, though? Everyone is talking about how Trump lied, rambled, and was incoherent, and that this is why it was such a staggering failure that Biden *still* could not win this debate.
Correct.
Well said, but he should not, under any circumstances, pardon his son.
Maybe wait until December at least
He absolutely should pardon his son -- after the election -- or strike a deal with Harris that he'll resign and give her a chance to run and then she'll do it after the election.
The only reason Hunter Biden is being prosecuted is because he's the President's son, and under a very arbitrarily and selectively enforced statute that has serious constitutional problems under the Second Amendment. That's not equal justice under the law; it's banana republic persecution.
If it has serious constitutional problems, and he thinks its a statue we shouldn't have, then repeal the statute. I'm sure Republicans would agree to this(in general)
If he thinks the law should stand, then it should stand.
Biden can't repeal the law by himself. All he can do is pardon those who are being unequally, arbitrarily and selectively prosecuted under it.
Then make a push to repeal it, and after repeal, blanket pardon _everyone_ convicted on this.
That may be true but that'll enable further abuse of the rule of law by Republicans in the future. The juice aint worth the squeeze IMO.
I'm curious what serious constitutional issues you see with this? Its pretty settled that lying on a federal form such as this is a felony. Even if you don't think the question should be asked, the legal way to address that is to answer correctly and then when denied, to take that to court.
It impermissibly burdens exercise of a fundamental right, by conditioning the exercise of it on filling out a questionnaire about compliance with unrelated federal statutes. Imagine if exercise of the right to publish a newsletter was conditioned on filling out a federal form about whether you complied with unrelated federal statutes. The non-violent crime of using a controlled substance is not a permissible basis to strip a person of their fundamental right to keep and bear arms, as the Fifth Circuit has ruled, and following the same logic the Third Circuit has found that the non-violent crime of welfare fraud is not a permissible basis.
If Hunter Biden objected to exercising a fundamental right that was conditioned on filling out a questionnaire, then he could have sued for injunctive relief relief prior to filling out the form. If he objected to a particular question on the form, he could have completed the form accurately, and then sued when he was rejected due to his answer to that question. But there is no right to answer falsely on a federal form.
Quote from a recent judicial opinion by Judge Frank Easterbrook :
"Many decisions of the Supreme Court hold that false statements may be punished even when the government is not entitled to demand answers—when, for example, compelling a truthful statement would incriminate the speaker. The word "material" in § 922(a)(6) does not create a privilege to lie, when the answer is material to a statute, whether or not that statute has an independent constitutional problem."
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/06/19/no-right-to-lie-about-current-indictments-on-gun-purchase-form/
Now if you are arguing that *SHOULD* not be the law, then that's fine. But the law as currently practiced is clear that what Hunter did is illegal.
I didn't say Hunter Biden did everything right; I said the statute has serious constitutional problems. I don't know if the statute would be facially unconstitutional, but it is most definitely unconstitutional as applied to millions of Americans, including most prominently the large number of people who have legally used marijuana and also purchased a gun. Marijuana is widely available legally under state law and is de facto legal under federal law when purchased legally under state law, so it's not a lie for those people to say on the form that they are not an illegal user of a controlled substance. Yet because marijuana remains nominally illegal everywhere under a dead-letter federal law that has sunk into desuetude through lack of enforcement, they nonetheless remain at least theoretically exposed to arbitrary and spurious prosecution under this law. That's an unconstitutional chilling and burdening of a fundamental right, not just in my opinion, but under a growing number of judicial opinions.
I think your conflating marijuana use with what Hunter was using which was cocaine. Use of that is legal in no jurisdiction in the US that I'm aware of.
Pardon Hunter, then resign
Yeah, kind of an odd aside from someone famous for his "we should actually enforce gun laws" takes
I'm with you here. Gun control requires actually prosecuting violations of gun laws. I'm shocked by how many people ordinarily in favor of stricter gun control want to give Hunter Biden a pass for lying to buy a gun and possessing said gun while an extremely heavy user of crack cocaine.
"We don't need new gun control, we need to actually enforce the laws we have now" is a very common (and frankly, somewhat correct) argument by opponents of gun control. Joe pardoning Hunter will be Exhibit A for anyone making this argument for the next decade.
You can be for gun control and "enforcing the laws we have on the books" while also recognizing that *this* law is almost never enforced and it's only being enforced here because of who the perpetrator is. As I pointed out below, if you are smoking weed in a state where it is legal, you either have to lie on the 4473 form, or not get a gun.
I see claims that this law is rarely enforced, but I never see numbers.
I'm also curious about the difficulty of enforcement. It seems difficult to prove that someone is a drug user unless they do something like write an autobiography containing admissions to heavy drug use during the time they possessed a firearm.
Marijuana in a legal state and crack cocaine are very, very different things on several dimensions; I don't see a huge problem with making the former a lower priority than the latter.
There's a lot of daylight between "we should more aggressively pursue traffickers and straw-purchasers" and "the president's son lied on a form that likely a majority of gun purchasers also lie on; throw the book at him and prosecute this crime that is never ever prosecuted otherwise!"
What lie(s) do you think that a majority of gun purchasers make on form 4473?
Here's the form PDF: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-transaction-record-over-counter-atf-form-53009/download
Smoking weed is a federal crime. Unless you think literally no gun owners smoke weed, they lied on the form.
I'm asking specifically about "a majority of gun purchasers."
Indeed. First, he said he wouldn't, and second, it looks like an abuse of presidential power for personal reasons.
Then wait until after the election and do it during the lame duck.
The optics would be atrocious.
And I think many don't understand the negative impact a pardon would have on the gun control debate: this will further crystallize the view that gun control proponents are fighting a culture war rather than sincerely trying to keep guns away from people who shouldn't have them.
I'm also surprised that Yglesias brought up a pardon and not commuting a prison sentence. Even if we accept for argument that Hunter's prosecution was politically motivated, Hunter absolutely did that shit. And I don't see the convictions as that big of a deal to Hunter; with or without them, Hunter isn't going to be practicing as a lawyer or sitting on corporate boards at this point. A lengthy prison sentence would be a big deal, however.
Joe should just wait. Hunter won't be sentenced until October/November; it's possible that he gets sentenced to house arrest or brief confinement in a camp (and he's unlikely to report to any confinement immediately). In that case, it's probably best to just let the punishment stand. If Hunter gets an unreasonable harsh sentence and Joe decides that he wants to do something, his aides can pull together a list of people who have also gotten unreasonable sentences for the same crimes and Joe can mass-commute all of their sentences to 12 months in minimum-security facilities or something.
You are completely correct morally, but if you really want him to step aside there's a realpolitik case to be made that Democrats should start acquiescing to the impeachment/Biden crime family push.
"Biden crime family"?
There's no "there" there. Pardoning him might _add_ a "there" though.
Sure, I'm not saying there is any "there" there. Just gaming out what might actually pressure Biden do resign if he can't be convinced to otherwise. Cornering him into pardoning his family might do it, not that applying that kind of pressure would be just or moral.
I don't actually think Harris is a competitive, "replacement level" candidate (neither is Gavin Newsom, really just avoid California). Biden needs to both drop out, and throw her under the bus. The point is to win and she is simply not electable, even if she's a moderately less terrible speaker than Joe is at this point.
Harris is a much better speaker and can hit Trump effectively just by being quicker and more coherent. Trump does not lack for weaknesses. Harris' best moments were at the hearings when she was in senate and that one debate attacking Biden.
She also can throw Biden under the bus for all the things people are unhappy with and take credit for all the things they like.
She cannot throw Biden under the bus. She has Biden's baggage and would also be identified with San Francisco and its perceived liberal overreach and out of control crime. She would be better than Biden, but Meg Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, or Gina Raimondo would be much stronger candidates.
i don't really think it's that hard for her to say "wow san francisco has gone downhill a lot since i stopped being top cop, we need someone to get smart on crime", though she probably isn't willing to say that
The credible fear is that swing state voters never get past the words "San Francisco" in that sentence.
So her disastrous polling numbers are meaningless? I'm open to the case that they are, mind you. Maybe in a heads up race against Trump she'd rise to the occasion. And needless to say I like and admire VP Harris and feel she has what it takes to be an effective president. But Matt seems to be urging us to drop a competitive candidate who lost a debate for a much less competitive candidate who's displayed zero talent for national politics.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/12/kamala-harris-favorability-poll-00162093
If Democrats are going to to do this, then do it right: either let her become POTUS now (so as to prove to voters she can do the job) or absolutely make sure the Chicago convention is a level playing field where non-delusional delegates can pick us a winner. Bowing out to give the nomination on a silver platter to a *weaker* candidate is lunacy in my view.
There are Democrats other than Kamala Harris who can "hit Trump effectively."
If Biden did decide to step aside, I think the odds that Harris will rise to the occasion, once she's the sole star in the limelight and not second fiddle, make that a much better bet than throwing it open to a chaotic and divisive free-for-all. And I agree that if Biden were to step aside he should do it by resigning as President so she can run as the incumbent with all the trappings that go with that.
Harris was in the winning lane (the not-Sanders lane) to get the 2020 nomination and quite possibly would be President now had Biden not cut in and bumped her out of contention.
Based only observing from afar, it seemed like Harris had a lot more energy and fun as a candidate -- which is infectious and a winning ingredient -- before it became pretty clear by the end of the summer of 2019 that she and everyone else in the race who were not-Biden and not-Sanders were basically relegated to going through the motions as also-rans. So I'm not convinced her performance after that point is really indicative of what she's capable of.
> Harris was in the winning lane (the not-Sanders lane) to get the 2020 nomination and quite possibly would be President now had Biden not cut in and bumped her out of contention.
She dropped out in early December 2019 before Iowa. Her polling numbers were pretty abysmal the entire campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_2020_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
One big issue with these polls is that you are only looking at top choice, what you care about is approval voting (and net approval). No one loves Harris, but if she is the Democratic nominee I would expect her to easily consolidate a larger base than Biden.
If we are comparing Harris and Biden I think her poll numbers are not any worse than his.
If you want a different nominee fair enough, but they will have to "jump the line" over a Black Woman and no one really has a clear justification for doing so. Given we are past the primary no one other than Harris has a clear claim to be the Biden successor.
If the Dems can't replace Biden because Kamala is "in line" they deserve to lose.
That might be true but I don't know that *we* deserve for them to lose.
Well if *we* have been voting for them, we do.
“Deserves to lose” is a stupid concept.
The bigger problem will be finding a good candidate that wants to risk a career on this situation.
That's a subsection of the larger problem. Anyone other than her who jumps into this is risking his or her own political career on what is now looking like a long shot, last minute gambit. Who wants to be the failed savior that loses to Trump?
I've not been one to panic, but don't mind saying I agreed with MY but am now proven wrong. What a disaster.
I agree. If (a big if) you want to give Kamala her best chance, Biden should resign as well as declining the nomination.
Also maintains continuity of control over the U.S. military, federal law enforcement, etc. in connection with post-election stuff. (As I've noted before when arguing that Biden should run this year, if you are concerned about possible pro-Trump coup attempts, you want an incumbent President to minimize "confusion" about who is Commander-in-Chief on January 20, 2025.)
At baseline she is a vastly less electable figure than Joe Biden. She has to be not merely less bad a speaker than the president, she would have to be dramatically better in a way she's never shown to be capable of.
I agree that she hasn't demonstrated electability in any real way given her primary performance but on the specific issue of speaking clearly and attacking Trump energetically I think she has her strengths.
Sure, but given the existence of OTHER Democrats who can speak clearly (Beshear, Kelly, Whitmer, Shapiro, Brown, etc) doesn't it make sense to avoid a candidate with perilously weak approval numbers AND a close association to the current White House.
I think the problem is just getting that other Democrat to be the nominee without causing some chaos by ditching Biden and jumping Harris.
I agree there are probably better choices but the party probably feels like they need to justify the pick beyond just kingmaking someone they like.
Democrats can't "ditch" Biden. He has to go willingly. But if he bows out, I really hope he simply releases his delegates, and solemnly tells his Vice President that, for the good of the country, he's going to stay neutral and let the delegates decide. Again, I like and admire the Vice President, and I'd be thrilled is she became the nominee AND went on to win this November. But she's not owed the nomination. The national interest has to come first. And my sense is there are stronger nominees available.
I wish there were evidence Kamala Harris is likely to perform more strongly against Trump than Biden is. But I think the evidence suggests the opposite.
What a shitty predicament for the country.
“At baseline she is a vastly less electable figure than Joe Biden.”
That might have been true yesterday morning (though even then “vastly” sounds overstated).
If she becomes the candidate, she should demand 3 debates. She would destroy him. Former DA and a great speaker. Her poll numbers are simply evidence that she has been largely invisible for four years. Is she the one we want? No. Is she the one we need right now? Yes?
The problem is that any Democrat who is not Harris and could plausibly benefit from being a fresh face probably won't want to step up and run what is likely a losing campaign to Trump.
Would it likely be a losing campaign? About 50% of the population will vote for anyone over Trump and a new candidate would have minimal baggage.
Because Trump is ahead, the new candidate would be undefined and could be defined negatively by Trump and Republicans, especially if they get tied to the current administration and voters' negative perceptions of Biden.
And some of the polling we have done at Blueprint finds that voters simply trust Trump more/prefer his approach on most issues, which makes this election an uphill battle for any Democrat. Now perhaps the fact that the generic ballot and Senate polling shows Democrats in a much stronger position than Biden is against Trump means that a new nominee could do much better. I think in expectation a new nominee would increase the chances of winning. But I think they'd still be the underdog, especially given the optics of switching candidates.
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/tlp-40-toplines-crosstabs/
I think the optics of switching candidate went from "ugly" before last night to "good, actually" after it.
Before last night, there would have been lots of speculation about behind-the-scenes power grabs and such. After last night, it is obviously the smart move.
The most ruthless thing for Harris to do would be to run a campaign stressing she was in the room, was unable to do much as VP, and saw the mistakes made in real time and will make sure it doesn't happen again. This would be the pivot on the immigration, foreign policy, and economy issue. Even better, keep the details vague of how you'd do it differently, just stress you would.
The problem is there is basically no evidence in her political career that she would run such a ruthless campaign that upsets others in the party; just like Biden, she's more or less wherever the center of the party is.
Thank you for the reality check. Democrats act like Whitmer or Shapiro would win win 40 states.
They wouldn’t win 40 states, but they would probably win PA, MI, and WI, which is what they actually need to do.
Stepping down as president isn't neccesary, in my view. The message should be "I will stay in office to provide a steady hand working on pressing issues like Ukraine and Israel-Palestine while Kamala will be our nominee"
If you are the sort of person who runs for president you are the sort of person who thinks you can turn this situation around. Also if you lose to Harris in the not-a-primary, or even if you challenge Biden publicly but he stays in place, you get to be the person who would have won if only they'd listened.
This argument doesn’t really make sense to me— Biden has been polling very close to parity with Trump, and another moderate Democrat would have very similar issue positions but not have a distinctive personal disqualification which voters have consistently signaled that they care a lot about. Why would you expect say, Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro to lose?
Because nobody will know who they are and will be put off by the switcheroo.
I mean, I guess my fear is that if Biden drops out that the convention will come down to who WANTS it. Which is probably Gavin and Kamala. This only works if the party is willing to TELL someone that they're the person. Of the 5-6 people that person could be I don't actually imagine any of them ducking the chance to go after Trump and I'm actually mostly confident any of the Polis/Whitmer/Shapiro/etc group have better odds in the general than any of Biden/Kamala/Newsom. The party has to actually do some leadership on this not just line up behind whoever wants to say it's their turn.
Whitmer and Shapiro have better odds than Harris and Newsom who have better odds than Biden. But all of them would still likely be underdogs against Trump. Perhaps for Whitmer or Shapiro it's a 40% chance of beating Trump vs. 35% for Harris or Newsom and, say, 30% for Biden. That's still a deal I'm more than willing to take. But we should be realistic about the odds here.
It’s a question of whether democracy is at stake though. If the democrats in question really believe that Trump winning would be the end of democracy then there’s no point in not going for it. It sounds like you’re saying that many don’t.
What I am saying is that this is a difficult collective action problem, but I agree that the nominee ought to be someone besides Biden
I'm surprised you assess the odds that way given that Trump seems a fairly weak candidate and a new nominee (not Harris) would in theory be able to distance themselves from Biden's inflation issues.
Trump's policies on the most salient issues of the day (immigration and inflation) are popular https://blueprint2024.com/polling/tlp-biden-trump-economics/
Yes, but *he's* not popular. In fact, he's very unpopular despite having policies that are popular. That would seem to be the definition of a weak candidate.
edit - which may be your point. His policies are so popular they overcome him being unpopular, in a reverse of 2012 where I believe Romney had positive approval ratings, but his policies definitely did not.
I don't know. People can be very optimistic, especially when what they stand to gain is a place in history.
Off topic, but Newsom makes me want to hurl. Such an obvious sleaze. Dude would sleep with your sister at the wedding reception. Why is he popular???
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/gavin-newsom-is-gross-and-embarrassing
Never stop posting this.
Because if it's not your sister that he's seducing then you are the sister. People love being seduced.
Freddie is reasonably a divisive commenter around here, but he nails this one: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-kamala-conundrum
Under the bus unless she wants to drive it, running as a anti-Sanders/Warren Democrat. The question is who can run that kind of campaign most effectively.
"Biden is fit to be president" was elite misinformation.
On top of how damaging the debate was for Biden, it also really hurts the credibility of Democrats and everyone who said he was still ok.
Yep Biden needs to step down now not in January
I’m glad we’re all here now, but it’s time to let go of the “stuttering” point. That spin has long since lived past its usefulness. We are not here and we did not reach here because of stuttering.
As a lifelong stutterer, I can assure you that the stutter isn't helping. Stressful situations exacerbate disfluency. But I take your point- all things equal, a 71-year old Biden would have handled this much better.
I’ve been there for months, but kept hearing “but Kamala…” and “but who else is there…”
That’s always been absurd. Harris would have lost an open primary to Kelly, Polis, Bashear, Whitmer…we have plenty of competent, normal democrats in the senate and governorships. Any of them are fine in a contest against Trump.
I have nothing against Biden. I have total contempt for the staff, family, and DNC leaders who followed the momentum or delusion this far.
The handling of the primary seems very poor in hindsight.
Meh? The primary system is a HUGE distortionary cog in the system.
Bypassing it and having a brokered convention pick an optimally suited candidate may be the silver lining here.
I think the argument is that a significant minority of the Dem base is going to feel that's undemocratic and complain a ton. It also gives the Republicans an attack angle for the disaffected/low-information types- 'it's undemocratic to not have a primary, they rigged it and just chose Kamala, same thing as Hillary in 2016', etc. etc. Maybe 98% of Dems ultimately pull the lever for her. But these elections are decided on the margins
Which is why taking Kamala out of the convention will help combat the unrigged narrative.
The point is that we did have one, the results appeared to be that the voters wanted Biden as the nominee. To now replace him would seem to subvert that.
If instead he had decided to be a 1 termer they could have had a real primary with all the decent candidates and we wouldn't have to guess who would be the best replacement.
Lol the voters wanted the Biden of last summer, not this guy right here.
The will of the electorate of Winter 2023-24 is not more sacred than protecting our democracy from Trump.
We were playing 4D chess all along. 😉
'I have nothing against Biden. I have total contempt for the staff, family, and DNC leaders who followed the momentum or delusion this far.'
I literally don't understand this perspective. You're mad at some staffer or other who couldn't or didn't persuade the literal actual President to quit, but not at the President himself?
Do many people share this opinion that it's an easy task to get an incumbent president to decide to quit when he clearly doesn't want to, and that all was needed was a bit of effort and elbow grease? Because it seems mad to me.
People who are sundowning often aren’t aware of it. They don’t realize they told the same joke three times in one meal. Or that they’re meandering in conversation. Lack of insight is a symptom of cognitive decline.
I definitely don’t think the staff and Jill had an easy task at all. Nobody who’s had to pry the car keys away from an aging parent would think that. Still their responsibility.
Exactly! This whole time, I've been thinking about how our family just had to make that choice, because my dad was incapable of seeing it. We really cannot blame Biden.
I had to persuade my great-aunt to stop driving when she couldn't see over the steering wheel any more, I've experienced this. But one pretty obvious difference is my great-aunt couldn't fire me for suggesting it.
It’s because deep down everyone know Biden is not running the show, which is why he isn’t to blame. I had the same thought listening to the Politix podcast. Brian was going off about the bad advice Biden got, and it’s like this guy is the literal president. He is responsible for what he says and does. And clearly he is not competent to be president.
I could do some I told you so's about this, because unlike Matt I thought it obvious Biden couldn't campaign effectively and that's the reason they were hiding him (along with their campaign's wrongheaded notion that Trump was so obviously bad after 1/6 that the public would never vote for him again and the Biden campaign wouldn't really have to do anything). Seriously, nobody turns down a Super Bowl interview. That's so obvious.
But this is well written and hopefully joins a loud enough chorus to pressure Biden to do this, so I am just glad Matt wrote it.
Exactly. Also, even if he was secretly capable of campaigning effectively, he wasn’t doing it. The lack of interviews and press conferences is just embarrassing.
Totally off topic: I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but I really like and respect your comments and thinking (here and on Twitter) but often think of your contrarian views on the Amanda Knox case and I think it would be interesting if you wrote a longer post laying out your case and addressing some of the counter arguments.
Ms. Knox has a lot of fans and is also aware of me and sicced them on me once!
But to be brief, my biggest problem is really that people think there was no evidence at all of her guilt and her prosecution was somehow made up out of thin air and was some police vendetta against American exchange students or something.
There was, in short:
1. Evidence of her blood mixed with the blood of the victim at the crime scene.
2. Evidence of her DNA on the handle of a potential murder weapon with the victim's DNA on the blade.
3. Evidence that Kircher was killed by multiple attackers (thereby negating her favorite talking point- that they "got the murderer and he served prison and it wasn't Knox").
4. Evidence that she falsely told the police that someone broke into the apartment, when the break-in was in fact staged.
5. Evidence of an extensive clean-up of the crime scene, and evidence that she and her boyfriend had purchased cleaning fluids the morning after the murder and lied about it to police.
6. She turned off her cellphone the night of the murder (a la Jodi Arias) and turned it back on the next morning, the only time she ever did that in Italy.
7. Her false accusation of her former friend Patrick Lamumba of being involved in the murder, which resulted in him spending a week in jail and Knox making no attempt to get him out until the police determined on their own he had an alibi. She even admitted she was the reason he was in jail.
8. Her admission to the police that she was at the crime scene the night of the murder.
9. Incriminating statements by her boyfriend to the police (this is important because she claims that her own statements were coerced by the police, a claim that even courts sympathetic to her have repeatedly rejected, but nobody claims his statements about her were coerced).
10. Evidence she knew Rudy Guede, the person who nobody doubts was involved.
There's also a lot of suggestive evidence such as evidence she had a bad relationship with Kircher and her demeanor at the crime scene when the police were called the day after the murder.
The point is, the police collected a lot of evidence against her, and that's why they charged her and her boyfriend with murder. You can make perfectly sound arguments that she wasn't proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but that wouldn't get her a career as a podcaster and media celebrity-- she needs to be actually innocent with no evidence of her guilt. So she has a ton of people going around convinced by her that there was not a shred of evidence that implicated her and that she was just an innocent girl who got caught up in a foreign judicial system she didn't understand by anti-American cops and prosecutors who exploited her linguistic difficulties. And THAT narrative- the one that really sustains her career as an innocence advocate is, as our President might say, malarkey. Doesn't mean the Italians proved her guilt-- although several courts over there found this to be sufficient evidence of murder, you could see a case like this leading to an acquittal in the US on reasonable doubt grounds. But there's plenty of evidence she was involved somehow or at least knows a lot more about what really happened. And for her to have all these fans in America who buy her version of this and think there wasn't a shred of evidence against her at all is perverse.
It's not at all obvious to me that it would have been better if Biden had dropped out of the race a year ago. Primaries are bruising and could have resulted in an unelectable "progressive" being elected. There may now be an opportunity for the party to choose an electable candidate, and to do so without a bruising primary.
Letting the party be paralyzed in fear of "bruising" is what GOT us here. We stagnated and let problems fester instead of airing them out and starting the process of memory-holing the worst parts. [Ed: Say what you want about the GOP, at least they are locked in a constant deathly power struggle with each other and they all understand that as the table stakes of the game -- and it allows their memory hole to work so damned well.]
Also, with Warren and Bernie aged out, it's "not at all obvious" that there even WOULD have been the same sort of lefty policy one-upsmanship that happened in 2020. I mean, think about the likeliest frontrunners: Harris, Buttigeig, Whitmer, Shapiro. Literally all centrists!
Harris might have run left and/or tried to use her identity as a cudgel, but doing so would have made her LESS viable to win the critical Black vote in South Carolina [ed: which Biden's 2020 run taught the party mainstream to understand as the final say on whether the party's Black base actually agreed with any particular claim being made RE race/identity].
One of the 2020 lefties might have rerun out of spite, like Castro, but the 2024 primary debate stage would have been 4 centrists teeing off against 1-2 lefties, not the 10v10 scrimmage we had last time. And they'd have a winning-ass argument: "Look at the four years we just had. Despite the inflation, Joe Biden got a lot of shit done by governing as a moderate. And the American people demonstrated right now that they don't want Democrats going on a drunken spending spree, they want someone who can save us from Donald Trump's insane plans."
I'm praying along with you that we don't have a "bruising primary" here, but the worst-case is that a contested convention incentivizes all the players to unleash their most brutal knockout blows. The MOST dangerous thing would be if Harris' ego gets the better of her and the wrong people get into her ears, goading her into a scorched-earth dead-ender campaign of alleging that anything short of a nomination for her would be a crime against Black women.
Wtf does this only have 3 likes. Great post. Also ouch.
It's a late post. Most of the likes are already gone today.
Need the Fed to print more likes to avoid a recession. Wow his is a lame joke sorry.
Up to 7 now!
Now I'm mad no one cosigned my evening take lol.
Also, just wait till you see the take I'm cooking for the evening thread.
Good point !
Yes I am anxiously on board with this take! After burying my head in the rug for a while last night I feel weirdly relieved and optimistic about this opportunity.
This sucks. I honestly expected better from Biden. People were claiming Biden seemed old, even senile, based on clips deceptively edited by people who were incentivized to deceptively edit them. But the debate showed me that he isn't sharp. I don't think he's senile, but responding quickly and well is part of the job and he did not do that.
Like many, I now wished he had dropped out earlier. Would make things much easier. But as the expression goes: the best time to do it would be a year ago. The second best time is now.
>> People were claiming Biden seemed old, even senile, based on clips deceptively edited
What are your grounds for that? Specifically, yes, the clips were edited, but “deceptively”? I.e. did you watch the originals and were honestly convinced “nothing to see here”?
They were deceptive in terms of being cherry picked, especially early on. It isn't that slip ups didn't happen, they just didn't happen all that much and not in ways that you would think undercut the point of what he was saying if you saw the longer version of the clip. He was still very sharp in 2020 but many people's perception of him were that he couldn't string two words together.
The problem is that what you describe as “cherry picking” is recognizable to people who’ve had elderly family members in decline as “good days and bad days.” In many families you see the same dynamic, where those in denial point to the good days. But the bad days just keep getting more common.
I agree. There is also the cannibal reference. That was so incredibly over the top (as in, no one who is president should make such a bizarre statement). Also, if someone is going to follow this up with something about Trump making bizarre statements, I concede this in advance.... he is odd and not ethical enough to be president. That still does not excuse blaming cannibals for your uncle's disappearance.
But there really were cannibals in Papua New Guinea!
Yeah, that one was like Corn Pop! More true than it sounded.
And also, the type of exaggeration Biden has been doing since he was middle-aged.
In 2020 he was in a much better state. These past few months though? I wouldn’t say the evidence is that he is totally gaga. Far from it! But it *did* show repeated moments of visible confusion and him falling asleep repeatedly under the public gaze. In other words, showing his age to the point that it clearly detracts to * a certain extent* from his ability to do his job. Should that disqualify him? No! Especially not given the alternative.
BUT my point is that the media did not express a nuanced view. It claimed that there is nothing to see here and that all those clips are total bs *purely* down to deceptive editing. It is this fact that the so called misinformation debunker have *themselves* spread misinformation that concerns me here. For me , at least, it goes without saying the Biden was, and remains, and infinitely preferable candidate to Trump. But I’m making a point here about another issue- the media and indeed epistemic environment in which we now live.
This may just be a difference in media we consume. I mostly consume NYT and other newspapers, where I felt like they were over reporting on Biden being old and I hadn't seen any articles denying that. I don't watch TV news but got the impression from my YouTube suggestions that that coverage was much the same. I've generally had the impression that "the media" didn't want Biden to be the nominee, but that may just be the stuff I read.
I refer to this NYT article in particular: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/us/politics/biden-age-videos.html
Republican influencers have been deceptively editing clips to make Biden look senile for 5 years now. One the main reasons he won in 2020 was because Republicans painted him as someone who could barely speak without drooling and he easily surpassed their expectations during the 2020 debates.
How does that answer my question ?