And even if Biden wins, I’m going to be a really embarrassed and ashamed Democrat over the next 4 years as the party collectively pretends that the leader is fit for the job.
With respect, the problem isn't so much your or anyone else's feeling of embarrassment, but his actual lack of fitness for the job. It's kind of important that the leader of the free world is up to it.
To build on your comment, what if in the run-up we lost the ability to think of our vote in any terms other than “who would best perform the duties of the office?” As in not: “Which person’s profile lends us marginal advantage to those three key counties around Milwaukee…”
It’s not that strategizing how to get elected isn’t obviously crucial; it’s more that, with a proper orientation, I suspect the horse-race calculating/fantasizing would be proportionally subsumed into the greater question, rather than the other way around as it feels.
Of course this orientation would go in hand with an electorate that was more affirmatively engaged in political activities beyond online commenting on punditry, so …
But that actually doesn't matter as long as Trump is in the picture. The only thing that matters is that someone else takes the oath of office in 2025. It would be great if Trump weren't around and we could have even one additional priority, but he is around, and we can't.
The the dishonesty and delusional thinking, and the cynicism and distrust that breeds, is probably a bigger deal in the end than the age issue itself.
And the Biden team is doing the same kind of "loyalty" testing of Democrats that authoritarian leaders do -- demanding that followers prove their loyalty by mouthing and repeating in public something that everyone knows isn't true, but willingness to pretend it's true is a totem and symbol of obedient loyalty.
When I heard Minnesota Governor Tim Walz say that Democrats should take a lesson for how Republicans stick with Trump after his felony conviction, it made me want to drop my party registration.
I of course didn't. And I will of course still vote for Biden no matter what. But I'm just not proud to be a Democrat right now.
So true. I’ve gotten pilloried by many fellow Democrats for daring to even suggest Biden should step aside. Apparently that’s disloyal and does nothing but help Trump. Pointing out the hypocrisy of Democrats squashing criticism of Biden just like the GOP does of Trump is also impermissible.
This cult-like authoritarian loyalty test business is very troubling to me. I'm not on board with that. I've seen enough with my own eyes to convince me that more likely than not Biden won't be physically capable of serving out another term. And I'm not okay with voting for a blank check for President out of blind loyalty to any party, especially after the Supreme Court's recent presidential immunity ruling. And since I don't think it's physically possible to vote for Biden to serve another term, the question is loyalty to what and to whom?
I'd vote for Harris but given what the Biden inner circle has revealed about itself so far I don't have any feeling of assurance she'll even be allowed to function and gradually take over as co-President and President as age takes it's course -- so voting for Biden might not even be tantamount to a vote for Harris. It might be instead be a vote for years of drift and rule by shadowy behind-the-scenes advisors, reminiscent of the final years of Woodrow Wilson's last term, with similar potentially serious ill consequences for national and global affairs.
It's within the power the Biden-Harris campaign to clear this up and be more transparent about how power will be divided and transitioned from Biden to Harris in another term as his health requires, but without that they're just asking for blind loyalty that's not warranted by the public evidence or their own deceptive behavior so far.
No. Please stop the false equivalences. Just because Trump is a fascist doesn't mean we need to stretch to label everything Dems do as authoritarian. Biden genuinely send to believe he is for to be the nominee. Trying to convince Dem governors if something he genuinely believes to be true and for them to publicly support him is not a word 1984 doublethink exercise. Amazingly people disagree with you on things and it isn't abusive for them to talk about their own beliefs.
The Biden we all saw with our own eyes on live TV was not physically able to make it through a high-stakes meeting with a rival leader. The ability to do that is basic competence for the job of President. Trying to convince people to ignore what was obvious to everyone is, in fact, a "1984 doublethink exercise."
None of this is a knock on Biden, who's been an all-star player for a lot longer than most. But everything comes to an end. It's something top sports players have to come to terms with every year.
As Luis Suarez put it recently, "as I get older, you enjoy more and more because you know that the flame of football is going out. I’m just one more player..." And so is Biden, when all is said and done, just one more player. There's no shame in admitting your run is over.
Beating Trump and then losing an absolute landslide in 2028 because voters are just disgusted with Democrats failing and humiliating the country for four years is not a great outcome.
If Biden wins, the 25th Amendment is right there. As a lame duck, his argument that he’s the only one that can beat Trump goes away, and Harris takes over.
This will not happen. Democrats, having personally put themselves on record supporting Biden’s competency, will not then immediately say “we all understand we were lying, right?”
In addition, the 25th can only be invoked by people personally selected by Biden in this scenario. Biden wouldn’t allow that humiliation. He will stack his cabinet with sycophants. We’re already seeing Biden’s people becoming more Trumpian by the day.
It’s almost preferable to lose in 2024 if we can successfully argue for Dem majorities in the House and Senate to deny Trump dictatorial powers (with the Supreme Court in his pocket and Project 2025 ambition of installing thousands of Trump puppets in the government administration).
I'm increasingly convinced of this route. I think Dems win both the Senate and House in 2026 if Trump wins in the Fall. Two years isn't long enough "install" himself as dictator given the inertia of bureaucracy.
This is an interesting point to me as a Canadian. In most other systems of government, like Canada's, the stakes of getting destroyed in an election are not existential because your side can always get back in power in the 5-10 years and unilaterally reverse those changes. This doesn't seem to be the case in the US due to the different time-horizons you guys run on, with the most notable being the ability to place life-time justices. In that sense, winning this fall and then getting truly destroyed up and down the ballot in 2028 could even be worse, giving the Repubs a once in a generation chance to remake things.
I’m not old enough to be able to attest to this myself, but a lot of people older than me tell me it’s true: it didn’t always feel so existential in the past, because the parties weren’t nearly as black-and-white opposed to one another on literally *everything* the way they are now. Hell, the House of Representatives was held only by Democrats for like four decades during my father’s lifetime; he’s been a Republican his whole life; and he said he didn’t used to think about it very often. Now the switches are quite frequent and everyone’s very worked up about everything, which has made politics extremely bitter and unpleasant in a weird way.
To a Republican less terrifying than Trump? Yes, of course. If we hold the WH for another term, then we should expect to lose it in 2028. Generally one party only holds office for two terms.
Depends if you think getting demolished in 2028 to a trifecta GOP with a "less scary" president versus maintaining the dynamic that's been in place for the last twenty years.
Meh, I’d tolerate the embarrassment if that were the price of keeping Trump out of power. Keeping Trump out of power is the only job now; how it feels is not important.
But running Biden now assures that Trump will win.
I would run a literal shoe against Trump if it meant getting the W in November. That doesn’t take away the fact that it’s also not great for the health of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Get me Inanimate Carbon Rod’s polling numbers, stat!
In all seriousness, I think all polls probably *should* have “Inanimate Carbon Rod” as a control option to gauge partisan commitment and/or trollishness among poll respondents.
If they insist on forgoing panache, “a literal rock with [partisan affiliation]” would also be okay.
Isn't this Biden's thought process too? He probably genuinely believes he's the best option Dems have with Midwestern swing states vs Harris taking over, and better than anyone who looks good on paper right now but would be bloodied by new policy concessions to the left (which Biden/Harris don't have to make) in a convention/primary process.
Biden/Harris have already been bloodied by concessions to the left as well as the stigma of managing a high inflation economy. I'm actually pretty optimistic a Whitmer or Shapiro would be able to avoid adopting electorally compromising left wing policies, and I think most of the high-profile left wing Democrats would go along with it for the sake of beating Trump. The biggest evidence we have of this is the fact that they're already going along with Biden, despite the fact that their base things he's a genocidal war-mongerer.
But it doesn't necessarily follow that because Democrats have been vulnerable to concessions to the left in the past, they cannot be hurt further in an open convention/blitz primary/whatever in the future. We saw in the 2020 primary there are plenty of questions for a raise of hands that would make a Democratic party man desire a pass (Biden demonstrated this with a funny superposition on a few left-wing items.)
If we want to explain why Democrats have gotten themselves to a very similar point as Republicans (leaking to the press while going along with the guy they think isn't quite fit for the job), I think the fear of the long primary and party activists adds up. It would explain their behavior much better than just incompetence or maliciousness to the press. The mentality of running a literal shoe for the executive is alive and well in our party system.
Can someone explain to me why Josh Shapiro is a thing?
I get it: he's the governor of a swing state. But what else? He beat an absolute loon for his current office after beating a nobody to be AG. He fixed a bridge (so did Gavin Newsom, by the way). What else makes him a compelling choice to be the first Jewish President?
A month or two, more like. Bronx politics, the winner resigns, and the party's preferred candidate, who could not win an election on their own, gets the office.
Oh, get over yourself. Biden is doing perfectly fine at being president, and if he takes a real turn for the worse, he can tap Harris. What Biden cannot do is run a vigorous campaign where he's the underdog.
A comatose Biden is more fit for the job than Trump, who is likely mentally unfit and CERTAINLY morally unfit for it. The only real question is whether candidate Harris has a better chance.
Not necessarily. Dementia can lead to marked changes in personality, judgment, and tolerance for and ability to gauge risk. It's just not the kind of condition where there should even be a question whether the President's decisionmaking is affected by it.
We're in a dangerous period globally, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think there could be tense showdowns with China, Iran, Russia or some other hostile countries that come down to the President's personal ability to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
I'm not convinced at all Biden that on a bad day or bad time of day would be better than Trump at that.
If Biden were truly suffering from dementia, I have confidence that his cabinet would step in and invoke 25th Amendment…Trump II is not going to feature the kind of cabinet officials who would do that. The problem with Biden now is that he is suffering from old age, not having the stamina to perform in the spotlight, which means he is unqualified to be a candidate (and of course not qualified for another term).
And then he will declare himself fit under the 25th Amendment because he is a selfish egotist, and Congress will not vote that he is unfit (especially since Republicans don't want to put Kamala Harris in). The 25th Amendment doesn't work.
This will likely be a very similar cabinet to the one that has let it go on this long...maybe they would because the election would be over but I am much less certain.
Biden's decision even to run again itself shows dangerous decline in judgment....like the Granny who shouldn;t be driving anymore but no one has the heart to take the keys from.
>A comatose Biden is more fit for the job than Trump<
Definitely.
I hope it's President Harris in 2025. But I'd take President Biden for a second term over the Orange Mussolini. Sure, maybe the latter's been kidding about prosecuting his enemies and inviting Putin to invade NATO states. Maybe! But I'd rather not chance it. Plus, his economic plans will be ruinous.
1. Having other candidates fight it out right now poses political risks for the Dems when they're already in a weak position
2. It's not clear any better candidates than Harris actually want to do it right now, as it presents them with political risks of their own
3. Casting off Harris off just before she would have become America's first female and black female president isn't the greatest look, and many would see it as racist/sexist
I think Matt is totally right on this. Harris may not be the best candidate ever, but she's well above Biden, and it's not going to be anyone else - so Harris or bust.
”Casting off Harris off just before she would have become America's first female and black female president isn't the greatest look, and many would see it as racist”
I know everyone loves to say this but there seems to be no actual voters who care much about Harris being thrown off the ticket, not even Black Democratic voters. It’s just thus unfalsifiable claim being thrown around as if it was a fact.
It's a funny tell from high ranking Democrats and commentators saying exactly what they think about their voters.
Ironically, in doing so they concede what everyone has known for three and a half years, but couldn't say: Harris is the epitome of the unqualified DEI hire caricature, except she actually exists and really is that bad. And now everyone on the left who can read a poll acknowledges that odds are it screws us in Nov.
No, she's not. Like LBJ, Mike Pence, and various 19th C figures, she's a *qualified* DEI candidate. JFK didn't run with LBJ because he thought Johnson was the 2nd-best eligible president but to include southern Dems (and Protestants, and conservatives) as a matter of equity within the party. Quayle and Palin were unqualified DEI candidates.
I see what you’re saying. She *is* qualified to be president in a way that myself or my auto mechanic isn’t. At the same time she would have been about 27th on Biden’s list of veep picks if she’d been a white male given her skills at campaigning.
The replies from Cat and Freeman miss the point. A Senator of the largest state, particularly one whose meteoric rise (Mayor, A.G.) demonstrates extraordinary talent at winning elections, is ipso facto a very qualified candidate. That she has hit bumps at the next level makes her no different from most, and is post-hoc reasoning.
As for her gender and the color of her skin, three things are true:
1. representation, including demographic representation, matters
2. below-replacement-level candidates shouldn't get picked (and weren't in her case per previous arguments)
3. the VP choice dynamic is bad and weird and has screwed up the country since at least Andrew Johnson
Johnson was an effective power broker in the party and chosen to broaden ticket appeal to southern protestants. The same argument could be made, though to a lesser extent, for Pence in 2016.
The same isn't true for Harris. She isn't appealing either to moderates or progressives in the party, nor do black voters particularly care for her or see her as their representative, in the way that Biden or other senior Dems think they should, which is why she's unqualified.
Lol. Literally no VP has been selected solely for their qualifications in the modern age. They are all selected for some demographic reasons. E.g., Pence is a DEI (evangelical) pick.
And Harris is objectively qualified even if you don’t like her politics.
She's not. Note I didn't criticize DEI criteria in general, just her specifically. VP picks are supposed to broaden ticket appeal, and in Biden's specific case reassure voters as a competent backup. She appeals neither to moderates or progressives, and was unpopular even in her own state, polling terribly in 2020. She has no constituency and was shoehorned in by Biden and senior Dems. If it was against anyone else but Trump she would've dragged the ticket down, not added value or at worst been neutral.
I maintain she was actually a better pick for Supreme Court, precisely for the reasons she is not a "traditional" good candidate for Supreme Court (not an Ivy League law graduate--or West Coast or Catholic equivalent--never sat on the federal--or any--bench, has held elective office). There were lots of such justices in the past and I maintain they kept the court way more grounded in what it actually is (an essentially political body). (I draw attention again to the eerie parallels between her career and Earl Warren's up until the point at which he lost his VP race and she won hers.) Alas nobody consulted me.
Also of note, in contrasting Harris and Pence w/r/t DEI, the difference between the selections of the two was that, in declaring prior to making his pick that it was going to be a black woman, Biden gave the game away in that who that black woman was mattered less than the fact that she was black. The same isn't true for Pence; not just any replacement level white male republican would have the same appeal to evangelicals.
Your problem with this logic is the people who will dig in with this line of attack are presently backing Biden. They will absolutely become more vocal the moment the debate actually shifts from “should Biden bow out” to “who should replace Biden.”
I should have worded it differently. With #3 I'm not so much worried about the average voter on the street thinking that way, but more the indirect effect of the media/activist class kicking up a fuss over it, attacking and fracturing the Democrats,, and making the party appear less competent.
But I do think this is one of the more minor problems with dumping Harris, which is why I put it #3.
We want more risk. We need more risk. We are not in a position where we can win by playing it safe and running out the clock. In fact, because we are underdogs, we should sacrifice some expected value if it increases variance enough.
People who care about that (who I think are at best deficient in their citizenship) are going to care about that. I'm arguing that other people should not be afraid to ignore that consideration, which is a stupid and counterproductive one. If the "first black woman president" faction can't wrap their heads around this, then Trump and the Republicans will educate them on the subject.
Racism and sexism are real things, and they do matter. Anyone who believes that believes that they matter even when other things matter, and also even when other things matter more.
The way you’re talking, you sound like someone who believes these are fictional things, that we tolerate discussion of when it doesn’t matter, like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, but are expected to drop entirely when anything is going on.
In this case the argument that "the racial / gender optics of dropping Harris look bad" vs. "electoral appeal is the relevant criterion to the near-exclusion of others within the Overton window of possible Democratic candidates" arguably is kind of a zero-sum competition where you genuinely can't care about two things and in fact have to privilege one to the exclusion of the other.
Assuming that one privileges the latter of the two options, "Coordination problems make non-Harris candidates infeasible" seems like a reasonable argument in her favor, but "it would be racist and sexist not to run Harris, her relative odds of success against Trump notwithstanding" doesn't.
Ed.: "Harris polls best" would, of course, be the best argument in her favor on option (2) grounds, but then the issue is moot anyway.
Oh, they're real, all right. And practiced by members of all races in our great nation. A crisis ahead of a critical election is not the time to play those games, however. Particularly as this is how we got the sub-par candidate that we don't know what to do with in the first place. Those parties who think race games matter in this instance will most likely have to take up their social justice issues with Trump and the Republicans when they win the election. I predict an unsympathetic reception.
Biden should step down today. Harris would become President and the Democrats could see how she does. If she has momentum then she’ll get the nomination. If she sucks then they’ll be able to pursue a stronger candidate. She needs to be tested as a political leader. This would do it.
I think I heard somewhere a description of the process which says Harris would still have to compete for the nomination, in the sense that she cannot have the delegates automatically pledged to her. It’s likely she would have the inside track, for reasons some have articulated here, but given that many see the reason for Biden attempting to run for another term being based on Harris’ horrible polling, the opportunity to consider another candidate might be taken up. Throwing it open seems impossible—most people are already running for something, it would have to be limited to a handful of credible candidates who can easily be replaced in their current positions.
RE#3 - many May see it as racist sexist, but she certainly will never be voted in as America’s titst black female president in this election cycle. Her performance in the primaries was horrendous and she has been a laughingstock as VP. Her portfolio was the border, and she avoided it like the plague - never even visited.And it now the #1 or #2 issue for most voters.
Another consideration is that Whitmer, Beshear, Shapiro, etc. are probably better candidates for 2028 if the Dems lose. Don't get me wrong, you play to win the game, but Harris is currently a better option than Biden and also can kind of play a sacrificial lamb type of role. If 2024 is already lost anyway, Harris gives you a better chance of beating Trump than Biden and if you lose, you don't damage the political pedigree of your deep bench of popular Dem governors. I don't think we are at the point yet that 2024 is surely lost for the Dems, but I do think the Whitmers and Beshears of the world might think it's too risky to jump in unconventionally now. Granted, everyone is different but I think this would be a difficult shot to take.
She is VP because she was chosen by Biden and voting for Biden in 2020 was hardly a vote for her. If I could have cast a separate ballot for vice President, she would not have been on it.
81 million people voted for a 78 year old (with polls showing significant numbers of them already had some level of concern about his age and acuity) with her as the explicit backup. That doesn't mean everything but it doesn't mean literally nothing either.
She isn't the guaranteed replacement candidate but she is the most likely replacement candidate. I agree with the sentiment that if you want Biden to step down you should at least be okay with the idea of Harris replacing him.
You really think we have enough time to organize a process? Even if Biden withdrew tomorrow, time is short—and he doesn't appear to be on the verge of dropping out.
I think if we're lucky, we may get a semi-contested convention, so Harris's nomination is not a pure coronation. But the grandiose plans I hear for an organized mini primary strike me as pure dorm room stoner session pablum. Ain't happening.
Why not? As many people have pointed out, the U.S. has an absurdly elongated Presidential campaign compared to the rest of the world. A few weeks is plenty of time to organize some kind of process that would shed light on who would make the best candidate. And then the delegates can vote at the convention.
This gives Kamala an opportunity to prove she really is the best candidate to beat Trump or for someone else to emerge.
As an added bonus, it gives us a shot at creating a process that will actually get Democrats and independents actually excited about a candidate rather than just trying to select someone who can beat Trump. And it might end up actually causing the parties to rethink the nominating process into something closer to what the rest of then world does.
I can't bring myself to think that is the game we will be playing. Seems much more likely we will be in the game of hammering whoever the democrats pick with whatever their strongest weakness is.
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather the nation wasn't effectively ignoring criticism of Trump. But that Trump is still relevant seems to betray the idea that he can be criticized out of relevance...
I appreciate the admission so I won't say much critical.
But I do want to say one thing about this State of the Union stuff. I think you and other commentators graded Biden on a massive curve. ANY other President gives that speech, except maybe Trump (who is also too old) and it would have been criticized as sounding like fumbling, inarticulate, senile man giving a speech full of malaprops. Seriously, if you want to be sobered on this, compare it to some of the speeches Reagan gave when the Alzheimers was already setting in. There is no comparison-- Biden sounded like a bumbling elderly man.
And it wasn't just me. My friends all felt the same way, and that includes some people who have significant positions in political journalism.
So I don't know where this "the SOTU was good" came from other than wishful thinking. The SOTU was terrible. You guys just convinced yourself that the Emperor's New Clothes were incredible.
But as I said, the major thrust of this, I appreciate. I just think the SOTU was obviously part of what you missed in seeing the rabbit instead of the duck.
One other minor point, about why people didn't run against Biden in the primary. It is absolutely true as far as it goes that "they had polling operations and the polls said they would lose".
But we need to examine one of the assumptions behind that-- that it is bad to get in and lose. Why is it bad to get in and lose? Why not make your argument and honorably lose if you are Gretchen Whitmer, and maybe position yourself for a run in 2028?
The answer is parties PUNISH people who challenge incumbents. The staffers of those campaigns get blacklisted-- and cynical careerism is the lifeblood of politics. The candidates can also get punished, especially by donor networks and/or if they are in a legislature and want committee assignments and such. It isn't just an organic issue of "I'm gonna lose"-- it's that for all the disorganization of the parties, one thing they actually do is protect incumbents and they do so by imposing political retribution on challengers.
Given what Matt says is true about the need for new blood and to replace bad candidates, people need to think about this more and whether there needs to be a sea change about how insiders look at the issue of party loyalty. A primary challenger to Biden would have been being loyal to the PARTY; just not to Joe Biden. And that's a big difference.
If the "journalists" had been doing their job for the first three years of the Biden presidency, perhaps someone other than Dean Phillips would have seen a potential path to unseat Biden.
I think that is going too far. There was a lot of coverage of Biden's age early on, he was still very sharp in person and vigorously biked every day so it was pretty easily provable that he wasn't a walking corpse. I think this story got chicken little'd. Biden is clearly worse than he was in 2020 but claims that Biden was this bad have been circling for his entire presidency so the natural assumption is that the recent claims were purposely overstated propaganda like they were before. People in these comments are still overstating how Biden's health has been and for how long. I don't see a reason to think that journalists secretly knew things but didn't put it in the dozens of top headline articles that were written about Biden's age before the debate.
There is a perception that challenging an incumbent and failing makes the incumbent weaker and so more likely to lose.
I think there is a correlation, but it's not clear which way the causality runs: this could be because weaker incumbents are more likely to be challenged.
At any rate, if it's true that a middling incumbent who is unchallenged is more likely to win than one who holds off a challenge, then there is a real judgment call about each challenge - "if you come at the king, you'd better not miss" becomes a real consideration.
My guess is for the most part the advantage of incumbency is mythical, especially in Polarized 2024 America. If an incumbent is strong, they are strong. But when they are weak, they lose, and the notion that, say, an incumbent can dole out all sorts of pork barrel projects a la Lyndon Johnson to pull out a victory is just not consistent with modern politics.
Incumbents, however, very much want you to believe incumbency is a big advantage.
Obama had his own insiders—Bill Clinton had a lot of “frenemies,” some key ones supported Obama early on. (His speech at the 2004 convention was an audition he passed with flying colors). Hillary was not an incumbent, she knew she had to compete for it.
Obama definitely had his own insiders but he still had to take a big risk-- had his campaign failed, a lot of the people who were affiliated it would have been frozen out of politics had Hillary won.
Yeah, as someone who's worked professionally in politics I'll say that the idea of shadowy cabals "freezing you out" is largely a myth, at least on the Dem side. There's always more work out there if you're interested. What actually happens is most people only work for a few cycles before they get exhausted and decide to go work for a do gooder org, or enter the private sector or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM-38xzT2d0 etc etc
> Why not make your argument and honorably lose if you are Gretchen Whitmer
Because running a campaign is a lot of work, that takes you away from your day job, and attracts both positive and negative attention (but the negative is more draining for you and your family).
If you don’t care about any of that, and just care about your political or electoral stature, then sure there’s no real downside.
The fundamental reason why people didn’t throw the hat in the ring is that it’s hard to run a campaign without a salient motive of disagreement, and the ppl most frequently named as contenders had none. This is also why Biden found the road blocked in 2016: donors would look around and ask, what would we do differently than Hillary? Same this time. Phillips is a nobody and could perhaps just raise his profile; even that failed, anyways because there was no appetite for ersatz-Biden. The uncommitted agita were just good for a few breathless stories, nothing sustainable (but yes, that also damaged Biden). Good candidates are not going to do trial runs. The devil here is human nature. Not everyone ages on the same schedule: from what little I see in public sources it’s quite possible that Bidens condition turned to the worse in the last few weeks, even after the debate calendar was agreed on.
One thing parties should consider is whether to create more incentives for this, if we must have primaries. They assume that the worst possible thing is to hurt the incumbent, but maybe the worst thing is to fail to test the incumbent.
In any event, my preference would be to get rid of primaries altogether and hire a bunch of analytics nerds to select the best candidate for the general; the first party that tries that will win a ton of elections because primary voters don't really mirror the general electorate.
That sort of approach works well with sports teams because sports teams are arbitrary labels and winning is an end in itself. But with political parties, anyone who's willing to put in that sort of time/money/effort would have to be someone who wants to win in order to accomplish certain things — which means they can't just pick the winningest candidates, they have to pick candidates who broadly align with their goals.
I think this really misunderstands the nature of cognitive decline, which can be intermittent: worse at certain times of day, in certain situations, under certain conditions (e.g., when you're tired or have a UTI). People with dementia have lucid moments. The president should essentially never have "senior moments".
People can have “senior moments” in their 50s and 60s when they are perfectly capable—heck, people will occasionally forget a name or where they put their keys when they’re even younger than that. Whatever Biden has going on—I don’t like amateur diagnoses—is way beyond “senior moments.”
Yes, I didn't mean to minimize, just to note that whatever his condition is, it seems to ebb and flow. Although I imagine Obama and W had moments of exhaustion where they weren't 100% up to the job, this is something very different. Biden clearly shouldn't be allowed to drive or babysit with his current health issues, no less serve as commander in chief!
" as sounding like fumbling, inarticulate, senile man giving a speech full of malaprops." part of the problem is this is how Biden haters have talked about him for 40 years, so it's hard to take those critics seriously because they were always calling Biden a bumbling pathetic moron going back to the Bork fight etc etc
It's like how one reason it was hard for a lot of liberals to take the arguments that what Bill Clinton did with Monica was wrong seriously was it was often made by people who said he was a drug trafficker, and murdered Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton was a lesbian and a satanists etc
Sorry for harping no this again and again, but what do you mean by "taking them seriously"? It's not a rumor-based thing (mostly). It's about what any of us can judge for ourselves based on the very very abundant video evidence of the president. STOU is available for all to watch within a click. Instead of deciding wether to believe the left or right pundits description, why not watch it for yourself? Ditto for all the rest. Of course, we don't always have time to do this, but on issues deemed important enough, shouldn't we? Isn't that the lesson here?
Like Matt I think the constant claims from Biden haters that he was senile that were made since 2019 weren't accurate, he wasn't senile in summer of 2021 etc. What happened was a real decline in the last six months that makes it clear he's not capable of running a vigorous campaign anymore.
So Matt's take is that he was fooled by what the White House was saying, and also by his own biases. Fair enough.
But let's take that first part more seriously. The White House and Democratic politicians have been saying very clearly that Joe Biden is NOT suffering from any age-related decline, and anyone who questions it is being duped by right-wing media. Joe's as good as ever, has more energy than anyone else, etc, etc.
Journalists should feel duped. Because they were. In my understanding of journalism¹, this would lead to hard questions: who knew about Biden's decline then lied about it? Be specific and give names. The public expects some spin; we don't expect lying. If they have misled journalists about this, what else have they not told the truth about? How will journalists hold the powerful -- even powerful Democrats -- accountable?
I'm convinced that the longest lasting and most destructive result of the Trump era will be the loss of trust and ethics in the journalism profession. We need a robust and independent Fourth Estate to subject the powerful to difficult and honest questioning. And we will still need that even after Trump is gone.
¹ My understand of journalism doesn't include off-the-record sit-downs with the most powerful people running our government with promises to never speak of the content, but I guess I'm just naive.
Aside from the broader questions about journalistic integrity and off the record interviews, which other commenters have answered substantively below, I think a big part of the answer here is just the fact that Biden seems to have fallen off the cliff rather rapidly. And the fact that he has always stuttered, frequently gaffed, and kinda slurred sentences made the decline even more apparent. Basically, I think it was kind of hard to tell and there was so much misinformation about it, the age question always felt like a bit of a right wing conspiracy.
Journalists are waking up to this fact now, which is good! It'd be more of a scandal if Axios started publishing a bunch of pieces about Biden's vigor.
My central thesis is that a vigorous and skeptical press makes the Democrats BETTER. Subjecting them to the same level of scrutiny and accountability as Republicans exposes their weaknesses so they can be addressed and fixed. This is the central problem with journalists leaning into their biases instead of fighting them.
The job is harder if you don't acquiesce to "access journalism", but the results are better. Better for the public, better for the Democrats and better for the profession of journalism.
While that seems true, why aren't his aides alerting everyone that they have seen signs of rapid decline? Why did it take a televised faceplant for them to suddenly start leaking things? If his decline is so rapid then why aren't they feverishly considering the 25th amendment before he fully loses it? Trump's staff included people who were working to undermine him in order to keep the country safe, embarrassingly it does not appear that Bidens team shares their patriotism.
“Rapid” means something different when you see someone everyday vs only seeing them occasionally. From the perspective of the staff, he verbally stays the same day-to-day, but for those of us who haven’t seen him much since the SOTU, it’s a big difference.
This comment seems a bit blowhardy on two obvious counts:
1) Trust of journalism has steadily declined since the 90s, in part because conservatives have been systematically discrediting the enterprise since at least the '80s, when I was a kid hearing it on the radio with my (Republican Baptist minister) dad. Back when I wanted to grow up and be, well, what Paul Ryan actually became, essentially (oh, the folly of youth), I already knew by the age of 16 the talking points on the "liberal media," except that I knew the liberal media as Peter Jennings on ABC (RIP, pour one out for one of the greats). Here's a Gallup poll article on it from 2022, and Trump actually briefly bounced the numbers UP before they reverted to trend. https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx
I guess you could argue that there's always farther to go or whatever, but saying "loss of trust and ethics in the journalism profession" is the "longest lasting and most destructive result of the Trump era" is just, I think, flat wrong on the merits. That's a long-time conservative project. I don't agree with the value of the project, but it has been successful, and we should give credit (or blame) where it is due.
2) I think you are underrating the timeline considerations. Age-related decline is one of those things that happens slow-and-then-fast. I deal with a lot of patients in my job who have changes in mental status, and it is a genuinely very hard thing to track, made worse by the fact that people tend to make allowances for stuff that they want to be not true.
Maybe Biden has been enfeebled for a long time; if that reporting comes out, I will be inclined to believe it. But I would be much less surprised to hear that he was kind of an edge case where he sort of had accumulating minor reductions in ability, and people waived it off in various ways, and then he just kind of went off a cliff in the last three or six or twelve months or whatever. I see this happen all the time--an older patient comes in, and we're like, "this person seems really out of it," and the family is like, "well, so-and-so has been a little spacey, but not too bad," and they are just flat wrong: so-and-so is clearly declining, and putting them into the ICU (or whatever health emergency brought them to the hospital) sends them straight over the cliff. The brain has a lot of coping mechanisms, and if you know someone, it's just easy to accept those; it's only when you put stress on the situation that the wheels come off.
I'm pretty off the day-to-day news, and I don't watch TikTok or YouTube, so I don't have any idea what the BiDecline timeline is like. In that sense, I'm a normie. But I sincerely doubt that this is a bunch of malice. I think it's much more pernicious: people don't want to believe a thing like this is happening, especially when the stakes are so high with the election, and they deceive themselves first. Because that's the most obvious way to explain how people who are supposed to be his loved ones and supporters supported Biden going out there to be humiliated in a debate on national television. You lie to to yourself first, and I'm telling you that in this situation that is very easy to do. I see it all the time, and I'm talking on people who are much, much worse, like literally dying, or just had a stroke, or are late-stage dementia (all three of these are references to cases I have seen in just the last six months).
The bottom line, as I have written elsewhere in these forums, is that gerontocracy is bad for precisely these types of reasons--and a million others. But this is just a national-level version of a drama that plays out all the time on a non-national scale, in precisely this way, with aging parents and friends.
I went through # 2 with my father who passed from a combination of Parkinson and Alzheimer's a couple of years past.
His decline was slow and then sudden as you describe. The period of slow change occurred roughly from 08-15: gradual decline in cognitive ability, energy slowing down, slight personality changes (using obscenity after never swearing, a meaner sense of humor, etc.). We tended to dismiss the significance despite the fact our mother, who was the same age showed none of it.
In retrospect, all of us who knew him saw obvious signs of significant decline from 15-19 but all of us tried to diminish the evidence. I remember a conversation me and my sister had about him during Christmas 2018 which was only 5 months before he went off the diving board. Our conversation occurred after a night where he was really out of it. The conversation consisted solely of "he's slowing down, yeah but only a little."
I think "genuinely surprised" would be a stretch, because I work with people in this phase of life often in my job, but this is what I meant about being a "normie." The policy interests that lead me to read Matt's blog are of a more niche variety, so while I follow the national news in print relatively closely, I haven't watched a political performance on TV in, literally, years.
I watched one of the Biden-Trump debates, and I watched the inauguration speech. I think that's it for me and Biden on TV since he was VP. I saw portions of the recent debate because it was on in several of my patients' rooms in the hospital, so I didn't even watch that straight; I just grabbed snippets as I was in and out doing nurse stuff.
So yes, many people in America, including me, were at least somewhat surprised at what we saw and heard on the screen. I take your word that watching speeches from 2016 to 2020 would make it screamingly obvious, but...I didn't do that. And I'm honestly not sure why I would have; politics isn't really my hobby in that particular way, even though I care a lot (and follow closely) on a few specific issues.
Off-record conversations seem fine? Like, if you’re talking to a journalist outside of their professional capacity you ask for it to be off-record to clarify that it’s a personal conversation not a work-related one. I had coffee with John Burn-Murdoch from the FT a month ago and we both clarified that the conversation was off-record at the start; I just wanted to meet the guy and talk shop.
Agreed - If public figures have no ability to speak without it being quotable, that will make them even more guarded and risk averse. Not sure that’s best.
I don't think sitting down with a fellow reporter is on the same level with sitting down (to be spun?) with the most powerful person in Government.
Maybe I'm wrong, and Matt is old friends with Joe from playing golf or going fishing or reminiscing about their favorite parts of Dune, and their private conversations are just a continuation of their friendship and nothing at all to do with how the powerful successfully manipulate their coverage.
I think there a many problems with journalism, but this most definitely isn't one of them. Your complaint seems to rest on two mistaken ideas: 1) off-record conversations are a form of manipulation in a way that on-record conversations are not and 2) journalists are oblivious to such attempts at manipulation. I think the truth is closer to a situation in which interview subjects are spinning journalists constantly whether speaking on or off record (which isn't the same as saying they are lying), and journalists are aware that they are constantly being spun. That's the nature of the game. Interviewees have an agenda. Journalists have an agenda. Readers have an agenda. From this web a story emerges.
BTW people really sneer at access journalism but access is a big part of journalism and buttering people up is part of access.
Can access journalism go too far? Sure. But we actually do want a certain amount of journalistic stenography, puff pieces, etc. This is part of the lubricant that allows the harder hitting journalism to function.
The agenda the journalists should have (in my view) is to hold powerful people accountable and report on their activities honestly. It is my contention that their actual agenda in the post-Trump era has been to try to defeat Trump. That is a laudable goal -- I agree with wanting to beat Trump. But that isn't the job of a journalist.
And by having abandoned the primary role of holding the powerful to account, they have contributed to the current situation. My thesis is that more skeptical reporting during the period of 2020 through June 28th, 2024 would have highlighted this issue with Biden's decline more clearly and on a timeline when something could have been done.
If not for Biden's decision to have a debate prior to the convention, this would have stayed a hidden issue until it was truly too late for any alternative.
But I still don’t get what the harm of the off the record convo is. What harm do you see? It could have been that Matt picked up on Biden’s cognitive problems, in which case, though he would not have been able to say precisely where his concerns came from, he would have been able to pay more attention to the “duck” hypothesis and signal us about it as well. In the event, Biden had a good interview, but that’s not a problem with it being off the record; it’s just the fickle nature of cognitive decline.
If journalists covering the tech sector both owned stock in Microsoft and agreed to meet with its CEO under such conditions so the CEO could spin their story, id think that compromises all their later reporting.
The question really becomes: what else did you miss?
For example, reporter that Hunter is acting as "gatekeeper" to POTUS right now really has me questioning his influence overall on the White House, which we were repeatedly assured was minimal, and an inappropriate thing to ask about.
Also, who is making decisions when Biden is having his senior moments??
Yes, I would also like to know this. It seems like Hunter and Jill Biden are suddenly the real powers behind the throne! That's absurd, and demands investigation. But journalists either can't, or won't, ask the obvious questions here.
Please, someone, get us an interview with one of them.
The problem is EVERYONE knew about Biden's decline even in 2019-20. All you had to do was watch him stumble through his speeches or try to perform on debate stage.
Professional libs and journo types who didn't support Biden in primary openly acknolwedged it.
They shifted only when Biden became the nominee and partisanship took over. They pretended to be concerned again in 2023-24 only to the extent that Biden's age was a political liability, not that the US deserved a president without "senior moments". They have shifted again into an adversarial posture because Biden--in his terrible judgment in even risking a debate-- has exposed their meretriciousness.
For a guy declining so much in 2019-20, he's been a pretty damn good President during his term.
This is why I wrote off all those "Biden is declining" stories until the debate. How do you reconcile that with the results of his presidency? Sadly, post-June 27, I no longer think he will continue to be an effective President for too much longer.
Yes, exactly. On Ukraine alone the Biden administration was showing a lot of leadership in a high stakes and dynamic "hot war" situation. It's not like Biden's presidency has been some kind of quiet period during which there have been no tests of leadership -- quite the opposite, the administration has actually gotten a lot of shit done on both domestic and foreign fronts, in which in turn makes all the Republican critiques of his age for the 2019-early 2024 period seem like so much FUD. The fact that they're correct now isn't due to any kind commitment to accuracy on the part of their critiques, it's more like the way certain commentators are described as predicting 11 of the last 4 recessions.
Or worse: it's as if you keep telling the economy that it's bad when it's actually good and the economy finally says, "Screw you, I'll show you what bad is" and goes into a deep depression just to stick it to all the naysayers.
It seems harder to be honest when a major party has been taken over by fascists with a leaked plan on how to overthrow American democracy. If Republicans were still a normal party it would be easier to condemn.
I agree with you that the job of being honest and holding powerful people accountable is harder when the journalist largely agrees with the powerful and the alternative is bad. However, it is still important to do that job ethically and diligently.
"I'm convinced that the longest lasting and most destructive result of the Trump era will be the loss of trust and ethics in the journalism profession."
Meh.
Google: "journalists and JFK." Was journalism more trustworthy then?
Then Vietnam happened, followed by Watergate. Those events pushed the profession into a better stance regarding holding the powerful to account. This largely held until Obama's rise, though the changes weren't widespread and only visible on the margins. It was the rise of Trump that has taken the profession into some bad ethical positions.
I agree that Vietnam and Watergate made journalism more adversarial with the powers that be and that could be a good thing, as those cases demonstrate. I'm not sure it made them more trustworthy, as from that point on, everything they looked at became Watergate Redux and whenever a journalist looked in the mirror they saw Woodward and Bernstein. See: Whitewater.
But whitewater helps make my point. The public saw something that was thoroughly investigated and decided there wasn’t much there. Clinton was overwhelmingly reelected. Was a good President.
As I understand it, "off the record" doesn't actually apply if the sources were intentionally trying to deceive the journalist. In that case, you're absolutely allowed to burn the source.
I don't assume the powerful choose to sit down with the press in off-the-record conversations to ensure "The Truth" is communicated. Instead, I think they do it to manipulate their coverage.
Plus, per the footnote Matt wrote, the agreement was that Matt would not disclose any of the information provided -- so this isn't about getting the truth out at all.
It's like the advantage of insider trading - the market price ends up being more accurate sooner if insiders are trading; it does so at the expense of outsider investors. When it comes to reporting, though, who loses out if insider journalists have better information?
Not those reading their stories. Not outsider journalists, they generally are trying to approach the news very differently anyway. Insider journalists who aren't given background info? Maybe; this is presumably why "access journalism" is something of a curse. But there are generally limits on how much politicians can tighten access as punishment for negative coverage.
Of course there's some heavy spin on the insider access, but it's the journalist's job to see through that spin, and I think MattY is partly expressing that he's angry at having been spun successfully. The fact that this sort of story is a story at all and is so rare is an indication of how unusual it is to mislead the press so thoroughly.
I think you're seeing the downside with this situation! Insider journalists got handed out bits of information in informal, off the record, but biased conversations providing a sense that "everything is fine" when it wasn't.
But how does the off the record nature contribute to the problem here? If it was on the record, Biden would have been just as lucid with Matt and then we all would have been more fooled, not less.
1. Huge props for writing this article. It’s not a big deal to be wrong if you admit it. As readers, this helps reassure us that you’re not just cynically running propaganda for Biden.
2. I find it hard to believe, though, that the entire prestige media had the same situation as Matt. Surely some people covering the White House beat could’ve asked some more pointed questions instead of yelling “misinformation! cheap fakes!” at every turn? If it wasn’t a conspiracy, it sure seems like a case of everyone knowing they weren’t really doing their jobs.
3. Not so sure it’s bad for Dems *in the long run* if the NYT, MSNBC, etc run stories about Biden’s age. For better or worse, these outlets are seen as part of the Dems’ brand. Blatant dishonesty very well might hurt the Dems.
If you start from the assumption that journalists are actually just gossipy people who write decently, you never have any trouble understanding the media. You don’t wonder if there’s a conspiracy and you don’t wonder how they get things wrong,
Prioritising quality of writing over quality of information communicated in the writing has been a problem with the written media for as long as I can remember. I'd much rather read something where the writing is a bit dull, but the content is insightful and informative than to read a wonderfully-written take whose content is exactly the same as the ten other takes on the same thing.
With so many articles, I often wish they’d just give me the chart and none of the words. It was so annoying by searching for French election results yesterday - it felt like looking up a recipe where I had to read the person’s diary entry before I found what I wanted.
I heard recently about some website that lets you put in the URL of a recipe, and it returns just the recipe, with all the filler stripped out.
Surprisingly, ChatGPT is actually now pretty good at doing recipes without all that filler, especially for moderately standard dishes. Even a year and a half ago, it was quite bad, making some suggestions that looked like recipe text but were bad ideas, but now it's decent.
Didn't the NYT write a a lot of stories about Biden's age? Biden, Stancil, general Biden fans, etc have been complaining about the focus on Biden's age for quite a while now. There was a pile on Astead Herndon on twitter for focusing on Biden's age too much
Yes, there were probably many stories about how Biden's age might affect his performance. But my impression is that these stories were outliers -- the general consensus at the NYT appeared to be that Biden's apparent fumbles could be explained as a new "style" or that they were simply right-wing misinformation. For every story that painted a mildly negative picture of Biden's age, there were probably two stories that gave readers the impression that the age problems were way overblown. And in my opinion none of those stories prepared readers for the extent of Biden's decline.
I don't know, there were plenty of articles suggesting that Biden *might* be too old. I think his staff just did a really good job of hiding this from the media.
I don't think you should be too hard on yourself for seeing the rabbit until the debate. There was genuinely a bad-faith multi-year effort to portray Biden as senile carried out by the same set of bozos we've been fighting politically since Gingrich was speaker. That we not only reject what those bozos say out of hand, but weigh the opposite of what they are claiming more heavily because the bozos are deeply and irredeemably dishonest is a heuristic that has worked out pretty well. It's a consequence of the GOP being deeply and at times hysterically bad faith almost all the time.
Also, I don't think you need to feel hurt by this since you (especially in your Politix chats with Beutler) were very clear about the possibility of this being a duck/rabbit situation, and that while you thought the evidence pointed to rabbit, if certain things failed to materialize (like an energetic campaign) it could in fact be a duck. Nate Silver wrote the silver lining of an early debate could be to show early enough that this was a duck for sure, and here we are.
That heuristic sounds well and good until you realize that it's the same one Republicans use to dismiss criticisms of Trump. Or as it's called on LessWrong: reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Just because your political opponents argue A, that doesn't automatically mean not-A.
I think it's a decent heuristic to discount what your opponents in a zero-sum game like politics are saying, but a very bad heuristic to go further and promote the opposite. As in, "Republicans/Democrats are for it, therefore it must be bad" leads to bad policy and bad epistemics.
There were BROAD concerns about someone Biden's age being president and the public routinely said it was one of their biggest issues. Never actually looking to see if its true because Republicans have been talking about it seems like a terrible approach to anything.
That suggests that any voter who thinks that Democrats were wasting their time talking about Russian interference and corruption are probably right to stop listening to Democrats talk about how bad Trump is...
I'm not saying you should give every possible accusation equal credibility, but Biden is in his 80s and noticeably slower than he was as VP. It seems very reasonable to give slightly more credence to age concerns and verify regularly that there isn't an issue. This situation is why you do that!
It's almost as if a drawing of a duck were not actually a duck, and a drawing of a rabbit were not actually a rabbit, and that the metaphor is about the drawing, not professor McGonagall transfiguring from a rabbit to a duck.
They are talking about evidence of rabbit vs evidence of duck. The actual thing doesn't change but when you don't know which one it is the evidence changes which one you think is more likely.
The difference would be that Biden's age was the main and most effective attack vector against him during the 2020 primary, and that he wasn't doing especially well because of this until South Carolina. And this is back when he was actually somewhat decent speaking publically.
After that there was a pretty clear circling of the wagons among media and senior Dems, so as not to damage Biden at all going into his match up with Trump. But everyone already knew he was too old for two terms. Why is it bad faith when Republicans do it, when his interparty rivals could see the exact same reality for four years?
Is this a joke? The James Comer-led "impeachment investigation" that has turned up exclusively evidence that Joe Biden is very generous with his family even though he doesn't have all that much money is a pretty good place to start.
I think the generosity that Biden extends his family is allowing them to make serious money off their relationship with him. I don't think it rises to the point of criminality or close to the modern standard of impeachment, but its definitely doesn't smell great.
*and for the love, please don't whatabout this. Trump is clearly worse on all counts, but can we have a slightly better standard than the worst person to be a modern president.
You have not been following this story then. What I am referring to is Joe loaning his son money to buy a car, and Comer trying to tell us that Hunter paying him back was “laundered money from a foreign enemy”.
Matt, you and me misjudged. I spent a career as a geriatric physician, and I thought it absurd that people were diagnosing dementia by media. I saw Joe Biden being an exceptional candidate in 2020 and winning both the primary and general election debates.
Although, I am still not going to diagnose something as significant and degenerating as Alzheimer's, you don't need to be a doctor to note that the Biden of 2024 is far from the Biden of 2020 and should be enjoying his grandchildren and the ocean and not running a country.
The NYTimes today is showing some hope that the campaign for Biden to resign is gaining momentum with key leaders, including Jeffries in the HOR, now pushing for him to step aside.
I had reached the point where I was going to write in Dean Phillips, simply because if Biden stays, he is emulating the head of MAGA whose raison d'etre is his own fortune, not that of the country.
I hope he does not anoint the equally unpopular Harris, but leave it to the Democratic voters to decide.
I had a Facebook group Roy Cooper for president and I only hope my NC centrist Democrat governor who won in 2016 and 2020, despite Trump winning the state, ups and declares. Governors have traditionally done better than VPs or Senators and Polis and Whitmer are also mentioned and would be great candidates.
It definitely seems like Biden has declined since 2020 but I think some people are misremembering a lot of that primary.
Biden as a great candidate seems like a retcon. His debate performance were not great for the most part. He had a very strange record player answer that ramped up age concerns.
He benefited quite heavily from a failure of Bernie and Warren to consolidate support. At a moment when it seemed like they might ramp up attacks on him they had a conflict between them and got distracted some how.
He was VP to a popular president and it seems like that carried him to victory.
I think in retrospect we have to realize that Biden benefited tremendously from not needing to campaign due to Covid. It seems pretty obvious that Biden has declined not just since 2020 but seemingly just the last 6 months. But I suspect if he ran a traditional campaign in 2020 a lot more questions would be ask about whether Biden was up for the job.
So I think someone like Josh Barro has some credibility right now.
And I agree he's exceeded my expectations. But I think in 2020 it was likely his campaign schedule would be more limited compared to other candidates but maybe less limited than now. And there were questions about his age during the primaries. My point being, the age attacks would have been more unfair in 2020, but I think they still would have occurred and likely harmed his standing with swing voters.
We can't rule out the possibility that he had Covid during the debate and the rapid antigen test simply wasn't picking it up yet.
It could give Biden a great way to save face. He could say everybody agrees I've been a great president but unfortunately there now seems to be a distinct possibility that Covid wrecked my brain. Like what they just reported on the cover of Science last week:
And hey by the way everybody might want to go get a booster dose so it doesn't wreck your brain next. That would be a pretty graceful way of bowing out.
The hypothesis that Covid is causing Biden's neurological dysfunction offers an experimentally testable prediction: he might get better if he takes an antihistamine, such as over-the-counter Pepcid (famotidine)
Well I watched several debates, there were 11 Democratic primary debates, and my subjective opinion was he did well, at any rate there was no clear evidence to me that he was cognitively challenged in the way he is today.
I don't know what a retcon is. Sounds like a partisan word for people you dont like.
I agree that the moderates were more united than the progressive and Biden benefitted from the support of Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and eventually Bloomberg.
The real problem with the progressives, as in 2016 was that they are never able to get the black vote which is mandatory to win the Democratic primary. Bernie's successes were largely limited to mostly white states although he was strong with Hispanics in Nevada.
Sorry, I understand that the "con" part of "retcon" might make it seem partisan in the political context but it is short for "Retroactive Continuity". Mostly a term from entertainment media. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retcon
My contention is just that Biden was not really an "exceptional" candidate in the minds of most people in 2020. He benefited a lot from a large field that didn't consolidate until it did behind him after he had some disappointing finishes in early contests.
Being the VP to Obama and perceived as electable were most of what his candidate was built on and I think people tend to back fill other ideas on to his success instead.
OK, thanks for a new word. I agree he was not exceptional. Certainly no Barack Obama or even Bill Clinton, but his political instincts were pretty good, and he did nothing to flub the primary as opposed to say Harris who seemed fairly unlikable or Bloomberg who lived up to his buying the election criticisms. He had less money than most candidates and started out slow, but I think he had more credibility with black voters and, yes, some of that was his association with Obama and the past Dem establishment. Also, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, he did not suffer from the "blueblood" elite perception so kept enough working class cred, Amtrak Joe, to keep the Midwest.
The killer for me TBH was re-watching some clips of the 2020 debates between him and Trump and I thought there was a bigger gap between 2024 Joe and 2020 Joe than there was between 2020 Joe and the guy who cheerfully wiped the floor with Paul Ryan in 2012
Biden in 2019-20---had declined considerably from even 2016. Until Biden got the nomination, professional liberals and lefty journos freely acknowledged this.
I disagree at least from personal experience. Biden was my last choice in 2020 and i was angry at how well he did in the primary debates and how lively he was despite how old i felt he should look. To your point, yes Biden won because he was the most popular moderate and the moderates realized they couldn't split the vote. Similarly he won't the general because Trump's agenda is poison to the average American. But he was still good at playing the part and as Matt notes, swing state Dems were the first to support him and we saw that bear out with solid polling from the start in those states that we might have had to build up with other candidates. Biden's popularity was definitely tied to Obama's but I also don't see that as an illegitimate kind of popularity to have. Seems a bit like another duck-rabbit illusion.
As I remember, professional libs were wondering when another candidate would catch fire because Biden seemed lackluster, old and out of touch and everything in the primary debates underscored that.
Biden won because of residual loyalty of SC blacks underscored by Clyburns endorsement in exchange for Biden's promise to appoint a black woman to #2. And bc fearing a Bernie Sanders win, Obama leaned on Kombucha, Warren, and Buttigieg to get behind Biden after SC. It was in spite of Biden's performance not because of it.
Have you ever read an actuarial table? The risk a man dying at age 82 is 7.8% and the risk of dying at age 86 is 11.7%. I didn’t go to medical school, but I’ve been told there are plenty of morbidities, including but not limited to stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia, that can sap mental performance long before they kill you.
You didn’t even need to look at Biden to know there was a huge risk of death or decline during his second term.
Yes, I checked them recently, seems a little unfriendly the way you ask. I mentioned nothing about dying, and I assume you are talking about one year survival with your figures which sound right. I looked at five year survival and the risk of dying within five years at age 80 is 31%. (https://www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying)
But nobody was speaking about dying but about cognition and that is dramatic. There are many causes of dementia, Alzheimer's represents about 60% of dementias, and its incidence approaches 50% by age 90.
My phrasing was forceful because your “expertise” concealed the forest with the trees. It is never a safe bet to assume that an 81 year old will maintain high levels of executive functioning for four years.
Also, if you don’t understand the effect of dying on cognition and job performance, I’m not sure there’s any helping you.
Again, I feel you are being very hostile. I am a stranger you dont know so sarcastic things like "if you don’t understand the effect of dying on cognition and job performance, I’m not sure there’s any helping you." is that how you talk to people.
I am less worried about dying because if somebody dies there is a clear progression to VP. But I am not defending Biden. I wouldnt think anybody 81 should run for president other than maybe Mel Brooks.
As a geriatric physician, you have a far better calibrated sense of aging than anyone who does not professionally interact with elderly people. I am curious how you view the differential between your patients and colleagues, i.e., physicians who are geriatrics compared to geriatrics in general.
I know a lot of MD and PhD-having people who stay very sharp mentally well into their 80's (because I interact with them professionally). Four of my close relatives lived to over 100 (plus a bunch who made it past 90) and they were quite sharp—for their age—right up until they died. In my totally subjective opinion, what separated them from the relatives who died in their 80's was boredom and lack of stimulation, often after their spouse passed. I saw the same thing when I was a kid and spent a bunch of time in nursing homes, where people would hang on, watching paint dry, until their families visited and then passed away days later.
I'm curious if you think (or if you know of evidence) that my anecdotal observation is true and that, more-or-less, exercising your brain is a necessary part of longevity. Because my fear is not that Biden will die, but that he will be like the 95 year-old Nobel laureates who shuffle around the hallways keeping themselves busy and being "really sharp for their age".
PS I cannot wrap my head polls showing Robinson and Stein in a dead heat.
Bubbles it is interesting and there are many studies that show a correlation between lower education and Alzheimer's, though others don't. I could not find a precise number on how much that effect is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3193875/ perhaps using your mind is protective though I have seen judges, doctors, professors with Alzheimer's. It might also just be that people with high cognitive function can mask it better.
I agree with your fears of Biden. It is one thing just to die which is a high risk at that age, but then you have an orderly succession process, but people with AD can hang on 5-15 years. Most of what I read suggests Reagan had AD in his last years in office and Nancy Reagan was running the White House.
I never attacked you personally, only your argument. And we both agree that supporting an 81 year old presidential candidate is, prima facie, dubious.
Your splitting of hairs between risk of death and risk of decline continues to rankle me. Relatively few people drop dead of a heart attack while still at 95% plus mentally. Risk of death is a very lower bound estimate of the risk of something going badly wrong. And the risk of Biden dying between now and inauguration day 2028 is almost 40%.
Accordingly, your squeamishness about diagnosing via tv strikes me as using “best practices” to deflect the obvious.
Tone policing is good for the same reason regular policing is good: if it doesn’t happen things descend into chaos, and then there goes the neighborhood.
Unsafe, when somebody is rude to you or just sarcastic in this case, I feel I should mention it. Imo it is not that important who wins an argument, but it is more important how people treat each other. I started this particular thread and if people disagree fine, I can learn something. If they want to be hostile, I feel it more important to make note of that than just ignore it.
Let me amend that figure. I tried to re find the data. The rate for AD goes up strongly with age and at >85 it is 33%. I dont see any figures for 90 but maybe somewhere towards 40%, But the other dementias tend to be more quickly fatal, so as the population gets older the percent AD probably goes up, eg ALS people dont live that long. It might only be 50% total dementia by age 90. https://cfah.org/alzheimers-dementia-statistics/
Most doctors are more familiar with the standard of care than actuarial statistics. That may me fine clinically, but it cuts against deferring to medical “experts” in actuarial debates.
I'm sorry--I get you find diagnosis by TV annoying--- but this is ridiculous. The decline of even the 2020 Biden from even 2016, the last full year when he was vice president, was screamingly obvious. No, I don't need to be a geriatric doctor to notice and comment on this either.
Red flag is wrong term. Biden seemed old, out of touch and uninspiring from the get go.
Between the bumbling debate performances, the slipping false teeth, the fact that Biden needed a low level staffer to hold his hand everywhere to prevent him from wandering off, the fact that when Biden did walk he shuffled like an old man, the fact that the whole 2020 campaign was just friendly interviews and set piece speeches and interactions.
Biden looked like a front man for anti Trump coalition who was being propped up. In 2020 he could get away with that. 2024 doubtful. I don't think America wants a Weekend at Bernie's president
"My guess is that the rigors of the campaign schedule combined with the linear progression of time and the trauma of Hunter’s legal problems made things much worse."
I reviewed Biden's medical reports and there was a significant change between 2023 and 2024. The big ones I saw were 1) his team specifically ruled out Parkinson's and 2) he restarted CPAP.
Why is this important? Because they could not plausibly just say his gait issues are orthopedic in 2024, they had to specifically investigate neurologic issues. And they likely started him on CPAP because they noticed him dragging, which can be a sign of chronic sleep deprivation.
2024 Biden can't hack the schedule of the presidency, the rigors of the campaign, and adversarial interviews that require extemporaneous speaking. He's not DANGEROUS as President but he's also not showing that he will have good enough judgment to step down if he becomes incapacitated. And his inner circle also isn't showing insight that they'd support 25A at that point (though I trust them to do that more than Trump's flunkies, who were endlessly craven over 4 years).
I like Biden. I think he was the right guy in 2020 and has earned the right to run again *if* he was the same candidate in 2020. He's not, though. He may feel it's unfair, but the presidency doesn't care about your sleep requirements or age. So I wrote to my federal electeds and requested they do what they can to replace him as our candidate. It sucks that Dems are left doing the mature thing to clean up the immaturity of Republicans. (The unfitness of the Republican candidate is the reason victory is so critical, especially in light of the SCOTUS immunity ruling.)
Yup, though not a neurologist or geriatrician. This is more a general medical take based on reading and writing enough notes to look between the lines. There are a few more docs on here who may have closer expertise and I'd love to hear what they think, even if they disagree.
I think Biden's team has been telling the truth that it's a sleep deprivation issue. It also doesn't matter because we now see that his worse day is no longer good enough to run for president.
I’m an internist with additional training in psychiatry and I largely agree. I’m a little suspicious of restarting CPAP - either you have obstructive sleep apnea or you don’t. If the CPAP recommendation is equivocal, that sounds more like grasping at straws - it couldn’t hurt and it might help
Seems that he had a FESS that helped. But his doctor suspected that the condition regressed and repeated a sleep study, which was positive. Sounds like mask fit has been a problem and might still be suboptimal.
Also explains where his atrial fib likely came from. The OSA dates back to at least '08. Which leads to one other possibility, that his asymptomatic atrial fib has evolved into a sick sinus syndrome and that his freezes are some sort of transient hypoperfusion. But I'm sure he'd be admitted if that's the case. There's just no mention of a Holter monitor or similar to formally exclude.
The report is well-written and does a good job of justifying its conclusions. They do mention doing polysomnography to document the recurrence of sleep apnea. I would note, however, that in the discussion of his neurological exam that there was no specific mention of cognitive impairment as something that was ruled out. It’s also unusual to have chronic atrial fibrillation without needing medication to control AV conduction and heart rate; his AV conduction may be unstable with periods of tachycardia or bradycardia. There’s no mention of a Holter monitor.
Agree they're missing any neuropsychological testing even though the "man, camera" screening won't likely find anything. But maybe the president, if anyone, would merit advanced testing.
I have seen patients who are naturally rate-controlled but a diseased conduction system is still a diseased conduction system. Kind of wondering if they'd put him on something if he was younger. But HR and BP are pretty decent. Rate and rhythm therapies seem to go in and out of fashion depending on whether cardiologists cooked up a cool study acronym so I'm out of my depth there.
I think we both agree that everything in there is truthful but there could certainly be some strategic omissions. After all, this isn't a full medical record. You can tell because it doesn't have an additional 12 pages of EMR-generated garbage added.
If they haven’t already, I would encourage this crowd to listen to Ezra Klein’s recent show with Elaina Plott Calabro, one of the journalists who have recently done deeply reported pieces with Kamala Harris. I left that piece thinking that Harris has real potential to beat Trump, but only if she can get out of her own head and go back to being the tough, sorry, smart on crime prosecutor she once was. (A point Matt has also made). Has the “it’s racist to want to have public order” crowd been cowed enough to enable her to do that? I don’t know, but a Harris win seems possible.
What if he’s competent 95% of the time and the rest of the administration takes care of things the other 5%? Especially if he’s doing particularly creatively good things others wouldn’t duplicate during some of that good time? Presumably, no action or comment needed then.
But what about when it slips to 90% of the time, and then 85% or the time, and then 80% of the time? At each moment, it might not seem like enough has changed for this to be the moment to act. And until the moment to actually act, you don’t want to be actively raising concerns and showing a divided administration, either for international or domestic audiences.
It was a really insightful interview but I still feel as though Harris is just unlikeable in the way Hillary Clinton was to many people. Even when she is on point, her voice and affect can be grating.
I get that may seem sexist but I really think it's a "her" problem.
I don't think Clinton has a history of being afraid to say the wrong thing in public. Remember "those jobs are not coming back"? But then I don't think Kerry came across as phony or insincere either (a bit stiff, sure).
No, it’s definitely sexist. That’s not a reason why you should like her of course, to each its own unavoidably. But she’s good at articulating the points Biden now seems fairly incapable to state clearly. Calabro has a good analysis of when she’s most effective.
I think when you say that *even when she's on point* her voice and affect are grating, it suggests that you dislike her for totally aesthetic reasons which are very difficult to separate from her sex.
The problem with citing pre-2013 Democratic party messaging is it involves denying the Democratic party has in any way changed its view on the legitimacy of policing and border enforcement over the last decade. It's like saying in 1968, well Humphrey just has to embrace the wartime presidency Truman showed us in the Korean war and FDR showed in WW2. By the time you have to ask people to do this, the national party has clearly changed a bit and wants something else. If it were an easy ask without alienating any other faction, the politician would already be doing it.
If you’re talking about elites- yes that is absolutely true. But I don’t think the rank and file has changed all that much. We won’t know unless we try.
If the party's elites matter enough to force Biden out when he has the vast majority delegates lined up for a normal convention by the current primary's standards, do they suddenly matter less when it comes time to set Harris's campaign message?
Consider the border issue. Biden had to spend months from December to last month, first setting up a deal debacle with Ukraine hawks among the GOP's senators disconnected from the GOP House, then denying the Speaker's claims he had the power to act on the border, and then finally signing executive order on the border. Even then, this 6 month process comes after years of being the most unpopular immigration president in modern history and had to be shortly accompanied a new parole-in-place program. It looks like the party's elites matter a lot when handling even the most unpopular part of Biden's presidency. What evidence is there that this changes with Harris? Her career suggests she's even less willing to piss off people in the party than Biden!
What is the evidence for associating support for immigrants with “elites”? The people most strongly supportive of immigrants are immigrants themselves, children of immigrants, and young college-educated people. Are this last group your idea of elites?
Many older immigrants are not happy with Biden's asylum policy and its burden on municipal government. Nonetheless, party leaders decided it was the best way to reflect a pro-immigration cause through executive policy. We can argue exactly how party elites (and frankly, party leader or party man might be a better term for this) contrast with the overall party constituents. But my point is it will not change one way or another under Harris. Any politicking to insist it will because she was an attorney general is just that, politicking.
Oh I think making Harris the president today is the right thing to do if Biden is unfit to normally campaign (and thus unfit to govern.) That's before we get into polling. I just think the eventual turn rightward in the road for Democrats nationally isn't coming until they lose a series of presidential races like they did before Bill Clinton stepped up. Wishing for a turn rightward on the merits or the appearance of it to deceive swing voters, it seems like that turns one right back to the problems that produced the cartel dynamics around discussing Biden's condition to begin with.
I listened to that podcast and concluded that Harris was toast due to (amongst other things) some really really bad timing. I think Ezra's take from the show is correct that if you could get a tough-on-crime former prosecutor to run now that would be great.
But Harris is disconnected from that identity, and I fear that if she tries to get it back now (when it would be useful) it's an easy attack that she's a weather vane - even if tough on crime really is who she is.
I read the transcript for the interview, maybe it’s better in audio but the contempt Elaina seemed to have for the VP (perhaps because she didn’t go to Yale like her) stood out in the text, particularly her assertion that the VP is incapable of making grand statements.
The Joe Biden of the debate reminded me my grandad a few months before he passed. He was stumbling with his words, couldn’t find answers or responses and was weirdly stiff.
I remember our last conversation. He was unusually lucid. He smiled and we talked about going fishing on his boat (he had sold the boat years ago and was obviously in no shape to take her out now). We talked about what fish we should catch up on Sardis lake and maybe we would fry up some catfish. I’ve never had to fight back tears so hard in my entire life. Toward the end he just got quiet and stared off into the distance. I held his hand and gave him his sippy cup of water. This war vet who taught me how to shoot a rifle, fish and start a camp fire. Hell, it makes me emotional to write about it now.
What I’m not seeing covered is the deeply real emotional response Joe’s appearance created for some Americans. It’s not just “old man is old!” Or “shitlib lost his marbles!” It’s “my god, someone help this man and stop this madness. Let him be with his family and spend his remaining days in peace”.
I don’t know, as mad as I am at Joe Biden and the cover up squad I’m also just sad. I’m sad for him, his family and what this whole situation is costing everyone.
This is part of the reason I support age (or term) limits for SCOTUS. I feel very bad that Ginsburg had to stay on the court in terrible condition, for example.
I agree, it was heart wrenching to watch. I watched my father decline similarly and I cannot for the life of me understand how Biden’s family could have allowed him to partake in really, such a humiliating experience.
I shouldn’t project too much but having addiction and mental illness in my family I’m pretty sure I know the Hunter Biden angle here. It’s really well captured by Kendall Roy in Succession “Without this…I don’t know what I am for really”. Addicts will often threaten their loved ones with the dark future that will exist if they do not get what they want. It’s a lack of emotional sobriety that can perpetuate even after years of sobriety from external chemical abuse.
Of course the usual corrupt business and political interests probably exist too but my guess is that Hunters appeals that land most effectively with his dad are of the Kendall Roy variety.
Oh I think it’s all of that plus the fear that he will back slide into drug abuse (if he hasn’t already) if he doesn’t have White House intrigue to keep him busy. The number one symptom of addiction is a blinding selfishness that swallows everything in your life into a yawning black hole. It’s deeper than a chemical problem, it’s a crisis of being.
I don't mean to be glib here. I have a lot of sympathy for Biden and I am incredibly thankful of the work he's done. I am less sympathetic to his family members who seem to be telling him to keep putting himself through this.
I'd like to think he has people around him who should have helped him get to "I'm going to have one good term and go out on a high note" - to ask him to get up now and say "I thought I had another one in me, I'm cooked, I gotta pass this torch" - that's asking a lot of anyone.
Do you want to know why most Americans thought Biden was too old at the beginning of the year? It's because he is too old! Like seriously I do not understand why anyone is surprised by this! It's like the commentariat has never been around a person in their 80s before.
Your last sentence is why I didn't worry about Biden's age as much as some people. I have been around a lot of people in their 80s, many of whom are extremely cogent and analyze and think about things much more deeply than those on their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It is also why I have become so discouraged about my physical ailments - I see people who are 25 or 30 years older than me moving around with more ease. My spouse says the sample of people I am around is not average, and it appears he is correct.
Two things: 1. Variation is enormous 2. You rarely if ever see the impressive 80-year-olds in a very very high stress job.
The point is not that it’s an irrefutable premise that being 80 is necessarily too old to handle the presidency, but it *is* a very very strong prior to that effect meaning to your presumption should be that he is too old unless consistently proven otherwise.
I think there are quite a few people who are very capable well into their 80s probably many more so than I am! But they are the exception and in my experience even the most capable would not be my first choice to be the president of the United States and I think most Americans realize that.
I think many people shared/shares my view, ”Yes he is too old but the other guy is a fascist, rapist and traitor”. Still not great to have a too old president but better than the alternative. I wish Biden would drop out, both so that we can have a better president and so that the fascist doesn’t win.
The thing is, on top of all that.... the other guy is ALSO TOO OLD. He makes many cognitive errors. Constantly. Some of them are because he has always been a bit of a moron, but some of them are obvious cognitive decline.
It is just very frustrating to watch people ignore this.
It’s not about the number, it’s about the capability. Bernie is a year older than Biden, but whatever you think of his politics, it seems clear to me the Bernie retains far more of his capabilities and fire than Biden does. People progress through these things at different rates.
One question - what have we actually seen from Bernie in the past year? One of the things that seems important in the Biden issue is that the downturn can actually be pretty quick when it happens.
There's a difference between old and senile. Biden in 2020 was old, but he still proved to be an extremely effective president. Recently he actually visited Israel and seemed fine. His SOTU seemed fine. But at some point he crossed the line to senile.
People should ask themselves when they first lost confidence in Joe.
For the last 3 years, I couldn't stop pondering this: If Joe was an Uber driver who showed up to pick me up, I'd feel nervous and offer to drive. "Get in the back seat and take a load off. It's ok, I'll do it".
It's wild that this guy wouldn't be trusted to drive a car but he's the 1 person out of 300 M we let run the place.
I've been holding my breath every time Biden spoke in public for 4+ years, just hoping he wouldn't collapse.
I white-knuckled my way through his 2020 debate with Bernie, so it started before then.
I maybe can stand in for a less-engaged voter on this because, while I am very politically engaged, I have an extreme text bias in media consumption and never watch video of anything.
I had tuned out all the Biden-is-too-old content as the same partisan noise we'd heard for 5 years already, while the Biden administration had done a good job in my view. It wasn't until the debate - which I actually watched for once - that I saw how old he looked and sounded.
It would have made a difference if any of my print sources, including Matt, had seriously covered age-related decline. Although I don't really see it as Matt's lane to break stories. More like NYT or another news source - Politico, WSJ, etc., where were they?
The wsj thing was weird because they interviewed a lot of Dems for that piece but basically didn't quote any of them. So on top of any regular "Biden is fine!" responses there were a lot of Dem electeds who replied with "I told them he was fit as a fiddle and they didn't quote me!"
The WSJ piece was bad for reasons you give, Adam. The Robert Hur report (even if true) was a scandalous abuse of his role. It's understandable that people on our side dismissed them.
But so what? Nothing would have changed, except for a few more Ezra Klein columns. We needed a shocking event to crystallize concerns. We got that on June 27. And even that may not be enough to get Biden to step aside.
"The Robert Hur report (even if true) was a scandalous abuse of his role."
It was still a scandalous abuse of his role to report the truth!?!
You're saying that if he had serious concerns about Biden, he should have said nothing? How would you feel about someone saying that about a report on Trump, because it seems very partisan brain to me?
Do you think those same Dem electeds who replied with "I told them he was fit as a fiddle and they didn't quote me!" are still unhappy that they didn't get quoted in the piece?
Genuinely a good question lol. In the end many of them seem to have lucked out (but I guess the situation also raises questions about the frequency of debate-like episodes, how often those electeds speak with him, and the rate of Biden's decline)
This is the problem with the "a bad night" argument. There are only a few moments in the campaign when you can grab people's attention and change the dynamics. This debate was it. I mean, this was the intention of the Biden campaign when they took the unprecedented step of calling for a June debate. They thought the campaign was getting frozen with Trump slightly in the lead and they wanted to shake things up and change the dynamic.
And it blew up in their faces. So how do they get another chance to do that? The convention? Yawn. Another debate in October? (Assuming Trump agrees.) I'm not seeing it. Paid ads/rallies/sit down interviews with Jon Stewart or whoever? Nope.
They had one opportunity to change the narrative of the campaign and that chance was lost.
I'm also a text majority consumer of media but I really don't get this comment: "Although I don't really see it as Matt's lane to break stories. More like NYT or another news source - Politico, WSJ, etc., where were they?"
The establishment media has been running "Biden is too old pieces" for the better part of 18 months now. Biden's age concerns have quite possibly been the second most covered story after AI in the last 18 months.
They’re very much covering the *concerns*, but not so much covering the actual *age* and related issues. It’s like the coverage they used to do of global warming where it was all about what voters think, and not about what was actually happening. (They’ve now gone a bit too far the other way on climate coverage, always inserting a sentence that says that 1.5 degrees is the number scientists say is a magic cutoff.)
I don't know if I ever thought about the question, because I see the executive branch as a team effort, and while the person on top obviously matters, that person isn't everything to the branch.
But others have made a convincing case that "being president" and "running for president" are two very different things, and it's clear that my confidence in the latter fell considerably after the debate.
I do think that is largely true, but from how I understand the presidency, it is really a job of processing a bunch of information from a lot of different people and making decisions based on that information. You can be advised on which decision to make, and 99% of the executive duties are delegated to other people, but that 1% is extremely important and entirely reliant on the president.
Ok but you realize that saying he’s always been incapable isn’t a convincing argument at this particular juncture? If you thought it before of course you’d keep believing it.
"Incapable" is not the right word. "Underpowered" and "high risk" would be more accurate.
Bu the debate was a definite game-changer.
A year ago, I just wanted him to not run for a second term.
After he chose to ran, my dream scenario was him telling the world that he was replacing Kamala with someone like Josh Shapiro, and that he would step down in 12-18 months after re-election and let Shapiro have the job.
But after that last debate, it changed to "get out now".
Since I live in California, my vote doesn't matter. If Biden chooses to stay on the ticket, it will show such terrible judgement and character that I'll leave it blank.
Well, when we’re watching Trump win the popular vote for the first time, at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I had to vote for someone I wasn’t enthusiastic about.
I'd be a bit nervous if FDR showed up to drive my cab too considering his body didn't work. But he still beat the Nazis. Driving a car and being president just aren't very related skills.
On a side note, Trump couldn't pass a background check to be hired as a manager at IHOP, but he still might become president.
Matt, don't feel bad for deciding that you were wrong. No one likes being wrong, but every fallible human is wrong at some point--I know I've had my fair share of wrongness about American politics. But many humans don't have the humility to admit that they were wrong. Many humans are also afraid to offer their takes out of fear of being wrong. I'm glad you're giving us your takes on a regular schedule and continue to look forward to it, even if you decide later that some of your takes were wrong.
Want to second this: the world is complicated and anyone who takes a view of high-uncertainty issues will be wrong a lot of the time even if their overall hit rate is good. The important thing is being able to take in new evidence and self-correct.
Matt definitely has more integrity than most take slingers. Though he is sometimes afraid to rock the center left boat, he rarely gets the facts wrong.
It is astonishing to me that Democrats are obsessed with "how do we win in November" when we are literally without a capable president day to day, at this moment. The idea that the country is being run by the president's family, including his felonious son who doesn't have and could never qualify for a security clearance, is hair-raising. The president needs to be gotten out of there now. Kamala needs to get in there now. Maybe this will give her a chance to show that she has political qualities that so far have not been apparent., but that's incidental; a functioning government now, and a functional opposition party later, are the only important things. This is so obvious, and yet the press, the party, seem to be oblivious to it. The lack of patriotism from people who have taken constitutional oaths is unspeakable.
Is there evidence Biden isn’t capable of being president day-to-day? Sure the debate was bad but that say very little about his ability to do the job. Caveating that obviously a younger president would be all else equal better.
I think the issue is less day to day than the out of the ordinary. There have been several reports (backed up by things Biden himself has said) that Biden works ok during normal business hours, but he starts slipping outside of those hours. An emergency that requires the president's attention at 9 pm isn't a day-to-day thing, but it is absolutely a thing a president needs to be capable of!
It’s for if the president is incapacitated. But Biden isn’t incapacitated. I want him out of there too but the only way to “get him out of there” is to convince him to leave and no one can make him choose to be convinced if he’s not.
But he clearly is incapacitated a decent amount of the time as we all saw from the debate. That was actually an event scheduled months in advance that was critical for the campaign and that the Biden team knew and treated as critical. Biden had the best possible preparation! And a capacitated Biden still couldn’t show up!
Sorry, I wasn't clear. "Incapacitated" would mean, like, he's in a coma and unable to send "his written declaration that no inability exists." If he does send a written declaration, then it comes down to Congress, which would need a 2/3 vote to remove him. Ain't happening. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-xxv
It doesn't matter whether it is or ain't gonna happen. The plausible *threat* of invoking the 25th Amendment could convince Jill Biden to back away from the puppet strings of power.
Agreed! Moreover, a secondary utility of the 25th Amendment is that if the VP and cabinet can plausibly *threaten* to invoke it then the saber-rattling can serve as a check-and-balance on the president's (or the president's family's) range of options.
I feel Team Biden is spinning a false narrative about him winning in 2020 by himself. The Dem establishment helped him a lot. He had a string of weak primary results, then won S Carolina aided by an endorsement from Clyburn, and then the field was cleared for him while he still had nowhere close to 50% of the delegates.
It strikes me as an effort to undermine those advocating for him to step down on false grounds and therefore only strengthens my belief that he should in fact step down. If you have a strong true case, you don't push a sketchy case like they seem to me to be.
Sure, but likely in a less dominant fashion and potentially in a way that encourages Klobuchar/Pete to stay in the race and split the Super Tuesday vote.
I appreciate the mea culpa, it will make me trust you more in future.
However, you are still not engaging with the substantive reason it’s bad to have a president with diminished (and rapidly diminishing) capacities. It’s not that he might lose the election, it’s that he might start a war, or fail to avoid one.
Suppose Russia fires a missile at a supply base in Poland. Or China blockades Taiwan. Etc. In situations like this, it’s very easy to imagine how the US could get drawn into a shooting war, and the personal capacity of the president to make difficult decisions and accurately communicate their thoughts becomes paramount.
For instance, one way to deescalate situations like the ones I described is for the president to get on the phone with Putin or Xi, and talk the situation out. Advisors can’t do this for him. It seems clear that Biden isn’t up to this.
To put this another way: imagine Biden (or Biden + 3 years) were handling the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you feel okay about that? I don’t.
By far, by far, by far the most important job of the US president is to avoid nuclear war.
Most of the non-"right wing" media seems to be writing about Bidens age not out of concern for this ability to do his current job but as part of Democratic electoral strategy.
Some journalists seemed pissed that they were lied to but that mostly seems to be self-inflicted. People like Ezra and Will Stancil talked about Biden being too old in 2020. When he was just a primary candidate "everyone" knew he was too old. I thought we all just pretended that wasn't true to beat Trump.
Couldn't these people just get over themselves? It is a strange time to start holding power to account for most of these journalists.
After angering right wingers for years news organizations also pissed for lefties with Gaza and now Biden stans with post debate coverage. Who are they going to have left.
I think it is silly to sink the party, and maybe country, for Biden's ego. It seems just as bad for journalists to do the same for their own egos.(I am not talking about Matt specifically)
As I say in the piece to me the fact that “everyone” (many people) said he was too old in 2020 is exactly one reason I was reluctant to listen as he really did get too old. His performance in 2020 was fine! If there was a problem in 2021 it’s that he had he *too much* legislative success. But he kept getting older and his health seems to have gotten worse.
But wasn't he really too old even in 2020? I think Ezra mused about some cognitive decline in one of the debate episodes.
It feels like in 2020 the idea was that Trump is terrible and Biden can beat him so his performance didn't matter.
Now since his poll numbers and approval ratings suck his ability to beat Trump is in doubt.
Did he really get "too old" or is he just no longer useful to the beat Trump strategy?
If Biden's approval wasn't underwater would he be "too old" or just the same very old he was in 2020.
The media output is mostly worry about losing the election. If they think his age is putting us in danger they should say that but other than Ross Douthat and Nate Silver I don't know that I have seen anybody suggest they would not vote for him.
Yeah I think there's a combination of (1) he really obviously was less "old" in 2020 but also (2) we graded him on a curve because of his importance in beating Trump.
And (2) is what isn't totally being grappled with here. We had good reasons to grade him on a curve! But the result of that is a lot of people pretended the age issue was less of a big deal than it really was.
We -- the population at large -- had a good reason to grade him on a curve. I did so in 2020 and I will do so again if he is the nominee in November. But journalists are supposed to tell the truth and let us make that choice! Instead, they have abandoned their ethics to the detriment of their profession.
If Biden were still ahead in the polls he would still be a dangerous and mentally decrepit egotist who wants to be President until he has no mind left at all at 86, for reasons completely contrary to the interests of the country. And the only reason I would still support him is because his opponent is even more dangerous and almost as old.
But, if he were ahead in the polls, it would not be the political problem that it is now.
If Biden's approval were not underwater and/or he were not polling behind Trump, we'd all be looking at each other thinking "If you don't think all the things he does and says in public are evidence that he is too old, then I'm willing to go along with it because defeating Trump is, by far, the highest priority."
MAGA has for years had a collective action problem; to push Trump aside and replace him with a better candidate would require everyone to decide to act at once. But instead they keep learning the lesson that the tallest blade of grass is the first one cut and MAGA is very quick to punish and excommunicate the insufficiently loyal. The result has been a string of election losses and the dissipation of "red waves".
Biden's coalition is an anti-Trump coalition, meaning a lot of his supporters are not partisan Democrats (I include myself in that group). I think that leaves room for people to step back and ask "are we having a collective action problem?" instead of just putting on the blue jersey and glowering at dissenters. And I think you see that coming out in the media because pundits feel—rightly—that taking a patriotic anti-Trump position is not the same thing as taking a partisan pro-Democratic Party position.
Don't be like MAGA: let's have a big discussion about Biden's age vis-a-vis his ability to defeat Trump. If Biden is the nominee coming out of the convention, the "Biden is too old" takes will be replaced with "Trump is even more dangerous than you think" takes.
If Biden were capable of repeating the same presidential performance of 2020-2023 then he still wouldn't actually be "too old". He's been a very effective president! It just seems clear now that he won't be able to. That's a change from 6 months ago. It went from he's lost a step to he's forgotten how to walk.
There are two dimensions, ideology/record and “performance.” Biden was the only Democratic candidate in 2020 with a fairly moderate ideology and a long record to prove it. Mayor Pete “performed” much better, but didn’t connect to black voters because he’s gay and blacks who vote in primaries are often socially conservative.
Mayor Pete had 0 credibility as a Presidential nominee. He was Mayor of a 100k person city. If anything being gay in the 2020 primaries was a net positive for his vote count.
If he was just a generic straight-guy Mayor of a liberal college town he would have went nowhere in the primaries.
Meh, Buttigieg never polled above Bloomberg. Not saying he wouldn't have beaten Bloomberg, just that let's hold off on saying he did would have done great outside of Blacks in the primary.
I'll admit I detested Pete in the primaries. I would have voted for him if he was nominated but it shows how weak parties are in the US that someone who had never even run in a competitive race or in a large jurisdiction was elevated to national leadership.
I'll go to my grave believing his elevation in the primaries was due to the national press and national power brokers seeing so much of their younger selves in his bio:
- College Professor Parent
- Ivy League Education
- Lifelong Ambition to enter politics.
That bio appeals to billionaires and journalists. That has some political value but it is hardly enough to jump to the presidency.
In 2020, I first supported Harris and then jumped to Klobuchar. It drives me batty that this non-entity got so much institutional support.
Looking back, I wonder if the overspending of ARPA, the deportation pause and end of Remain in Mexico, and some other things are more helpfully explained by the oldest and most conservative party man in the room not really being in the room.
I'm skeptical the overspending is due to age. I think a lot of Democrats, myself included, internalized from the terminally slow recovery from the Great Recession:
- You only get 1 chance to pass a relief measure during a recession;
- If you undershoot moderates will incorrectly go for austerity;
- You get years of underemployment
- Reactionaries take over Congress.
On that one at least, I do see the failed response to the Great Recession as the primary driver. But your larger point that his age may have allowed the moderate POTUS to be rolled more easily. The Climate wing is an elite* project and they got way more out of this presidency than the votes they supplied. As is your immigration point.
* I don't use elite as a pejorative but as a descriptive term. And here it applies. Climate politics is a mostly elite project and they got a ton out of this Presidency despite how few voters are climate hawks.
Right? Everyone is going with “Biden has been the greatest leader since Hammurabi bit. Ok, two things, first let’s not get carried away. As you note, immigration and inflation have been policy disasters contributed in a large part to the direct actions of the administration. Second, it isn’t clear what Biden himself has actually done. And if a government is to have democratic legitimacy, it needs to be run by the guy that actually got the votes.
I think just in general journalist elites that claim they were lied to have zero credibility, all evidence points to a change, perhaps temporary, rather than a “coverup”
It doesn't seem outrageous to believe that they were "lied to" but the WH. Since the debate they have seemed a bit less than honest about some details.
It seems a lot less credible that they "believed" what they were being told.
That isn’t their claim though - they aren’t only mad about the response, they explicitly say they were “gaslit” about his previous state (which was fine, fucking obviously, if it wasn’t and they wanted to cover it up they wouldn’t have done a debate at all).
It seems true both that the WH hasn't been forthcoming with Biden's health and that the journalists are full of shit when they say they were fooled by what the WH was saying.
While Biden was too old in the 2020 campaign, he got the job done and has performed well at being president.
Imo their failure to think strategically and plan ahead to give Kamala some wins is very frustrating and seems like political malpractice - like come on you’ve got a VP who’s going to be around for the next few cycles, do whatever you can to improve her favorability!
So long as Biden remains the nominee, we’re going to keep getting hammered on age and mental decline.
As soon as Harris is the nominee, we can hammer Trump on age and mental decline.
I’d rather play the second game.
And even if Biden wins, I’m going to be a really embarrassed and ashamed Democrat over the next 4 years as the party collectively pretends that the leader is fit for the job.
With respect, the problem isn't so much your or anyone else's feeling of embarrassment, but his actual lack of fitness for the job. It's kind of important that the leader of the free world is up to it.
Of course! It’s bad for the country and bad for the health of the party.
Guy,
To build on your comment, what if in the run-up we lost the ability to think of our vote in any terms other than “who would best perform the duties of the office?” As in not: “Which person’s profile lends us marginal advantage to those three key counties around Milwaukee…”
It’s not that strategizing how to get elected isn’t obviously crucial; it’s more that, with a proper orientation, I suspect the horse-race calculating/fantasizing would be proportionally subsumed into the greater question, rather than the other way around as it feels.
Of course this orientation would go in hand with an electorate that was more affirmatively engaged in political activities beyond online commenting on punditry, so …
But that actually doesn't matter as long as Trump is in the picture. The only thing that matters is that someone else takes the oath of office in 2025. It would be great if Trump weren't around and we could have even one additional priority, but he is around, and we can't.
The the dishonesty and delusional thinking, and the cynicism and distrust that breeds, is probably a bigger deal in the end than the age issue itself.
And the Biden team is doing the same kind of "loyalty" testing of Democrats that authoritarian leaders do -- demanding that followers prove their loyalty by mouthing and repeating in public something that everyone knows isn't true, but willingness to pretend it's true is a totem and symbol of obedient loyalty.
When I heard Minnesota Governor Tim Walz say that Democrats should take a lesson for how Republicans stick with Trump after his felony conviction, it made me want to drop my party registration.
I of course didn't. And I will of course still vote for Biden no matter what. But I'm just not proud to be a Democrat right now.
So true. I’ve gotten pilloried by many fellow Democrats for daring to even suggest Biden should step aside. Apparently that’s disloyal and does nothing but help Trump. Pointing out the hypocrisy of Democrats squashing criticism of Biden just like the GOP does of Trump is also impermissible.
This cult-like authoritarian loyalty test business is very troubling to me. I'm not on board with that. I've seen enough with my own eyes to convince me that more likely than not Biden won't be physically capable of serving out another term. And I'm not okay with voting for a blank check for President out of blind loyalty to any party, especially after the Supreme Court's recent presidential immunity ruling. And since I don't think it's physically possible to vote for Biden to serve another term, the question is loyalty to what and to whom?
I'd vote for Harris but given what the Biden inner circle has revealed about itself so far I don't have any feeling of assurance she'll even be allowed to function and gradually take over as co-President and President as age takes it's course -- so voting for Biden might not even be tantamount to a vote for Harris. It might be instead be a vote for years of drift and rule by shadowy behind-the-scenes advisors, reminiscent of the final years of Woodrow Wilson's last term, with similar potentially serious ill consequences for national and global affairs.
It's within the power the Biden-Harris campaign to clear this up and be more transparent about how power will be divided and transitioned from Biden to Harris in another term as his health requires, but without that they're just asking for blind loyalty that's not warranted by the public evidence or their own deceptive behavior so far.
No. Please stop the false equivalences. Just because Trump is a fascist doesn't mean we need to stretch to label everything Dems do as authoritarian. Biden genuinely send to believe he is for to be the nominee. Trying to convince Dem governors if something he genuinely believes to be true and for them to publicly support him is not a word 1984 doublethink exercise. Amazingly people disagree with you on things and it isn't abusive for them to talk about their own beliefs.
The Biden we all saw with our own eyes on live TV was not physically able to make it through a high-stakes meeting with a rival leader. The ability to do that is basic competence for the job of President. Trying to convince people to ignore what was obvious to everyone is, in fact, a "1984 doublethink exercise."
None of this is a knock on Biden, who's been an all-star player for a lot longer than most. But everything comes to an end. It's something top sports players have to come to terms with every year.
As Luis Suarez put it recently, "as I get older, you enjoy more and more because you know that the flame of football is going out. I’m just one more player..." And so is Biden, when all is said and done, just one more player. There's no shame in admitting your run is over.
https://www.intermiami.news/news/luis-suarez-drops-retirement-hint-that-might-now-worry-inter-miami/
Beating Trump and then losing an absolute landslide in 2028 because voters are just disgusted with Democrats failing and humiliating the country for four years is not a great outcome.
And what about the 2026 midterms? Wouldn't you rather go into them with a President Harris than a 2 years older 84 year old President Biden?
Yes? That's what I'm trying to say, that even if Biden wins, if he's not up to the job, Democrats will pay a huge price for it.
If Biden wins, the 25th Amendment is right there. As a lame duck, his argument that he’s the only one that can beat Trump goes away, and Harris takes over.
This will not happen. Democrats, having personally put themselves on record supporting Biden’s competency, will not then immediately say “we all understand we were lying, right?”
In addition, the 25th can only be invoked by people personally selected by Biden in this scenario. Biden wouldn’t allow that humiliation. He will stack his cabinet with sycophants. We’re already seeing Biden’s people becoming more Trumpian by the day.
I’m more willing to take the “Trump will die before 2028” wager than the “Democrats somehow manage to stymie Project 2025” wager.
Agreed, though both are pretty bad bets.
It’s almost preferable to lose in 2024 if we can successfully argue for Dem majorities in the House and Senate to deny Trump dictatorial powers (with the Supreme Court in his pocket and Project 2025 ambition of installing thousands of Trump puppets in the government administration).
I'm increasingly convinced of this route. I think Dems win both the Senate and House in 2026 if Trump wins in the Fall. Two years isn't long enough "install" himself as dictator given the inertia of bureaucracy.
Beats the hell out of losing to Trump.
This is an interesting point to me as a Canadian. In most other systems of government, like Canada's, the stakes of getting destroyed in an election are not existential because your side can always get back in power in the 5-10 years and unilaterally reverse those changes. This doesn't seem to be the case in the US due to the different time-horizons you guys run on, with the most notable being the ability to place life-time justices. In that sense, winning this fall and then getting truly destroyed up and down the ballot in 2028 could even be worse, giving the Repubs a once in a generation chance to remake things.
I’m not old enough to be able to attest to this myself, but a lot of people older than me tell me it’s true: it didn’t always feel so existential in the past, because the parties weren’t nearly as black-and-white opposed to one another on literally *everything* the way they are now. Hell, the House of Representatives was held only by Democrats for like four decades during my father’s lifetime; he’s been a Republican his whole life; and he said he didn’t used to think about it very often. Now the switches are quite frequent and everyone’s very worked up about everything, which has made politics extremely bitter and unpleasant in a weird way.
To a Republican less terrifying than Trump? Yes, of course. If we hold the WH for another term, then we should expect to lose it in 2028. Generally one party only holds office for two terms.
Depends if you think getting demolished in 2028 to a trifecta GOP with a "less scary" president versus maintaining the dynamic that's been in place for the last twenty years.
“… I’m going to be a really embarrassed….”
Meh, I’d tolerate the embarrassment if that were the price of keeping Trump out of power. Keeping Trump out of power is the only job now; how it feels is not important.
But running Biden now assures that Trump will win.
I would run a literal shoe against Trump if it meant getting the W in November. That doesn’t take away the fact that it’s also not great for the health of the Democratic Party as a whole.
“I would run a shoe against Trump….”
Yup. Electability is the sole criterion.
My version of this I would vote for an Inanimate Carbon Rod over Trump.
In Rod We Trust!
Get me Inanimate Carbon Rod’s polling numbers, stat!
In all seriousness, I think all polls probably *should* have “Inanimate Carbon Rod” as a control option to gauge partisan commitment and/or trollishness among poll respondents.
If they insist on forgoing panache, “a literal rock with [partisan affiliation]” would also be okay.
The Inanimate Carbon Rod is an astronaut, and astronauts regularly make successful politicians!
Isn't this Biden's thought process too? He probably genuinely believes he's the best option Dems have with Midwestern swing states vs Harris taking over, and better than anyone who looks good on paper right now but would be bloodied by new policy concessions to the left (which Biden/Harris don't have to make) in a convention/primary process.
Biden/Harris have already been bloodied by concessions to the left as well as the stigma of managing a high inflation economy. I'm actually pretty optimistic a Whitmer or Shapiro would be able to avoid adopting electorally compromising left wing policies, and I think most of the high-profile left wing Democrats would go along with it for the sake of beating Trump. The biggest evidence we have of this is the fact that they're already going along with Biden, despite the fact that their base things he's a genocidal war-mongerer.
Downwardly mobile trust fund leftists are the albatross on Democrats policy making. They take so many staffer roles.
But it doesn't necessarily follow that because Democrats have been vulnerable to concessions to the left in the past, they cannot be hurt further in an open convention/blitz primary/whatever in the future. We saw in the 2020 primary there are plenty of questions for a raise of hands that would make a Democratic party man desire a pass (Biden demonstrated this with a funny superposition on a few left-wing items.)
If we want to explain why Democrats have gotten themselves to a very similar point as Republicans (leaking to the press while going along with the guy they think isn't quite fit for the job), I think the fear of the long primary and party activists adds up. It would explain their behavior much better than just incompetence or maliciousness to the press. The mentality of running a literal shoe for the executive is alive and well in our party system.
Can someone explain to me why Josh Shapiro is a thing?
I get it: he's the governor of a swing state. But what else? He beat an absolute loon for his current office after beating a nobody to be AG. He fixed a bridge (so did Gavin Newsom, by the way). What else makes him a compelling choice to be the first Jewish President?
The Dems should run Romney.
“Guarantees” means you need a dose of humility when the polls point to a small shift, a lot from Democrats becoming “undecided”
Totally.
Keeping the United States from being sidelined by its opportunistic foreign enemies between now and November, is the only job now.
I suspect Biden resigns a year or two if he get re-elected.
hmmm. Judging by the past (Wilson, Reagan), incapable presidents don't resign--and the people closest to them make sure it doesn't happen.
A month or two, more like. Bronx politics, the winner resigns, and the party's preferred candidate, who could not win an election on their own, gets the office.
Oh, get over yourself. Biden is doing perfectly fine at being president, and if he takes a real turn for the worse, he can tap Harris. What Biden cannot do is run a vigorous campaign where he's the underdog.
A comatose Biden is more fit for the job than Trump, who is likely mentally unfit and CERTAINLY morally unfit for it. The only real question is whether candidate Harris has a better chance.
Not necessarily. Dementia can lead to marked changes in personality, judgment, and tolerance for and ability to gauge risk. It's just not the kind of condition where there should even be a question whether the President's decisionmaking is affected by it.
We're in a dangerous period globally, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think there could be tense showdowns with China, Iran, Russia or some other hostile countries that come down to the President's personal ability to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
I'm not convinced at all Biden that on a bad day or bad time of day would be better than Trump at that.
If Biden were truly suffering from dementia, I have confidence that his cabinet would step in and invoke 25th Amendment…Trump II is not going to feature the kind of cabinet officials who would do that. The problem with Biden now is that he is suffering from old age, not having the stamina to perform in the spotlight, which means he is unqualified to be a candidate (and of course not qualified for another term).
And then he will declare himself fit under the 25th Amendment because he is a selfish egotist, and Congress will not vote that he is unfit (especially since Republicans don't want to put Kamala Harris in). The 25th Amendment doesn't work.
This will likely be a very similar cabinet to the one that has let it go on this long...maybe they would because the election would be over but I am much less certain.
Yes...this!!!
Biden's decision even to run again itself shows dangerous decline in judgment....like the Granny who shouldn;t be driving anymore but no one has the heart to take the keys from.
Biden is surely unaware how much he has declined.
>A comatose Biden is more fit for the job than Trump<
Definitely.
I hope it's President Harris in 2025. But I'd take President Biden for a second term over the Orange Mussolini. Sure, maybe the latter's been kidding about prosecuting his enemies and inviting Putin to invade NATO states. Maybe! But I'd rather not chance it. Plus, his economic plans will be ruinous.
I know!!! If Biden wins I would want him to immediately step down. World events don't wait for your sundowning period to be over.
Threadjacking to post this: https://maketrumploseagain.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-trump-call-your-representatives
The short of it is to call or email your Dem reps to tell them you're a Dem who wants to Biden to gracefully step aside.
Why do you assume it will default to Harris? Shouldn’t we have caucuses or something? Isn’t it best that the nominee prove herself?
1. Having other candidates fight it out right now poses political risks for the Dems when they're already in a weak position
2. It's not clear any better candidates than Harris actually want to do it right now, as it presents them with political risks of their own
3. Casting off Harris off just before she would have become America's first female and black female president isn't the greatest look, and many would see it as racist/sexist
I think Matt is totally right on this. Harris may not be the best candidate ever, but she's well above Biden, and it's not going to be anyone else - so Harris or bust.
”Casting off Harris off just before she would have become America's first female and black female president isn't the greatest look, and many would see it as racist”
I know everyone loves to say this but there seems to be no actual voters who care much about Harris being thrown off the ticket, not even Black Democratic voters. It’s just thus unfalsifiable claim being thrown around as if it was a fact.
It's a funny tell from high ranking Democrats and commentators saying exactly what they think about their voters.
Ironically, in doing so they concede what everyone has known for three and a half years, but couldn't say: Harris is the epitome of the unqualified DEI hire caricature, except she actually exists and really is that bad. And now everyone on the left who can read a poll acknowledges that odds are it screws us in Nov.
No, she's not. Like LBJ, Mike Pence, and various 19th C figures, she's a *qualified* DEI candidate. JFK didn't run with LBJ because he thought Johnson was the 2nd-best eligible president but to include southern Dems (and Protestants, and conservatives) as a matter of equity within the party. Quayle and Palin were unqualified DEI candidates.
I see what you’re saying. She *is* qualified to be president in a way that myself or my auto mechanic isn’t. At the same time she would have been about 27th on Biden’s list of veep picks if she’d been a white male given her skills at campaigning.
The replies from Cat and Freeman miss the point. A Senator of the largest state, particularly one whose meteoric rise (Mayor, A.G.) demonstrates extraordinary talent at winning elections, is ipso facto a very qualified candidate. That she has hit bumps at the next level makes her no different from most, and is post-hoc reasoning.
As for her gender and the color of her skin, three things are true:
1. representation, including demographic representation, matters
2. below-replacement-level candidates shouldn't get picked (and weren't in her case per previous arguments)
3. the VP choice dynamic is bad and weird and has screwed up the country since at least Andrew Johnson
Johnson was an effective power broker in the party and chosen to broaden ticket appeal to southern protestants. The same argument could be made, though to a lesser extent, for Pence in 2016.
The same isn't true for Harris. She isn't appealing either to moderates or progressives in the party, nor do black voters particularly care for her or see her as their representative, in the way that Biden or other senior Dems think they should, which is why she's unqualified.
Lol. Literally no VP has been selected solely for their qualifications in the modern age. They are all selected for some demographic reasons. E.g., Pence is a DEI (evangelical) pick.
And Harris is objectively qualified even if you don’t like her politics.
She's not. Note I didn't criticize DEI criteria in general, just her specifically. VP picks are supposed to broaden ticket appeal, and in Biden's specific case reassure voters as a competent backup. She appeals neither to moderates or progressives, and was unpopular even in her own state, polling terribly in 2020. She has no constituency and was shoehorned in by Biden and senior Dems. If it was against anyone else but Trump she would've dragged the ticket down, not added value or at worst been neutral.
I maintain she was actually a better pick for Supreme Court, precisely for the reasons she is not a "traditional" good candidate for Supreme Court (not an Ivy League law graduate--or West Coast or Catholic equivalent--never sat on the federal--or any--bench, has held elective office). There were lots of such justices in the past and I maintain they kept the court way more grounded in what it actually is (an essentially political body). (I draw attention again to the eerie parallels between her career and Earl Warren's up until the point at which he lost his VP race and she won hers.) Alas nobody consulted me.
Also of note, in contrasting Harris and Pence w/r/t DEI, the difference between the selections of the two was that, in declaring prior to making his pick that it was going to be a black woman, Biden gave the game away in that who that black woman was mattered less than the fact that she was black. The same isn't true for Pence; not just any replacement level white male republican would have the same appeal to evangelicals.
Your problem with this logic is the people who will dig in with this line of attack are presently backing Biden. They will absolutely become more vocal the moment the debate actually shifts from “should Biden bow out” to “who should replace Biden.”
I should have worded it differently. With #3 I'm not so much worried about the average voter on the street thinking that way, but more the indirect effect of the media/activist class kicking up a fuss over it, attacking and fracturing the Democrats,, and making the party appear less competent.
But I do think this is one of the more minor problems with dumping Harris, which is why I put it #3.
We want more risk. We need more risk. We are not in a position where we can win by playing it safe and running out the clock. In fact, because we are underdogs, we should sacrifice some expected value if it increases variance enough.
Racist and sexist. Christ. As if that's important now. Those who still care about that in the middle of this debacle should be sent to pound sand.
You go to war with the coalition you have, not the coalition you want.
People who care about that (who I think are at best deficient in their citizenship) are going to care about that. I'm arguing that other people should not be afraid to ignore that consideration, which is a stupid and counterproductive one. If the "first black woman president" faction can't wrap their heads around this, then Trump and the Republicans will educate them on the subject.
You would think the country would remember we had a Black president as recently as 7 years ago.
Hmm, why couldn't the Democrats hold his white (working-class) voters, do you think?
Racism and sexism are real things, and they do matter. Anyone who believes that believes that they matter even when other things matter, and also even when other things matter more.
The way you’re talking, you sound like someone who believes these are fictional things, that we tolerate discussion of when it doesn’t matter, like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, but are expected to drop entirely when anything is going on.
In this case the argument that "the racial / gender optics of dropping Harris look bad" vs. "electoral appeal is the relevant criterion to the near-exclusion of others within the Overton window of possible Democratic candidates" arguably is kind of a zero-sum competition where you genuinely can't care about two things and in fact have to privilege one to the exclusion of the other.
Assuming that one privileges the latter of the two options, "Coordination problems make non-Harris candidates infeasible" seems like a reasonable argument in her favor, but "it would be racist and sexist not to run Harris, her relative odds of success against Trump notwithstanding" doesn't.
Ed.: "Harris polls best" would, of course, be the best argument in her favor on option (2) grounds, but then the issue is moot anyway.
Oh, they're real, all right. And practiced by members of all races in our great nation. A crisis ahead of a critical election is not the time to play those games, however. Particularly as this is how we got the sub-par candidate that we don't know what to do with in the first place. Those parties who think race games matter in this instance will most likely have to take up their social justice issues with Trump and the Republicans when they win the election. I predict an unsympathetic reception.
Biden should step down today. Harris would become President and the Democrats could see how she does. If she has momentum then she’ll get the nomination. If she sucks then they’ll be able to pursue a stronger candidate. She needs to be tested as a political leader. This would do it.
I think we're three weeks too late to have an open convention.
Why?
I think I heard somewhere a description of the process which says Harris would still have to compete for the nomination, in the sense that she cannot have the delegates automatically pledged to her. It’s likely she would have the inside track, for reasons some have articulated here, but given that many see the reason for Biden attempting to run for another term being based on Harris’ horrible polling, the opportunity to consider another candidate might be taken up. Throwing it open seems impossible—most people are already running for something, it would have to be limited to a handful of credible candidates who can easily be replaced in their current positions.
RE#3 - many May see it as racist sexist, but she certainly will never be voted in as America’s titst black female president in this election cycle. Her performance in the primaries was horrendous and she has been a laughingstock as VP. Her portfolio was the border, and she avoided it like the plague - never even visited.And it now the #1 or #2 issue for most voters.
Another consideration is that Whitmer, Beshear, Shapiro, etc. are probably better candidates for 2028 if the Dems lose. Don't get me wrong, you play to win the game, but Harris is currently a better option than Biden and also can kind of play a sacrificial lamb type of role. If 2024 is already lost anyway, Harris gives you a better chance of beating Trump than Biden and if you lose, you don't damage the political pedigree of your deep bench of popular Dem governors. I don't think we are at the point yet that 2024 is surely lost for the Dems, but I do think the Whitmers and Beshears of the world might think it's too risky to jump in unconventionally now. Granted, everyone is different but I think this would be a difficult shot to take.
She has, she’s been VP
She is VP because she was chosen by Biden and voting for Biden in 2020 was hardly a vote for her. If I could have cast a separate ballot for vice President, she would not have been on it.
81 million people voted for a 78 year old (with polls showing significant numbers of them already had some level of concern about his age and acuity) with her as the explicit backup. That doesn't mean everything but it doesn't mean literally nothing either.
I suspect more than half of those 81 million people didn't vote FOR Biden-Harris and instead voted AGAINST Trump.
Oh c'mon. It means almost nothing. If one wanted to vote against Trump, there was no other choice.
And that will be true again in November, no?
She's the only one who can spend the campaign money that has been already raised.
That's not true.
No? How does an alternative candidate get to have the money, then?
The Biden campaign transfers it to the DNC. Makes it harder to coordinate but that's the only advantage re/the money Harris has.
Sue, did the President call?
The Biden/Harris Fund has $165 million in it and can only be spent on either Biden or Harris.
Barro said they could transfer it to the DNC, fwiw: https://www.joshbarro.com/p/im-not-ready-to-call-for-biden-to
She isn't the guaranteed replacement candidate but she is the most likely replacement candidate. I agree with the sentiment that if you want Biden to step down you should at least be okay with the idea of Harris replacing him.
You really think we have enough time to organize a process? Even if Biden withdrew tomorrow, time is short—and he doesn't appear to be on the verge of dropping out.
I think if we're lucky, we may get a semi-contested convention, so Harris's nomination is not a pure coronation. But the grandiose plans I hear for an organized mini primary strike me as pure dorm room stoner session pablum. Ain't happening.
Why not? As many people have pointed out, the U.S. has an absurdly elongated Presidential campaign compared to the rest of the world. A few weeks is plenty of time to organize some kind of process that would shed light on who would make the best candidate. And then the delegates can vote at the convention.
This gives Kamala an opportunity to prove she really is the best candidate to beat Trump or for someone else to emerge.
As an added bonus, it gives us a shot at creating a process that will actually get Democrats and independents actually excited about a candidate rather than just trying to select someone who can beat Trump. And it might end up actually causing the parties to rethink the nominating process into something closer to what the rest of then world does.
This comment aged well.
I can't bring myself to think that is the game we will be playing. Seems much more likely we will be in the game of hammering whoever the democrats pick with whatever their strongest weakness is.
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather the nation wasn't effectively ignoring criticism of Trump. But that Trump is still relevant seems to betray the idea that he can be criticized out of relevance...
I appreciate the admission so I won't say much critical.
But I do want to say one thing about this State of the Union stuff. I think you and other commentators graded Biden on a massive curve. ANY other President gives that speech, except maybe Trump (who is also too old) and it would have been criticized as sounding like fumbling, inarticulate, senile man giving a speech full of malaprops. Seriously, if you want to be sobered on this, compare it to some of the speeches Reagan gave when the Alzheimers was already setting in. There is no comparison-- Biden sounded like a bumbling elderly man.
And it wasn't just me. My friends all felt the same way, and that includes some people who have significant positions in political journalism.
So I don't know where this "the SOTU was good" came from other than wishful thinking. The SOTU was terrible. You guys just convinced yourself that the Emperor's New Clothes were incredible.
But as I said, the major thrust of this, I appreciate. I just think the SOTU was obviously part of what you missed in seeing the rabbit instead of the duck.
One other minor point, about why people didn't run against Biden in the primary. It is absolutely true as far as it goes that "they had polling operations and the polls said they would lose".
But we need to examine one of the assumptions behind that-- that it is bad to get in and lose. Why is it bad to get in and lose? Why not make your argument and honorably lose if you are Gretchen Whitmer, and maybe position yourself for a run in 2028?
The answer is parties PUNISH people who challenge incumbents. The staffers of those campaigns get blacklisted-- and cynical careerism is the lifeblood of politics. The candidates can also get punished, especially by donor networks and/or if they are in a legislature and want committee assignments and such. It isn't just an organic issue of "I'm gonna lose"-- it's that for all the disorganization of the parties, one thing they actually do is protect incumbents and they do so by imposing political retribution on challengers.
Given what Matt says is true about the need for new blood and to replace bad candidates, people need to think about this more and whether there needs to be a sea change about how insiders look at the issue of party loyalty. A primary challenger to Biden would have been being loyal to the PARTY; just not to Joe Biden. And that's a big difference.
If the "journalists" had been doing their job for the first three years of the Biden presidency, perhaps someone other than Dean Phillips would have seen a potential path to unseat Biden.
I think that is going too far. There was a lot of coverage of Biden's age early on, he was still very sharp in person and vigorously biked every day so it was pretty easily provable that he wasn't a walking corpse. I think this story got chicken little'd. Biden is clearly worse than he was in 2020 but claims that Biden was this bad have been circling for his entire presidency so the natural assumption is that the recent claims were purposely overstated propaganda like they were before. People in these comments are still overstating how Biden's health has been and for how long. I don't see a reason to think that journalists secretly knew things but didn't put it in the dozens of top headline articles that were written about Biden's age before the debate.
Well, Biden's campaign also said in 2020 that he wasn't going to run in 2024.
There is a perception that challenging an incumbent and failing makes the incumbent weaker and so more likely to lose.
I think there is a correlation, but it's not clear which way the causality runs: this could be because weaker incumbents are more likely to be challenged.
At any rate, if it's true that a middling incumbent who is unchallenged is more likely to win than one who holds off a challenge, then there is a real judgment call about each challenge - "if you come at the king, you'd better not miss" becomes a real consideration.
My guess is for the most part the advantage of incumbency is mythical, especially in Polarized 2024 America. If an incumbent is strong, they are strong. But when they are weak, they lose, and the notion that, say, an incumbent can dole out all sorts of pork barrel projects a la Lyndon Johnson to pull out a victory is just not consistent with modern politics.
Incumbents, however, very much want you to believe incumbency is a big advantage.
Obama chose to challenge Hillary against all advise from ”cautious” insiders
Obama had his own insiders—Bill Clinton had a lot of “frenemies,” some key ones supported Obama early on. (His speech at the 2004 convention was an audition he passed with flying colors). Hillary was not an incumbent, she knew she had to compete for it.
Obama definitely had his own insiders but he still had to take a big risk-- had his campaign failed, a lot of the people who were affiliated it would have been frozen out of politics had Hillary won.
“Frozen out of politics” seems extreme—more that they’d be unlikely to get White House jobs and have to look elsewhere, that’s how it always is.
Yeah, as someone who's worked professionally in politics I'll say that the idea of shadowy cabals "freezing you out" is largely a myth, at least on the Dem side. There's always more work out there if you're interested. What actually happens is most people only work for a few cycles before they get exhausted and decide to go work for a do gooder org, or enter the private sector or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM-38xzT2d0 etc etc
Careerism is really the lifeblood of politics. So when staffers become unemployable in various desirable jobs, it affects greatly their calculations.
Indeed he did. And it was a patriotic act.
I thought Pelosi and Reid urged him to? Am I misremembering?
Yes, political actors where skeptical of HRC and urged Obama into the race
The actual reason only Dean Phillips ran against Biden? It wasn't some evil conspiracy, it's because Phillips only got 2 percent (!!!) of the vote in South Carolina because Dem voters really like Joe. It's all well and good to sit back in your lazy boy and opine about how why Whitmer should have run, but running for president really sucks, seriously it's a horrible experience: https://www.amazon.com/What-Takes-Way-White-House/dp/0679746498/ref=sr_1_4?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.QURy5roug0KfF4dMF102BXlc9cLKHDoenHDpYtO4TTgcZTHNnwsyFM31AeueHPlNJP_8jenYTrLrw3AByWeR4ymXxR_mebZVMCeC_qFROzAMjV8_G_JyMmJkxbALGJQK31pjIdAU8o3C57nQq98_Lt6YEiftNqbX1O6Dm-ugsGrleIv__AID_zxxkRTVBshRVB9GVA0oX73V_YwL5A4SUnKP_8fZPeNh6nmR5NlXOgY.LraPEu87I8y54JqNCzbCe7wVOKYkdjpta7nMFqW11ig&dib_tag=se&keywords=what+it+takes&qid=1720460516&s=books&sr=1-4 so no politicians generally don't want to do that unless they think there's something of a chance they can win, which as Dean Phillips learned there wasn't, because the Dem voters like Joe.
Not everything is elite failure, sometimes the unwashed masses really are to blame.
> Why not make your argument and honorably lose if you are Gretchen Whitmer
Because running a campaign is a lot of work, that takes you away from your day job, and attracts both positive and negative attention (but the negative is more draining for you and your family).
If you don’t care about any of that, and just care about your political or electoral stature, then sure there’s no real downside.
The fundamental reason why people didn’t throw the hat in the ring is that it’s hard to run a campaign without a salient motive of disagreement, and the ppl most frequently named as contenders had none. This is also why Biden found the road blocked in 2016: donors would look around and ask, what would we do differently than Hillary? Same this time. Phillips is a nobody and could perhaps just raise his profile; even that failed, anyways because there was no appetite for ersatz-Biden. The uncommitted agita were just good for a few breathless stories, nothing sustainable (but yes, that also damaged Biden). Good candidates are not going to do trial runs. The devil here is human nature. Not everyone ages on the same schedule: from what little I see in public sources it’s quite possible that Bidens condition turned to the worse in the last few weeks, even after the debate calendar was agreed on.
One thing parties should consider is whether to create more incentives for this, if we must have primaries. They assume that the worst possible thing is to hurt the incumbent, but maybe the worst thing is to fail to test the incumbent.
In any event, my preference would be to get rid of primaries altogether and hire a bunch of analytics nerds to select the best candidate for the general; the first party that tries that will win a ton of elections because primary voters don't really mirror the general electorate.
That sort of approach works well with sports teams because sports teams are arbitrary labels and winning is an end in itself. But with political parties, anyone who's willing to put in that sort of time/money/effort would have to be someone who wants to win in order to accomplish certain things — which means they can't just pick the winningest candidates, they have to pick candidates who broadly align with their goals.
Correct, Biden slurred his speech during the SOTU. He sounded like me after four drinks, perfectly cogent but not quite Presidential.
Right. The cogency came from the text. But if you got this kind of delivery from Amazon, you would ask Bezos for a refund.
No the SOTU wasn’t an amazing speech. But the bar set by Republicans was “Biden is senile” which it cleared, easily
We shouldn't let Republicans set our bars for us.
We shouldn’t, but when you live in a political society, the broad bar gets set by what most people are saying.
In a democracy, politicians should remember that the bar is set by median/tipping point voters.
I think this really misunderstands the nature of cognitive decline, which can be intermittent: worse at certain times of day, in certain situations, under certain conditions (e.g., when you're tired or have a UTI). People with dementia have lucid moments. The president should essentially never have "senior moments".
People can have “senior moments” in their 50s and 60s when they are perfectly capable—heck, people will occasionally forget a name or where they put their keys when they’re even younger than that. Whatever Biden has going on—I don’t like amateur diagnoses—is way beyond “senior moments.”
Yes, I didn't mean to minimize, just to note that whatever his condition is, it seems to ebb and flow. Although I imagine Obama and W had moments of exhaustion where they weren't 100% up to the job, this is something very different. Biden clearly shouldn't be allowed to drive or babysit with his current health issues, no less serve as commander in chief!
" as sounding like fumbling, inarticulate, senile man giving a speech full of malaprops." part of the problem is this is how Biden haters have talked about him for 40 years, so it's hard to take those critics seriously because they were always calling Biden a bumbling pathetic moron going back to the Bork fight etc etc
It's like how one reason it was hard for a lot of liberals to take the arguments that what Bill Clinton did with Monica was wrong seriously was it was often made by people who said he was a drug trafficker, and murdered Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton was a lesbian and a satanists etc
Sorry for harping no this again and again, but what do you mean by "taking them seriously"? It's not a rumor-based thing (mostly). It's about what any of us can judge for ourselves based on the very very abundant video evidence of the president. STOU is available for all to watch within a click. Instead of deciding wether to believe the left or right pundits description, why not watch it for yourself? Ditto for all the rest. Of course, we don't always have time to do this, but on issues deemed important enough, shouldn't we? Isn't that the lesson here?
Like Matt I think the constant claims from Biden haters that he was senile that were made since 2019 weren't accurate, he wasn't senile in summer of 2021 etc. What happened was a real decline in the last six months that makes it clear he's not capable of running a vigorous campaign anymore.
100%
So Matt's take is that he was fooled by what the White House was saying, and also by his own biases. Fair enough.
But let's take that first part more seriously. The White House and Democratic politicians have been saying very clearly that Joe Biden is NOT suffering from any age-related decline, and anyone who questions it is being duped by right-wing media. Joe's as good as ever, has more energy than anyone else, etc, etc.
Journalists should feel duped. Because they were. In my understanding of journalism¹, this would lead to hard questions: who knew about Biden's decline then lied about it? Be specific and give names. The public expects some spin; we don't expect lying. If they have misled journalists about this, what else have they not told the truth about? How will journalists hold the powerful -- even powerful Democrats -- accountable?
I'm convinced that the longest lasting and most destructive result of the Trump era will be the loss of trust and ethics in the journalism profession. We need a robust and independent Fourth Estate to subject the powerful to difficult and honest questioning. And we will still need that even after Trump is gone.
¹ My understand of journalism doesn't include off-the-record sit-downs with the most powerful people running our government with promises to never speak of the content, but I guess I'm just naive.
Aside from the broader questions about journalistic integrity and off the record interviews, which other commenters have answered substantively below, I think a big part of the answer here is just the fact that Biden seems to have fallen off the cliff rather rapidly. And the fact that he has always stuttered, frequently gaffed, and kinda slurred sentences made the decline even more apparent. Basically, I think it was kind of hard to tell and there was so much misinformation about it, the age question always felt like a bit of a right wing conspiracy.
Journalists are waking up to this fact now, which is good! It'd be more of a scandal if Axios started publishing a bunch of pieces about Biden's vigor.
My central thesis is that a vigorous and skeptical press makes the Democrats BETTER. Subjecting them to the same level of scrutiny and accountability as Republicans exposes their weaknesses so they can be addressed and fixed. This is the central problem with journalists leaning into their biases instead of fighting them.
The job is harder if you don't acquiesce to "access journalism", but the results are better. Better for the public, better for the Democrats and better for the profession of journalism.
While that seems true, why aren't his aides alerting everyone that they have seen signs of rapid decline? Why did it take a televised faceplant for them to suddenly start leaking things? If his decline is so rapid then why aren't they feverishly considering the 25th amendment before he fully loses it? Trump's staff included people who were working to undermine him in order to keep the country safe, embarrassingly it does not appear that Bidens team shares their patriotism.
“Rapid” means something different when you see someone everyday vs only seeing them occasionally. From the perspective of the staff, he verbally stays the same day-to-day, but for those of us who haven’t seen him much since the SOTU, it’s a big difference.
This comment seems a bit blowhardy on two obvious counts:
1) Trust of journalism has steadily declined since the 90s, in part because conservatives have been systematically discrediting the enterprise since at least the '80s, when I was a kid hearing it on the radio with my (Republican Baptist minister) dad. Back when I wanted to grow up and be, well, what Paul Ryan actually became, essentially (oh, the folly of youth), I already knew by the age of 16 the talking points on the "liberal media," except that I knew the liberal media as Peter Jennings on ABC (RIP, pour one out for one of the greats). Here's a Gallup poll article on it from 2022, and Trump actually briefly bounced the numbers UP before they reverted to trend. https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx
I guess you could argue that there's always farther to go or whatever, but saying "loss of trust and ethics in the journalism profession" is the "longest lasting and most destructive result of the Trump era" is just, I think, flat wrong on the merits. That's a long-time conservative project. I don't agree with the value of the project, but it has been successful, and we should give credit (or blame) where it is due.
2) I think you are underrating the timeline considerations. Age-related decline is one of those things that happens slow-and-then-fast. I deal with a lot of patients in my job who have changes in mental status, and it is a genuinely very hard thing to track, made worse by the fact that people tend to make allowances for stuff that they want to be not true.
Maybe Biden has been enfeebled for a long time; if that reporting comes out, I will be inclined to believe it. But I would be much less surprised to hear that he was kind of an edge case where he sort of had accumulating minor reductions in ability, and people waived it off in various ways, and then he just kind of went off a cliff in the last three or six or twelve months or whatever. I see this happen all the time--an older patient comes in, and we're like, "this person seems really out of it," and the family is like, "well, so-and-so has been a little spacey, but not too bad," and they are just flat wrong: so-and-so is clearly declining, and putting them into the ICU (or whatever health emergency brought them to the hospital) sends them straight over the cliff. The brain has a lot of coping mechanisms, and if you know someone, it's just easy to accept those; it's only when you put stress on the situation that the wheels come off.
I'm pretty off the day-to-day news, and I don't watch TikTok or YouTube, so I don't have any idea what the BiDecline timeline is like. In that sense, I'm a normie. But I sincerely doubt that this is a bunch of malice. I think it's much more pernicious: people don't want to believe a thing like this is happening, especially when the stakes are so high with the election, and they deceive themselves first. Because that's the most obvious way to explain how people who are supposed to be his loved ones and supporters supported Biden going out there to be humiliated in a debate on national television. You lie to to yourself first, and I'm telling you that in this situation that is very easy to do. I see it all the time, and I'm talking on people who are much, much worse, like literally dying, or just had a stroke, or are late-stage dementia (all three of these are references to cases I have seen in just the last six months).
The bottom line, as I have written elsewhere in these forums, is that gerontocracy is bad for precisely these types of reasons--and a million others. But this is just a national-level version of a drama that plays out all the time on a non-national scale, in precisely this way, with aging parents and friends.
I went through # 2 with my father who passed from a combination of Parkinson and Alzheimer's a couple of years past.
His decline was slow and then sudden as you describe. The period of slow change occurred roughly from 08-15: gradual decline in cognitive ability, energy slowing down, slight personality changes (using obscenity after never swearing, a meaner sense of humor, etc.). We tended to dismiss the significance despite the fact our mother, who was the same age showed none of it.
In retrospect, all of us who knew him saw obvious signs of significant decline from 15-19 but all of us tried to diminish the evidence. I remember a conversation me and my sister had about him during Christmas 2018 which was only 5 months before he went off the diving board. Our conversation occurred after a night where he was really out of it. The conversation consisted solely of "he's slowing down, yeah but only a little."
OK just watch speeches from 2016 to 2020 and you'll notice decline...it's screamingly obvious.
If anyone in AMerica is genuinely surprised by Biden's debate performance, they simply haven't been paying much attention.
I think "genuinely surprised" would be a stretch, because I work with people in this phase of life often in my job, but this is what I meant about being a "normie." The policy interests that lead me to read Matt's blog are of a more niche variety, so while I follow the national news in print relatively closely, I haven't watched a political performance on TV in, literally, years.
I watched one of the Biden-Trump debates, and I watched the inauguration speech. I think that's it for me and Biden on TV since he was VP. I saw portions of the recent debate because it was on in several of my patients' rooms in the hospital, so I didn't even watch that straight; I just grabbed snippets as I was in and out doing nurse stuff.
So yes, many people in America, including me, were at least somewhat surprised at what we saw and heard on the screen. I take your word that watching speeches from 2016 to 2020 would make it screamingly obvious, but...I didn't do that. And I'm honestly not sure why I would have; politics isn't really my hobby in that particular way, even though I care a lot (and follow closely) on a few specific issues.
I still haven't watched the debate performance myself but I trust the commentariat/my family is right that it was a dumpster fire.
Great comment.
Off-record conversations seem fine? Like, if you’re talking to a journalist outside of their professional capacity you ask for it to be off-record to clarify that it’s a personal conversation not a work-related one. I had coffee with John Burn-Murdoch from the FT a month ago and we both clarified that the conversation was off-record at the start; I just wanted to meet the guy and talk shop.
Agreed - If public figures have no ability to speak without it being quotable, that will make them even more guarded and risk averse. Not sure that’s best.
I don't think sitting down with a fellow reporter is on the same level with sitting down (to be spun?) with the most powerful person in Government.
Maybe I'm wrong, and Matt is old friends with Joe from playing golf or going fishing or reminiscing about their favorite parts of Dune, and their private conversations are just a continuation of their friendship and nothing at all to do with how the powerful successfully manipulate their coverage.
I think there a many problems with journalism, but this most definitely isn't one of them. Your complaint seems to rest on two mistaken ideas: 1) off-record conversations are a form of manipulation in a way that on-record conversations are not and 2) journalists are oblivious to such attempts at manipulation. I think the truth is closer to a situation in which interview subjects are spinning journalists constantly whether speaking on or off record (which isn't the same as saying they are lying), and journalists are aware that they are constantly being spun. That's the nature of the game. Interviewees have an agenda. Journalists have an agenda. Readers have an agenda. From this web a story emerges.
BTW people really sneer at access journalism but access is a big part of journalism and buttering people up is part of access.
Can access journalism go too far? Sure. But we actually do want a certain amount of journalistic stenography, puff pieces, etc. This is part of the lubricant that allows the harder hitting journalism to function.
The agenda the journalists should have (in my view) is to hold powerful people accountable and report on their activities honestly. It is my contention that their actual agenda in the post-Trump era has been to try to defeat Trump. That is a laudable goal -- I agree with wanting to beat Trump. But that isn't the job of a journalist.
And by having abandoned the primary role of holding the powerful to account, they have contributed to the current situation. My thesis is that more skeptical reporting during the period of 2020 through June 28th, 2024 would have highlighted this issue with Biden's decline more clearly and on a timeline when something could have been done.
If not for Biden's decision to have a debate prior to the convention, this would have stayed a hidden issue until it was truly too late for any alternative.
But I still don’t get what the harm of the off the record convo is. What harm do you see? It could have been that Matt picked up on Biden’s cognitive problems, in which case, though he would not have been able to say precisely where his concerns came from, he would have been able to pay more attention to the “duck” hypothesis and signal us about it as well. In the event, Biden had a good interview, but that’s not a problem with it being off the record; it’s just the fickle nature of cognitive decline.
If journalists covering the tech sector both owned stock in Microsoft and agreed to meet with its CEO under such conditions so the CEO could spin their story, id think that compromises all their later reporting.
The question really becomes: what else did you miss?
For example, reporter that Hunter is acting as "gatekeeper" to POTUS right now really has me questioning his influence overall on the White House, which we were repeatedly assured was minimal, and an inappropriate thing to ask about.
Also, who is making decisions when Biden is having his senior moments??
Yes, I would also like to know this. It seems like Hunter and Jill Biden are suddenly the real powers behind the throne! That's absurd, and demands investigation. But journalists either can't, or won't, ask the obvious questions here.
Please, someone, get us an interview with one of them.
The problem is EVERYONE knew about Biden's decline even in 2019-20. All you had to do was watch him stumble through his speeches or try to perform on debate stage.
Professional libs and journo types who didn't support Biden in primary openly acknolwedged it.
They shifted only when Biden became the nominee and partisanship took over. They pretended to be concerned again in 2023-24 only to the extent that Biden's age was a political liability, not that the US deserved a president without "senior moments". They have shifted again into an adversarial posture because Biden--in his terrible judgment in even risking a debate-- has exposed their meretriciousness.
For a guy declining so much in 2019-20, he's been a pretty damn good President during his term.
This is why I wrote off all those "Biden is declining" stories until the debate. How do you reconcile that with the results of his presidency? Sadly, post-June 27, I no longer think he will continue to be an effective President for too much longer.
Yes, exactly. On Ukraine alone the Biden administration was showing a lot of leadership in a high stakes and dynamic "hot war" situation. It's not like Biden's presidency has been some kind of quiet period during which there have been no tests of leadership -- quite the opposite, the administration has actually gotten a lot of shit done on both domestic and foreign fronts, in which in turn makes all the Republican critiques of his age for the 2019-early 2024 period seem like so much FUD. The fact that they're correct now isn't due to any kind commitment to accuracy on the part of their critiques, it's more like the way certain commentators are described as predicting 11 of the last 4 recessions.
Or worse: it's as if you keep telling the economy that it's bad when it's actually good and the economy finally says, "Screw you, I'll show you what bad is" and goes into a deep depression just to stick it to all the naysayers.
In 2020, he pretty clearly wasn't what he used to be. But he was enough. (They had a pretty good record the next couple years.) In 2024, he's not.
It seems harder to be honest when a major party has been taken over by fascists with a leaked plan on how to overthrow American democracy. If Republicans were still a normal party it would be easier to condemn.
I agree with you that the job of being honest and holding powerful people accountable is harder when the journalist largely agrees with the powerful and the alternative is bad. However, it is still important to do that job ethically and diligently.
"I'm convinced that the longest lasting and most destructive result of the Trump era will be the loss of trust and ethics in the journalism profession."
Meh.
Google: "journalists and JFK." Was journalism more trustworthy then?
They were not.
Then Vietnam happened, followed by Watergate. Those events pushed the profession into a better stance regarding holding the powerful to account. This largely held until Obama's rise, though the changes weren't widespread and only visible on the margins. It was the rise of Trump that has taken the profession into some bad ethical positions.
I agree that Vietnam and Watergate made journalism more adversarial with the powers that be and that could be a good thing, as those cases demonstrate. I'm not sure it made them more trustworthy, as from that point on, everything they looked at became Watergate Redux and whenever a journalist looked in the mirror they saw Woodward and Bernstein. See: Whitewater.
But whitewater helps make my point. The public saw something that was thoroughly investigated and decided there wasn’t much there. Clinton was overwhelmingly reelected. Was a good President.
Good for the public then.
But I don't think the media (especially the NYT) spending years going after their white whale shows that they were more *trustworthy.*
As I understand it, "off the record" doesn't actually apply if the sources were intentionally trying to deceive the journalist. In that case, you're absolutely allowed to burn the source.
I don't assume the powerful choose to sit down with the press in off-the-record conversations to ensure "The Truth" is communicated. Instead, I think they do it to manipulate their coverage.
Plus, per the footnote Matt wrote, the agreement was that Matt would not disclose any of the information provided -- so this isn't about getting the truth out at all.
It's like the advantage of insider trading - the market price ends up being more accurate sooner if insiders are trading; it does so at the expense of outsider investors. When it comes to reporting, though, who loses out if insider journalists have better information?
Not those reading their stories. Not outsider journalists, they generally are trying to approach the news very differently anyway. Insider journalists who aren't given background info? Maybe; this is presumably why "access journalism" is something of a curse. But there are generally limits on how much politicians can tighten access as punishment for negative coverage.
Of course there's some heavy spin on the insider access, but it's the journalist's job to see through that spin, and I think MattY is partly expressing that he's angry at having been spun successfully. The fact that this sort of story is a story at all and is so rare is an indication of how unusual it is to mislead the press so thoroughly.
I think you're seeing the downside with this situation! Insider journalists got handed out bits of information in informal, off the record, but biased conversations providing a sense that "everything is fine" when it wasn't.
But how does the off the record nature contribute to the problem here? If it was on the record, Biden would have been just as lucid with Matt and then we all would have been more fooled, not less.
Some thoughts.
1. Huge props for writing this article. It’s not a big deal to be wrong if you admit it. As readers, this helps reassure us that you’re not just cynically running propaganda for Biden.
2. I find it hard to believe, though, that the entire prestige media had the same situation as Matt. Surely some people covering the White House beat could’ve asked some more pointed questions instead of yelling “misinformation! cheap fakes!” at every turn? If it wasn’t a conspiracy, it sure seems like a case of everyone knowing they weren’t really doing their jobs.
3. Not so sure it’s bad for Dems *in the long run* if the NYT, MSNBC, etc run stories about Biden’s age. For better or worse, these outlets are seen as part of the Dems’ brand. Blatant dishonesty very well might hurt the Dems.
If you start from the assumption that journalists are actually just gossipy people who write decently, you never have any trouble understanding the media. You don’t wonder if there’s a conspiracy and you don’t wonder how they get things wrong,
Prioritising quality of writing over quality of information communicated in the writing has been a problem with the written media for as long as I can remember. I'd much rather read something where the writing is a bit dull, but the content is insightful and informative than to read a wonderfully-written take whose content is exactly the same as the ten other takes on the same thing.
With so many articles, I often wish they’d just give me the chart and none of the words. It was so annoying by searching for French election results yesterday - it felt like looking up a recipe where I had to read the person’s diary entry before I found what I wanted.
I hate this about recipes. Should be banned.
I heard recently about some website that lets you put in the URL of a recipe, and it returns just the recipe, with all the filler stripped out.
Surprisingly, ChatGPT is actually now pretty good at doing recipes without all that filler, especially for moderately standard dishes. Even a year and a half ago, it was quite bad, making some suggestions that looked like recipe text but were bad ideas, but now it's decent.
Didn't the NYT write a a lot of stories about Biden's age? Biden, Stancil, general Biden fans, etc have been complaining about the focus on Biden's age for quite a while now. There was a pile on Astead Herndon on twitter for focusing on Biden's age too much
Yes, there were probably many stories about how Biden's age might affect his performance. But my impression is that these stories were outliers -- the general consensus at the NYT appeared to be that Biden's apparent fumbles could be explained as a new "style" or that they were simply right-wing misinformation. For every story that painted a mildly negative picture of Biden's age, there were probably two stories that gave readers the impression that the age problems were way overblown. And in my opinion none of those stories prepared readers for the extent of Biden's decline.
I don't know, there were plenty of articles suggesting that Biden *might* be too old. I think his staff just did a really good job of hiding this from the media.
I don't think you should be too hard on yourself for seeing the rabbit until the debate. There was genuinely a bad-faith multi-year effort to portray Biden as senile carried out by the same set of bozos we've been fighting politically since Gingrich was speaker. That we not only reject what those bozos say out of hand, but weigh the opposite of what they are claiming more heavily because the bozos are deeply and irredeemably dishonest is a heuristic that has worked out pretty well. It's a consequence of the GOP being deeply and at times hysterically bad faith almost all the time.
Also, I don't think you need to feel hurt by this since you (especially in your Politix chats with Beutler) were very clear about the possibility of this being a duck/rabbit situation, and that while you thought the evidence pointed to rabbit, if certain things failed to materialize (like an energetic campaign) it could in fact be a duck. Nate Silver wrote the silver lining of an early debate could be to show early enough that this was a duck for sure, and here we are.
You're just updating your priors. I did too.
That heuristic sounds well and good until you realize that it's the same one Republicans use to dismiss criticisms of Trump. Or as it's called on LessWrong: reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Just because your political opponents argue A, that doesn't automatically mean not-A.
But that’s also just what a good heuristic is - something that is often useful and often enough right, but very much not always right.
I think it's a decent heuristic to discount what your opponents in a zero-sum game like politics are saying, but a very bad heuristic to go further and promote the opposite. As in, "Republicans/Democrats are for it, therefore it must be bad" leads to bad policy and bad epistemics.
I think you’re right that it’s bad to reverse policy views. But when it’s a media narrative about an election, reversal might actually be better.
There were BROAD concerns about someone Biden's age being president and the public routinely said it was one of their biggest issues. Never actually looking to see if its true because Republicans have been talking about it seems like a terrible approach to anything.
I think it’s more looking the first ten times they said it, then having learned they’re just wasting your time, and thus stopping looking any more.
That suggests that any voter who thinks that Democrats were wasting their time talking about Russian interference and corruption are probably right to stop listening to Democrats talk about how bad Trump is...
I'm not saying you should give every possible accusation equal credibility, but Biden is in his 80s and noticeably slower than he was as VP. It seems very reasonable to give slightly more credence to age concerns and verify regularly that there isn't an issue. This situation is why you do that!
Ducks don’t turn into rabbits, it’s either one or the other. It’s a bad metaphor
Cool
It's almost as if a drawing of a duck were not actually a duck, and a drawing of a rabbit were not actually a rabbit, and that the metaphor is about the drawing, not professor McGonagall transfiguring from a rabbit to a duck.
They are talking about evidence of rabbit vs evidence of duck. The actual thing doesn't change but when you don't know which one it is the evidence changes which one you think is more likely.
The difference would be that Biden's age was the main and most effective attack vector against him during the 2020 primary, and that he wasn't doing especially well because of this until South Carolina. And this is back when he was actually somewhat decent speaking publically.
After that there was a pretty clear circling of the wagons among media and senior Dems, so as not to damage Biden at all going into his match up with Trump. But everyone already knew he was too old for two terms. Why is it bad faith when Republicans do it, when his interparty rivals could see the exact same reality for four years?
Is this a joke? The James Comer-led "impeachment investigation" that has turned up exclusively evidence that Joe Biden is very generous with his family even though he doesn't have all that much money is a pretty good place to start.
I think the generosity that Biden extends his family is allowing them to make serious money off their relationship with him. I don't think it rises to the point of criminality or close to the modern standard of impeachment, but its definitely doesn't smell great.
*and for the love, please don't whatabout this. Trump is clearly worse on all counts, but can we have a slightly better standard than the worst person to be a modern president.
You have not been following this story then. What I am referring to is Joe loaning his son money to buy a car, and Comer trying to tell us that Hunter paying him back was “laundered money from a foreign enemy”.
These people are lying bozos.
Matt, you and me misjudged. I spent a career as a geriatric physician, and I thought it absurd that people were diagnosing dementia by media. I saw Joe Biden being an exceptional candidate in 2020 and winning both the primary and general election debates.
Although, I am still not going to diagnose something as significant and degenerating as Alzheimer's, you don't need to be a doctor to note that the Biden of 2024 is far from the Biden of 2020 and should be enjoying his grandchildren and the ocean and not running a country.
The NYTimes today is showing some hope that the campaign for Biden to resign is gaining momentum with key leaders, including Jeffries in the HOR, now pushing for him to step aside.
I had reached the point where I was going to write in Dean Phillips, simply because if Biden stays, he is emulating the head of MAGA whose raison d'etre is his own fortune, not that of the country.
I hope he does not anoint the equally unpopular Harris, but leave it to the Democratic voters to decide.
I had a Facebook group Roy Cooper for president and I only hope my NC centrist Democrat governor who won in 2016 and 2020, despite Trump winning the state, ups and declares. Governors have traditionally done better than VPs or Senators and Polis and Whitmer are also mentioned and would be great candidates.
It definitely seems like Biden has declined since 2020 but I think some people are misremembering a lot of that primary.
Biden as a great candidate seems like a retcon. His debate performance were not great for the most part. He had a very strange record player answer that ramped up age concerns.
He benefited quite heavily from a failure of Bernie and Warren to consolidate support. At a moment when it seemed like they might ramp up attacks on him they had a conflict between them and got distracted some how.
He was VP to a popular president and it seems like that carried him to victory.
I think in retrospect we have to realize that Biden benefited tremendously from not needing to campaign due to Covid. It seems pretty obvious that Biden has declined not just since 2020 but seemingly just the last 6 months. But I suspect if he ran a traditional campaign in 2020 a lot more questions would be ask about whether Biden was up for the job.
But he *was* up for the job! He's been a fantastic President! (Whether that will continue, however . . . )
Nothing discredits people who claim Biden is too old to run now because it was "obvious" that he was too old and was declining back in 2020.
It's the people who said he was good enough to be President back in 2020 and say that is no longer the case who have some credibility.
So I think someone like Josh Barro has some credibility right now.
And I agree he's exceeded my expectations. But I think in 2020 it was likely his campaign schedule would be more limited compared to other candidates but maybe less limited than now. And there were questions about his age during the primaries. My point being, the age attacks would have been more unfair in 2020, but I think they still would have occurred and likely harmed his standing with swing voters.
Indeed.
Did Biden ever have Covid? That would not have helped his neurological situation.
Twice that we know of:
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/vaxxing-and-relaxing-to-fascism
We can't rule out the possibility that he had Covid during the debate and the rapid antigen test simply wasn't picking it up yet.
It could give Biden a great way to save face. He could say everybody agrees I've been a great president but unfortunately there now seems to be a distinct possibility that Covid wrecked my brain. Like what they just reported on the cover of Science last week:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.adk3295
Or on SNL a couple years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkJvlLAuJcE
And hey by the way everybody might want to go get a booster dose so it doesn't wreck your brain next. That would be a pretty graceful way of bowing out.
OK, so *now* can we finally please start talking about the possibility of Covid brain fog?!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/joe-biden-tests-positive-covid-19/index.html
The hypothesis that Covid is causing Biden's neurological dysfunction offers an experimentally testable prediction: he might get better if he takes an antihistamine, such as over-the-counter Pepcid (famotidine)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37327698/
Biden's publicly observable symptoms seem consistent with Parkinson's disease:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/us/politics/parkinsons-expert-white-house.html
https://medium.com/wise-well/the-biden-trump-debate-spoke-loudly-about-their-mental-health-7192a2af6a1b
Covid accelerates Parkinson's:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10232873/
He had it back in 2022.
Well I watched several debates, there were 11 Democratic primary debates, and my subjective opinion was he did well, at any rate there was no clear evidence to me that he was cognitively challenged in the way he is today.
I don't know what a retcon is. Sounds like a partisan word for people you dont like.
I agree that the moderates were more united than the progressive and Biden benefitted from the support of Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and eventually Bloomberg.
The real problem with the progressives, as in 2016 was that they are never able to get the black vote which is mandatory to win the Democratic primary. Bernie's successes were largely limited to mostly white states although he was strong with Hispanics in Nevada.
Sorry, I understand that the "con" part of "retcon" might make it seem partisan in the political context but it is short for "Retroactive Continuity". Mostly a term from entertainment media. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retcon
My contention is just that Biden was not really an "exceptional" candidate in the minds of most people in 2020. He benefited a lot from a large field that didn't consolidate until it did behind him after he had some disappointing finishes in early contests.
Being the VP to Obama and perceived as electable were most of what his candidate was built on and I think people tend to back fill other ideas on to his success instead.
OK, thanks for a new word. I agree he was not exceptional. Certainly no Barack Obama or even Bill Clinton, but his political instincts were pretty good, and he did nothing to flub the primary as opposed to say Harris who seemed fairly unlikable or Bloomberg who lived up to his buying the election criticisms. He had less money than most candidates and started out slow, but I think he had more credibility with black voters and, yes, some of that was his association with Obama and the past Dem establishment. Also, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, he did not suffer from the "blueblood" elite perception so kept enough working class cred, Amtrak Joe, to keep the Midwest.
The killer for me TBH was re-watching some clips of the 2020 debates between him and Trump and I thought there was a bigger gap between 2024 Joe and 2020 Joe than there was between 2020 Joe and the guy who cheerfully wiped the floor with Paul Ryan in 2012
Thank you!!!
Biden in 2019-20---had declined considerably from even 2016. Until Biden got the nomination, professional liberals and lefty journos freely acknowledged this.
I disagree at least from personal experience. Biden was my last choice in 2020 and i was angry at how well he did in the primary debates and how lively he was despite how old i felt he should look. To your point, yes Biden won because he was the most popular moderate and the moderates realized they couldn't split the vote. Similarly he won't the general because Trump's agenda is poison to the average American. But he was still good at playing the part and as Matt notes, swing state Dems were the first to support him and we saw that bear out with solid polling from the start in those states that we might have had to build up with other candidates. Biden's popularity was definitely tied to Obama's but I also don't see that as an illegitimate kind of popularity to have. Seems a bit like another duck-rabbit illusion.
What primary debate did he do well in?
As I remember, professional libs were wondering when another candidate would catch fire because Biden seemed lackluster, old and out of touch and everything in the primary debates underscored that.
Biden won because of residual loyalty of SC blacks underscored by Clyburns endorsement in exchange for Biden's promise to appoint a black woman to #2. And bc fearing a Bernie Sanders win, Obama leaned on Kombucha, Warren, and Buttigieg to get behind Biden after SC. It was in spite of Biden's performance not because of it.
Have you ever read an actuarial table? The risk a man dying at age 82 is 7.8% and the risk of dying at age 86 is 11.7%. I didn’t go to medical school, but I’ve been told there are plenty of morbidities, including but not limited to stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia, that can sap mental performance long before they kill you.
You didn’t even need to look at Biden to know there was a huge risk of death or decline during his second term.
Yes, I checked them recently, seems a little unfriendly the way you ask. I mentioned nothing about dying, and I assume you are talking about one year survival with your figures which sound right. I looked at five year survival and the risk of dying within five years at age 80 is 31%. (https://www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying)
But nobody was speaking about dying but about cognition and that is dramatic. There are many causes of dementia, Alzheimer's represents about 60% of dementias, and its incidence approaches 50% by age 90.
My phrasing was forceful because your “expertise” concealed the forest with the trees. It is never a safe bet to assume that an 81 year old will maintain high levels of executive functioning for four years.
Also, if you don’t understand the effect of dying on cognition and job performance, I’m not sure there’s any helping you.
Again, I feel you are being very hostile. I am a stranger you dont know so sarcastic things like "if you don’t understand the effect of dying on cognition and job performance, I’m not sure there’s any helping you." is that how you talk to people.
I am less worried about dying because if somebody dies there is a clear progression to VP. But I am not defending Biden. I wouldnt think anybody 81 should run for president other than maybe Mel Brooks.
As a geriatric physician, you have a far better calibrated sense of aging than anyone who does not professionally interact with elderly people. I am curious how you view the differential between your patients and colleagues, i.e., physicians who are geriatrics compared to geriatrics in general.
I know a lot of MD and PhD-having people who stay very sharp mentally well into their 80's (because I interact with them professionally). Four of my close relatives lived to over 100 (plus a bunch who made it past 90) and they were quite sharp—for their age—right up until they died. In my totally subjective opinion, what separated them from the relatives who died in their 80's was boredom and lack of stimulation, often after their spouse passed. I saw the same thing when I was a kid and spent a bunch of time in nursing homes, where people would hang on, watching paint dry, until their families visited and then passed away days later.
I'm curious if you think (or if you know of evidence) that my anecdotal observation is true and that, more-or-less, exercising your brain is a necessary part of longevity. Because my fear is not that Biden will die, but that he will be like the 95 year-old Nobel laureates who shuffle around the hallways keeping themselves busy and being "really sharp for their age".
PS I cannot wrap my head polls showing Robinson and Stein in a dead heat.
Bubbles it is interesting and there are many studies that show a correlation between lower education and Alzheimer's, though others don't. I could not find a precise number on how much that effect is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3193875/ perhaps using your mind is protective though I have seen judges, doctors, professors with Alzheimer's. It might also just be that people with high cognitive function can mask it better.
I agree with your fears of Biden. It is one thing just to die which is a high risk at that age, but then you have an orderly succession process, but people with AD can hang on 5-15 years. Most of what I read suggests Reagan had AD in his last years in office and Nancy Reagan was running the White House.
I never attacked you personally, only your argument. And we both agree that supporting an 81 year old presidential candidate is, prima facie, dubious.
Your splitting of hairs between risk of death and risk of decline continues to rankle me. Relatively few people drop dead of a heart attack while still at 95% plus mentally. Risk of death is a very lower bound estimate of the risk of something going badly wrong. And the risk of Biden dying between now and inauguration day 2028 is almost 40%.
Accordingly, your squeamishness about diagnosing via tv strikes me as using “best practices” to deflect the obvious.
Lot of tone policing happening here.
Tone policing is good for the same reason regular policing is good: if it doesn’t happen things descend into chaos, and then there goes the neighborhood.
Unsafe, when somebody is rude to you or just sarcastic in this case, I feel I should mention it. Imo it is not that important who wins an argument, but it is more important how people treat each other. I started this particular thread and if people disagree fine, I can learn something. If they want to be hostile, I feel it more important to make note of that than just ignore it.
Just a medical / odds question:
If 50% of people have Alzheimers by age 90, and Alzheimers is 60% of dementias, does that mean 84% of 90 year olds have dementia or Alzheimers?
Let me amend that figure. I tried to re find the data. The rate for AD goes up strongly with age and at >85 it is 33%. I dont see any figures for 90 but maybe somewhere towards 40%, But the other dementias tend to be more quickly fatal, so as the population gets older the percent AD probably goes up, eg ALS people dont live that long. It might only be 50% total dementia by age 90. https://cfah.org/alzheimers-dementia-statistics/
Most doctors are more familiar with the standard of care than actuarial statistics. That may me fine clinically, but it cuts against deferring to medical “experts” in actuarial debates.
I'm sorry--I get you find diagnosis by TV annoying--- but this is ridiculous. The decline of even the 2020 Biden from even 2016, the last full year when he was vice president, was screamingly obvious. No, I don't need to be a geriatric doctor to notice and comment on this either.
Sincerely asking what the biggest 2019-2020 red flags were for you?
Red flag is wrong term. Biden seemed old, out of touch and uninspiring from the get go.
Between the bumbling debate performances, the slipping false teeth, the fact that Biden needed a low level staffer to hold his hand everywhere to prevent him from wandering off, the fact that when Biden did walk he shuffled like an old man, the fact that the whole 2020 campaign was just friendly interviews and set piece speeches and interactions.
Biden looked like a front man for anti Trump coalition who was being propped up. In 2020 he could get away with that. 2024 doubtful. I don't think America wants a Weekend at Bernie's president
You seem like you have an agenda here. It’s not subtle.
"My guess is that the rigors of the campaign schedule combined with the linear progression of time and the trauma of Hunter’s legal problems made things much worse."
I reviewed Biden's medical reports and there was a significant change between 2023 and 2024. The big ones I saw were 1) his team specifically ruled out Parkinson's and 2) he restarted CPAP.
Why is this important? Because they could not plausibly just say his gait issues are orthopedic in 2024, they had to specifically investigate neurologic issues. And they likely started him on CPAP because they noticed him dragging, which can be a sign of chronic sleep deprivation.
2024 Biden can't hack the schedule of the presidency, the rigors of the campaign, and adversarial interviews that require extemporaneous speaking. He's not DANGEROUS as President but he's also not showing that he will have good enough judgment to step down if he becomes incapacitated. And his inner circle also isn't showing insight that they'd support 25A at that point (though I trust them to do that more than Trump's flunkies, who were endlessly craven over 4 years).
I like Biden. I think he was the right guy in 2020 and has earned the right to run again *if* he was the same candidate in 2020. He's not, though. He may feel it's unfair, but the presidency doesn't care about your sleep requirements or age. So I wrote to my federal electeds and requested they do what they can to replace him as our candidate. It sucks that Dems are left doing the mature thing to clean up the immaturity of Republicans. (The unfitness of the Republican candidate is the reason victory is so critical, especially in light of the SCOTUS immunity ruling.)
"The unfitness of the Republican candidate is the reason victory is so critical, especially in light of the SCOTUS immunity ruling."
I mean, said unfitness is also the only reason victory is even possible, to be fair.
This is a very helpful comment!
Interesting. You're a doctor, right?
Yup, though not a neurologist or geriatrician. This is more a general medical take based on reading and writing enough notes to look between the lines. There are a few more docs on here who may have closer expertise and I'd love to hear what they think, even if they disagree.
I think Biden's team has been telling the truth that it's a sleep deprivation issue. It also doesn't matter because we now see that his worse day is no longer good enough to run for president.
I’m an internist with additional training in psychiatry and I largely agree. I’m a little suspicious of restarting CPAP - either you have obstructive sleep apnea or you don’t. If the CPAP recommendation is equivocal, that sounds more like grasping at straws - it couldn’t hurt and it might help
You're definitely more of an expert than me on this! Here's the 2024 report.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Health-Summary-2.28.pdf
Seems that he had a FESS that helped. But his doctor suspected that the condition regressed and repeated a sleep study, which was positive. Sounds like mask fit has been a problem and might still be suboptimal.
Also explains where his atrial fib likely came from. The OSA dates back to at least '08. Which leads to one other possibility, that his asymptomatic atrial fib has evolved into a sick sinus syndrome and that his freezes are some sort of transient hypoperfusion. But I'm sure he'd be admitted if that's the case. There's just no mention of a Holter monitor or similar to formally exclude.
The report is well-written and does a good job of justifying its conclusions. They do mention doing polysomnography to document the recurrence of sleep apnea. I would note, however, that in the discussion of his neurological exam that there was no specific mention of cognitive impairment as something that was ruled out. It’s also unusual to have chronic atrial fibrillation without needing medication to control AV conduction and heart rate; his AV conduction may be unstable with periods of tachycardia or bradycardia. There’s no mention of a Holter monitor.
Agree they're missing any neuropsychological testing even though the "man, camera" screening won't likely find anything. But maybe the president, if anyone, would merit advanced testing.
I have seen patients who are naturally rate-controlled but a diseased conduction system is still a diseased conduction system. Kind of wondering if they'd put him on something if he was younger. But HR and BP are pretty decent. Rate and rhythm therapies seem to go in and out of fashion depending on whether cardiologists cooked up a cool study acronym so I'm out of my depth there.
I think we both agree that everything in there is truthful but there could certainly be some strategic omissions. After all, this isn't a full medical record. You can tell because it doesn't have an additional 12 pages of EMR-generated garbage added.
If they haven’t already, I would encourage this crowd to listen to Ezra Klein’s recent show with Elaina Plott Calabro, one of the journalists who have recently done deeply reported pieces with Kamala Harris. I left that piece thinking that Harris has real potential to beat Trump, but only if she can get out of her own head and go back to being the tough, sorry, smart on crime prosecutor she once was. (A point Matt has also made). Has the “it’s racist to want to have public order” crowd been cowed enough to enable her to do that? I don’t know, but a Harris win seems possible.
Did Elaina Plott Calabro ask about Kamala Harris's role in deceiving us about Joe's mental and physical condition?
Meaning, was she part of the administration doing what the administration wanted? Yes she was. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect otherwise.
I'm trying to imagine a scenario in which the VP is the brave truth teller about the President.
This Harris-as-deceiver is one of the stupidest takes I've seen in a long time.
I mean, Pence came close and was given approval for it.
The VP takes an oath to serve the Constitution, not the president, correct?
He was no longer VP.
But yes, if Biden pressured Harris to do something illegal and to overthrow the election, I hope she would resist.
And if Biden is not competent, and unfit, she should say something.
What if he’s competent 95% of the time and the rest of the administration takes care of things the other 5%? Especially if he’s doing particularly creatively good things others wouldn’t duplicate during some of that good time? Presumably, no action or comment needed then.
But what about when it slips to 90% of the time, and then 85% or the time, and then 80% of the time? At each moment, it might not seem like enough has changed for this to be the moment to act. And until the moment to actually act, you don’t want to be actively raising concerns and showing a divided administration, either for international or domestic audiences.
It was a really insightful interview but I still feel as though Harris is just unlikeable in the way Hillary Clinton was to many people. Even when she is on point, her voice and affect can be grating.
I get that may seem sexist but I really think it's a "her" problem.
Yes, Hillary had a grating voice and was unlikeable.
Yes, Kamala has a grating voice and is unlikeable.
You know, we're one away from a trend and a common factor (three guesses as to that common factor).
Did people, like, listen to JFK’s voice to help them sleep? Who thought Carter had a soothing voice? Etc.
Guess #1: they're both obviously afraid to say the "wrong thing" in public, so they come off as stilted and phony, like Kerry in 2004.
I don't think Clinton has a history of being afraid to say the wrong thing in public. Remember "those jobs are not coming back"? But then I don't think Kerry came across as phony or insincere either (a bit stiff, sure).
No, it’s definitely sexist. That’s not a reason why you should like her of course, to each its own unavoidably. But she’s good at articulating the points Biden now seems fairly incapable to state clearly. Calabro has a good analysis of when she’s most effective.
Or maybe she’s just unlikeable? One could argue that it’s actually sexist to say the only reason one might not like her is because she’s a woman.
I think when you say that *even when she's on point* her voice and affect are grating, it suggests that you dislike her for totally aesthetic reasons which are very difficult to separate from her sex.
The problem with citing pre-2013 Democratic party messaging is it involves denying the Democratic party has in any way changed its view on the legitimacy of policing and border enforcement over the last decade. It's like saying in 1968, well Humphrey just has to embrace the wartime presidency Truman showed us in the Korean war and FDR showed in WW2. By the time you have to ask people to do this, the national party has clearly changed a bit and wants something else. If it were an easy ask without alienating any other faction, the politician would already be doing it.
If you’re talking about elites- yes that is absolutely true. But I don’t think the rank and file has changed all that much. We won’t know unless we try.
If the party's elites matter enough to force Biden out when he has the vast majority delegates lined up for a normal convention by the current primary's standards, do they suddenly matter less when it comes time to set Harris's campaign message?
Consider the border issue. Biden had to spend months from December to last month, first setting up a deal debacle with Ukraine hawks among the GOP's senators disconnected from the GOP House, then denying the Speaker's claims he had the power to act on the border, and then finally signing executive order on the border. Even then, this 6 month process comes after years of being the most unpopular immigration president in modern history and had to be shortly accompanied a new parole-in-place program. It looks like the party's elites matter a lot when handling even the most unpopular part of Biden's presidency. What evidence is there that this changes with Harris? Her career suggests she's even less willing to piss off people in the party than Biden!
What is the evidence for associating support for immigrants with “elites”? The people most strongly supportive of immigrants are immigrants themselves, children of immigrants, and young college-educated people. Are this last group your idea of elites?
Many older immigrants are not happy with Biden's asylum policy and its burden on municipal government. Nonetheless, party leaders decided it was the best way to reflect a pro-immigration cause through executive policy. We can argue exactly how party elites (and frankly, party leader or party man might be a better term for this) contrast with the overall party constituents. But my point is it will not change one way or another under Harris. Any politicking to insist it will because she was an attorney general is just that, politicking.
You may very well be right and elites are more important and the effort will fail. I think it’s still worth a try - what is the alternative?
Oh I think making Harris the president today is the right thing to do if Biden is unfit to normally campaign (and thus unfit to govern.) That's before we get into polling. I just think the eventual turn rightward in the road for Democrats nationally isn't coming until they lose a series of presidential races like they did before Bill Clinton stepped up. Wishing for a turn rightward on the merits or the appearance of it to deceive swing voters, it seems like that turns one right back to the problems that produced the cartel dynamics around discussing Biden's condition to begin with.
I think winning a contested convention gives her a lot more credibility and profile.
I listened to that podcast and concluded that Harris was toast due to (amongst other things) some really really bad timing. I think Ezra's take from the show is correct that if you could get a tough-on-crime former prosecutor to run now that would be great.
But Harris is disconnected from that identity, and I fear that if she tries to get it back now (when it would be useful) it's an easy attack that she's a weather vane - even if tough on crime really is who she is.
I read the transcript for the interview, maybe it’s better in audio but the contempt Elaina seemed to have for the VP (perhaps because she didn’t go to Yale like her) stood out in the text, particularly her assertion that the VP is incapable of making grand statements.
Hmmmm. I think she comes across as more sympathetic in the audio.
Agree, I didn’t get any contempt in the audio
That’s not a fair representation of what Calabro said, imo
Agreed, but Biden needs to really step aside to make that happen. It can't look like she's pushing him over to scramble to the top.
The Joe Biden of the debate reminded me my grandad a few months before he passed. He was stumbling with his words, couldn’t find answers or responses and was weirdly stiff.
I remember our last conversation. He was unusually lucid. He smiled and we talked about going fishing on his boat (he had sold the boat years ago and was obviously in no shape to take her out now). We talked about what fish we should catch up on Sardis lake and maybe we would fry up some catfish. I’ve never had to fight back tears so hard in my entire life. Toward the end he just got quiet and stared off into the distance. I held his hand and gave him his sippy cup of water. This war vet who taught me how to shoot a rifle, fish and start a camp fire. Hell, it makes me emotional to write about it now.
What I’m not seeing covered is the deeply real emotional response Joe’s appearance created for some Americans. It’s not just “old man is old!” Or “shitlib lost his marbles!” It’s “my god, someone help this man and stop this madness. Let him be with his family and spend his remaining days in peace”.
I don’t know, as mad as I am at Joe Biden and the cover up squad I’m also just sad. I’m sad for him, his family and what this whole situation is costing everyone.
This is part of the reason I support age (or term) limits for SCOTUS. I feel very bad that Ginsburg had to stay on the court in terrible condition, for example.
I agree, it was heart wrenching to watch. I watched my father decline similarly and I cannot for the life of me understand how Biden’s family could have allowed him to partake in really, such a humiliating experience.
Without him, they are not important.
I shouldn’t project too much but having addiction and mental illness in my family I’m pretty sure I know the Hunter Biden angle here. It’s really well captured by Kendall Roy in Succession “Without this…I don’t know what I am for really”. Addicts will often threaten their loved ones with the dark future that will exist if they do not get what they want. It’s a lack of emotional sobriety that can perpetuate even after years of sobriety from external chemical abuse.
Of course the usual corrupt business and political interests probably exist too but my guess is that Hunters appeals that land most effectively with his dad are of the Kendall Roy variety.
I was thinking more of Jill than of Hunter.
What do you think Hunter's motivations are? Just influence on a President, a pardon, money, something else?
Oh I think it’s all of that plus the fear that he will back slide into drug abuse (if he hasn’t already) if he doesn’t have White House intrigue to keep him busy. The number one symptom of addiction is a blinding selfishness that swallows everything in your life into a yawning black hole. It’s deeper than a chemical problem, it’s a crisis of being.
I'm sad that his family keeps telling him to stay in the race.
I don't mean to be glib here. I have a lot of sympathy for Biden and I am incredibly thankful of the work he's done. I am less sympathetic to his family members who seem to be telling him to keep putting himself through this.
I'd like to think he has people around him who should have helped him get to "I'm going to have one good term and go out on a high note" - to ask him to get up now and say "I thought I had another one in me, I'm cooked, I gotta pass this torch" - that's asking a lot of anyone.
Do you want to know why most Americans thought Biden was too old at the beginning of the year? It's because he is too old! Like seriously I do not understand why anyone is surprised by this! It's like the commentariat has never been around a person in their 80s before.
Your last sentence is why I didn't worry about Biden's age as much as some people. I have been around a lot of people in their 80s, many of whom are extremely cogent and analyze and think about things much more deeply than those on their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It is also why I have become so discouraged about my physical ailments - I see people who are 25 or 30 years older than me moving around with more ease. My spouse says the sample of people I am around is not average, and it appears he is correct.
Two things: 1. Variation is enormous 2. You rarely if ever see the impressive 80-year-olds in a very very high stress job.
The point is not that it’s an irrefutable premise that being 80 is necessarily too old to handle the presidency, but it *is* a very very strong prior to that effect meaning to your presumption should be that he is too old unless consistently proven otherwise.
All I can really think of is Nancy Pelosi.
Dr Fauci is two years older than Biden
I think there are quite a few people who are very capable well into their 80s probably many more so than I am! But they are the exception and in my experience even the most capable would not be my first choice to be the president of the United States and I think most Americans realize that.
Unfortunately most people don’t get their first choice to be the president of the United States.
I've been around some amazing teenagers, but I wouldn't want a teenager to be president.
I think many people shared/shares my view, ”Yes he is too old but the other guy is a fascist, rapist and traitor”. Still not great to have a too old president but better than the alternative. I wish Biden would drop out, both so that we can have a better president and so that the fascist doesn’t win.
The thing is, on top of all that.... the other guy is ALSO TOO OLD. He makes many cognitive errors. Constantly. Some of them are because he has always been a bit of a moron, but some of them are obvious cognitive decline.
It is just very frustrating to watch people ignore this.
The thing everyone is so frustrated by, though, is that, very obviously, Trump is also too old.
"My opponent is too old" is simply not a critique that a 78-year old who constantly says very stupid things, incoherently, should be allowed to make.
Yet here we are.
It’s not about the number, it’s about the capability. Bernie is a year older than Biden, but whatever you think of his politics, it seems clear to me the Bernie retains far more of his capabilities and fire than Biden does. People progress through these things at different rates.
One question - what have we actually seen from Bernie in the past year? One of the things that seems important in the Biden issue is that the downturn can actually be pretty quick when it happens.
There's a difference between old and senile. Biden in 2020 was old, but he still proved to be an extremely effective president. Recently he actually visited Israel and seemed fine. His SOTU seemed fine. But at some point he crossed the line to senile.
People should ask themselves when they first lost confidence in Joe.
For the last 3 years, I couldn't stop pondering this: If Joe was an Uber driver who showed up to pick me up, I'd feel nervous and offer to drive. "Get in the back seat and take a load off. It's ok, I'll do it".
It's wild that this guy wouldn't be trusted to drive a car but he's the 1 person out of 300 M we let run the place.
I've been holding my breath every time Biden spoke in public for 4+ years, just hoping he wouldn't collapse.
I white-knuckled my way through his 2020 debate with Bernie, so it started before then.
His 4-year stretch of ok luck finally ran out.
I maybe can stand in for a less-engaged voter on this because, while I am very politically engaged, I have an extreme text bias in media consumption and never watch video of anything.
I had tuned out all the Biden-is-too-old content as the same partisan noise we'd heard for 5 years already, while the Biden administration had done a good job in my view. It wasn't until the debate - which I actually watched for once - that I saw how old he looked and sounded.
It would have made a difference if any of my print sources, including Matt, had seriously covered age-related decline. Although I don't really see it as Matt's lane to break stories. More like NYT or another news source - Politico, WSJ, etc., where were they?
To be fair, the WSJ dif write article about it and got absolutely slammed as a partisan hit job for it by most Democrats.
The wsj thing was weird because they interviewed a lot of Dems for that piece but basically didn't quote any of them. So on top of any regular "Biden is fine!" responses there were a lot of Dem electeds who replied with "I told them he was fit as a fiddle and they didn't quote me!"
The WSJ piece was bad for reasons you give, Adam. The Robert Hur report (even if true) was a scandalous abuse of his role. It's understandable that people on our side dismissed them.
But so what? Nothing would have changed, except for a few more Ezra Klein columns. We needed a shocking event to crystallize concerns. We got that on June 27. And even that may not be enough to get Biden to step aside.
"The Robert Hur report (even if true) was a scandalous abuse of his role."
It was still a scandalous abuse of his role to report the truth!?!
You're saying that if he had serious concerns about Biden, he should have said nothing? How would you feel about someone saying that about a report on Trump, because it seems very partisan brain to me?
It was gratuitous and therefore suspicious
He had mo place to speculate on what some hypothetical jury might think, given how controversial he knew such a comment would be
Do you think those same Dem electeds who replied with "I told them he was fit as a fiddle and they didn't quote me!" are still unhappy that they didn't get quoted in the piece?
Genuinely a good question lol. In the end many of them seem to have lucked out (but I guess the situation also raises questions about the frequency of debate-like episodes, how often those electeds speak with him, and the rate of Biden's decline)
This is the problem with the "a bad night" argument. There are only a few moments in the campaign when you can grab people's attention and change the dynamics. This debate was it. I mean, this was the intention of the Biden campaign when they took the unprecedented step of calling for a June debate. They thought the campaign was getting frozen with Trump slightly in the lead and they wanted to shake things up and change the dynamic.
And it blew up in their faces. So how do they get another chance to do that? The convention? Yawn. Another debate in October? (Assuming Trump agrees.) I'm not seeing it. Paid ads/rallies/sit down interviews with Jon Stewart or whoever? Nope.
They had one opportunity to change the narrative of the campaign and that chance was lost.
I'm also a text majority consumer of media but I really don't get this comment: "Although I don't really see it as Matt's lane to break stories. More like NYT or another news source - Politico, WSJ, etc., where were they?"
The establishment media has been running "Biden is too old pieces" for the better part of 18 months now. Biden's age concerns have quite possibly been the second most covered story after AI in the last 18 months.
They’re very much covering the *concerns*, but not so much covering the actual *age* and related issues. It’s like the coverage they used to do of global warming where it was all about what voters think, and not about what was actually happening. (They’ve now gone a bit too far the other way on climate coverage, always inserting a sentence that says that 1.5 degrees is the number scientists say is a magic cutoff.)
At 1.6 degrees Manhattan will be underwater! /sarc
I don't know if I ever thought about the question, because I see the executive branch as a team effort, and while the person on top obviously matters, that person isn't everything to the branch.
But others have made a convincing case that "being president" and "running for president" are two very different things, and it's clear that my confidence in the latter fell considerably after the debate.
I do think that is largely true, but from how I understand the presidency, it is really a job of processing a bunch of information from a lot of different people and making decisions based on that information. You can be advised on which decision to make, and 99% of the executive duties are delegated to other people, but that 1% is extremely important and entirely reliant on the president.
Ok but you realize that saying he’s always been incapable isn’t a convincing argument at this particular juncture? If you thought it before of course you’d keep believing it.
"Incapable" is not the right word. "Underpowered" and "high risk" would be more accurate.
Bu the debate was a definite game-changer.
A year ago, I just wanted him to not run for a second term.
After he chose to ran, my dream scenario was him telling the world that he was replacing Kamala with someone like Josh Shapiro, and that he would step down in 12-18 months after re-election and let Shapiro have the job.
But after that last debate, it changed to "get out now".
Why is Josh Shapiro so fantastic? I just don't get it.
I guess you’ll have to suck it up for either Biden or Kamala then.
Since I live in California, my vote doesn't matter. If Biden chooses to stay on the ticket, it will show such terrible judgement and character that I'll leave it blank.
Well, when we’re watching Trump win the popular vote for the first time, at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I had to vote for someone I wasn’t enthusiastic about.
That's an odd comparison, since those are very different skills.
I wouldn't trust FDR much as a driver, but he did a fine job as president for 4 terms during the great depression and WW2.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want Queen Elizabeth to be president, but she was apparently quite a skilled driver, even well into old age: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/23/7877243/king-abdullah-queen-drive
"4-year stretch of ok luck"
OK, sure, whatever.
I'd be a bit nervous if FDR showed up to drive my cab too considering his body didn't work. But he still beat the Nazis. Driving a car and being president just aren't very related skills.
On a side note, Trump couldn't pass a background check to be hired as a manager at IHOP, but he still might become president.
I think most people who have "lost confidence in Joe" did so at least twice.
Once when he was running in the 2020 primary against their preferred candidate and it seemed like would beat them.
Once when he was running in the 2024 general election against Donald Trump and it seemed like he might lose to him.
Matt, don't feel bad for deciding that you were wrong. No one likes being wrong, but every fallible human is wrong at some point--I know I've had my fair share of wrongness about American politics. But many humans don't have the humility to admit that they were wrong. Many humans are also afraid to offer their takes out of fear of being wrong. I'm glad you're giving us your takes on a regular schedule and continue to look forward to it, even if you decide later that some of your takes were wrong.
Want to second this: the world is complicated and anyone who takes a view of high-uncertainty issues will be wrong a lot of the time even if their overall hit rate is good. The important thing is being able to take in new evidence and self-correct.
Matt definitely has more integrity than most take slingers. Though he is sometimes afraid to rock the center left boat, he rarely gets the facts wrong.
It is astonishing to me that Democrats are obsessed with "how do we win in November" when we are literally without a capable president day to day, at this moment. The idea that the country is being run by the president's family, including his felonious son who doesn't have and could never qualify for a security clearance, is hair-raising. The president needs to be gotten out of there now. Kamala needs to get in there now. Maybe this will give her a chance to show that she has political qualities that so far have not been apparent., but that's incidental; a functioning government now, and a functional opposition party later, are the only important things. This is so obvious, and yet the press, the party, seem to be oblivious to it. The lack of patriotism from people who have taken constitutional oaths is unspeakable.
Is there evidence Biden isn’t capable of being president day-to-day? Sure the debate was bad but that say very little about his ability to do the job. Caveating that obviously a younger president would be all else equal better.
I think the issue is less day to day than the out of the ordinary. There have been several reports (backed up by things Biden himself has said) that Biden works ok during normal business hours, but he starts slipping outside of those hours. An emergency that requires the president's attention at 9 pm isn't a day-to-day thing, but it is absolutely a thing a president needs to be capable of!
This makes no sense to me but whatever. I’d only add that the President needs the people’s confidence, not the other way around.
We have a capable president from 10am to 4pm tho right? Let's just make sure all international crisises happen during banking hours.
I don't know how Drunk History missed casting Jill Biden in the role of Edith Wilson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta1ZcjpwVLo
The 25th Amendment is there for a reason!
It’s for if the president is incapacitated. But Biden isn’t incapacitated. I want him out of there too but the only way to “get him out of there” is to convince him to leave and no one can make him choose to be convinced if he’s not.
But he clearly is incapacitated a decent amount of the time as we all saw from the debate. That was actually an event scheduled months in advance that was critical for the campaign and that the Biden team knew and treated as critical. Biden had the best possible preparation! And a capacitated Biden still couldn’t show up!
Sorry, I wasn't clear. "Incapacitated" would mean, like, he's in a coma and unable to send "his written declaration that no inability exists." If he does send a written declaration, then it comes down to Congress, which would need a 2/3 vote to remove him. Ain't happening. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-xxv
It doesn't matter whether it is or ain't gonna happen. The plausible *threat* of invoking the 25th Amendment could convince Jill Biden to back away from the puppet strings of power.
Agreed! Moreover, a secondary utility of the 25th Amendment is that if the VP and cabinet can plausibly *threaten* to invoke it then the saber-rattling can serve as a check-and-balance on the president's (or the president's family's) range of options.
Checks and balances make for better government
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQExgALv9wI
I feel Team Biden is spinning a false narrative about him winning in 2020 by himself. The Dem establishment helped him a lot. He had a string of weak primary results, then won S Carolina aided by an endorsement from Clyburn, and then the field was cleared for him while he still had nowhere close to 50% of the delegates.
It strikes me as an effort to undermine those advocating for him to step down on false grounds and therefore only strengthens my belief that he should in fact step down. If you have a strong true case, you don't push a sketchy case like they seem to me to be.
Joe Biden would have won South Carolina without Jim Clyburn
Sure, but likely in a less dominant fashion and potentially in a way that encourages Klobuchar/Pete to stay in the race and split the Super Tuesday vote.
I appreciate the mea culpa, it will make me trust you more in future.
However, you are still not engaging with the substantive reason it’s bad to have a president with diminished (and rapidly diminishing) capacities. It’s not that he might lose the election, it’s that he might start a war, or fail to avoid one.
Suppose Russia fires a missile at a supply base in Poland. Or China blockades Taiwan. Etc. In situations like this, it’s very easy to imagine how the US could get drawn into a shooting war, and the personal capacity of the president to make difficult decisions and accurately communicate their thoughts becomes paramount.
For instance, one way to deescalate situations like the ones I described is for the president to get on the phone with Putin or Xi, and talk the situation out. Advisors can’t do this for him. It seems clear that Biden isn’t up to this.
To put this another way: imagine Biden (or Biden + 3 years) were handling the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you feel okay about that? I don’t.
By far, by far, by far the most important job of the US president is to avoid nuclear war.
I wish you weren't right, but I think you are. It's my estimate that the world is significantly more dangerous than in 2020.
Does the media climate have to get worse?
Most of the non-"right wing" media seems to be writing about Bidens age not out of concern for this ability to do his current job but as part of Democratic electoral strategy.
Some journalists seemed pissed that they were lied to but that mostly seems to be self-inflicted. People like Ezra and Will Stancil talked about Biden being too old in 2020. When he was just a primary candidate "everyone" knew he was too old. I thought we all just pretended that wasn't true to beat Trump.
Couldn't these people just get over themselves? It is a strange time to start holding power to account for most of these journalists.
After angering right wingers for years news organizations also pissed for lefties with Gaza and now Biden stans with post debate coverage. Who are they going to have left.
I think it is silly to sink the party, and maybe country, for Biden's ego. It seems just as bad for journalists to do the same for their own egos.(I am not talking about Matt specifically)
As I say in the piece to me the fact that “everyone” (many people) said he was too old in 2020 is exactly one reason I was reluctant to listen as he really did get too old. His performance in 2020 was fine! If there was a problem in 2021 it’s that he had he *too much* legislative success. But he kept getting older and his health seems to have gotten worse.
"really did get too old"
But wasn't he really too old even in 2020? I think Ezra mused about some cognitive decline in one of the debate episodes.
It feels like in 2020 the idea was that Trump is terrible and Biden can beat him so his performance didn't matter.
Now since his poll numbers and approval ratings suck his ability to beat Trump is in doubt.
Did he really get "too old" or is he just no longer useful to the beat Trump strategy?
If Biden's approval wasn't underwater would he be "too old" or just the same very old he was in 2020.
The media output is mostly worry about losing the election. If they think his age is putting us in danger they should say that but other than Ross Douthat and Nate Silver I don't know that I have seen anybody suggest they would not vote for him.
Yeah I think there's a combination of (1) he really obviously was less "old" in 2020 but also (2) we graded him on a curve because of his importance in beating Trump.
And (2) is what isn't totally being grappled with here. We had good reasons to grade him on a curve! But the result of that is a lot of people pretended the age issue was less of a big deal than it really was.
We -- the population at large -- had a good reason to grade him on a curve. I did so in 2020 and I will do so again if he is the nominee in November. But journalists are supposed to tell the truth and let us make that choice! Instead, they have abandoned their ethics to the detriment of their profession.
If Biden was still ahead in the polls would he be "too old"?
Voters have been saying he was "too old" for months.
If journalists are happy with how he is governing then do they just mean he is too old to win? Voters have been saying that for a while.
Biden was useful to beat Trump in 2020, if was on pace to do it again would any of these journalists care about the debate.
If Biden were still ahead in the polls he would still be a dangerous and mentally decrepit egotist who wants to be President until he has no mind left at all at 86, for reasons completely contrary to the interests of the country. And the only reason I would still support him is because his opponent is even more dangerous and almost as old.
But, if he were ahead in the polls, it would not be the political problem that it is now.
If Biden's approval were not underwater and/or he were not polling behind Trump, we'd all be looking at each other thinking "If you don't think all the things he does and says in public are evidence that he is too old, then I'm willing to go along with it because defeating Trump is, by far, the highest priority."
MAGA has for years had a collective action problem; to push Trump aside and replace him with a better candidate would require everyone to decide to act at once. But instead they keep learning the lesson that the tallest blade of grass is the first one cut and MAGA is very quick to punish and excommunicate the insufficiently loyal. The result has been a string of election losses and the dissipation of "red waves".
Biden's coalition is an anti-Trump coalition, meaning a lot of his supporters are not partisan Democrats (I include myself in that group). I think that leaves room for people to step back and ask "are we having a collective action problem?" instead of just putting on the blue jersey and glowering at dissenters. And I think you see that coming out in the media because pundits feel—rightly—that taking a patriotic anti-Trump position is not the same thing as taking a partisan pro-Democratic Party position.
Don't be like MAGA: let's have a big discussion about Biden's age vis-a-vis his ability to defeat Trump. If Biden is the nominee coming out of the convention, the "Biden is too old" takes will be replaced with "Trump is even more dangerous than you think" takes.
Matt is spot on.
If you thought Biden was too old in 2020, you have to think he was too old to be an effective President 2021-present.
I don't think so -- quite the opposite. And I think I'm right.
Is he too old *now*? Totally different question.
So when did Matt start being "wrong about Biden"? Since Ezra's column?
What does it mean to be "too old" in this context?
If Biden is polling ahead of Trump is he still "too old"?
There is no clear line.
If Biden were capable of repeating the same presidential performance of 2020-2023 then he still wouldn't actually be "too old". He's been a very effective president! It just seems clear now that he won't be able to. That's a change from 6 months ago. It went from he's lost a step to he's forgotten how to walk.
There are two dimensions, ideology/record and “performance.” Biden was the only Democratic candidate in 2020 with a fairly moderate ideology and a long record to prove it. Mayor Pete “performed” much better, but didn’t connect to black voters because he’s gay and blacks who vote in primaries are often socially conservative.
Mayor Pete had 0 credibility as a Presidential nominee. He was Mayor of a 100k person city. If anything being gay in the 2020 primaries was a net positive for his vote count.
If he was just a generic straight-guy Mayor of a liberal college town he would have went nowhere in the primaries.
Meh, Buttigieg never polled above Bloomberg. Not saying he wouldn't have beaten Bloomberg, just that let's hold off on saying he did would have done great outside of Blacks in the primary.
I'll admit I detested Pete in the primaries. I would have voted for him if he was nominated but it shows how weak parties are in the US that someone who had never even run in a competitive race or in a large jurisdiction was elevated to national leadership.
I'll go to my grave believing his elevation in the primaries was due to the national press and national power brokers seeing so much of their younger selves in his bio:
- College Professor Parent
- Ivy League Education
- Lifelong Ambition to enter politics.
That bio appeals to billionaires and journalists. That has some political value but it is hardly enough to jump to the presidency.
In 2020, I first supported Harris and then jumped to Klobuchar. It drives me batty that this non-entity got so much institutional support.
Looking back, I wonder if the overspending of ARPA, the deportation pause and end of Remain in Mexico, and some other things are more helpfully explained by the oldest and most conservative party man in the room not really being in the room.
I'm skeptical the overspending is due to age. I think a lot of Democrats, myself included, internalized from the terminally slow recovery from the Great Recession:
- You only get 1 chance to pass a relief measure during a recession;
- If you undershoot moderates will incorrectly go for austerity;
- You get years of underemployment
- Reactionaries take over Congress.
On that one at least, I do see the failed response to the Great Recession as the primary driver. But your larger point that his age may have allowed the moderate POTUS to be rolled more easily. The Climate wing is an elite* project and they got way more out of this presidency than the votes they supplied. As is your immigration point.
* I don't use elite as a pejorative but as a descriptive term. And here it applies. Climate politics is a mostly elite project and they got a ton out of this Presidency despite how few voters are climate hawks.
Right? Everyone is going with “Biden has been the greatest leader since Hammurabi bit. Ok, two things, first let’s not get carried away. As you note, immigration and inflation have been policy disasters contributed in a large part to the direct actions of the administration. Second, it isn’t clear what Biden himself has actually done. And if a government is to have democratic legitimacy, it needs to be run by the guy that actually got the votes.
When do you feel you started to be wrong about Biden?
After Ezra's column?
I think just in general journalist elites that claim they were lied to have zero credibility, all evidence points to a change, perhaps temporary, rather than a “coverup”
It doesn't seem outrageous to believe that they were "lied to" but the WH. Since the debate they have seemed a bit less than honest about some details.
It seems a lot less credible that they "believed" what they were being told.
That isn’t their claim though - they aren’t only mad about the response, they explicitly say they were “gaslit” about his previous state (which was fine, fucking obviously, if it wasn’t and they wanted to cover it up they wouldn’t have done a debate at all).
Yes I agree with you.
It seems true both that the WH hasn't been forthcoming with Biden's health and that the journalists are full of shit when they say they were fooled by what the WH was saying.
While Biden was too old in the 2020 campaign, he got the job done and has performed well at being president.
Imo their failure to think strategically and plan ahead to give Kamala some wins is very frustrating and seems like political malpractice - like come on you’ve got a VP who’s going to be around for the next few cycles, do whatever you can to improve her favorability!