It takes courage to be a leader. And it seems our elected representatives, save for a few notable exceptions, lack courage. Only seven Republican Senators voted to convict Trump in 2021 (Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, Toomey), while the rest looked at the evidence of his wrongdoing and chose cowardice.
Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?
I feel like to immediately start talking about "courage" is to completely miss the point of the column.
It's not about courage. It's about having rules mechanisms within the party that give formal power for people to make decisions and know they have the support of the party even if they aren't particularly brave.
To some degree, but it also takes courage to go against groupthink and the groupthink was that you couldn't challenge Biden and you had to ignore his disastrous polls. Just two days before Pelosi or whomever (?Obama) pulled the tablecloth, or Biden just succumbed to reality, Bernie Sanders wrote an op ed about why we needed Joe Biden.
Now, true that courage is not anything we can design so we might need structural change. I dont know what structural changes would help. It was not that the leadership was any better than the rank and file, they were both smoking the Joe is fine cigarettes. If there was any hero, imo, besides Pelosi, it was the media. And cudos to Dean Phillips for playing the Cheney for the Dems.
Indeed, courage and groupthink are ultimately natural human characteristics. The imperative is not to design them out of existence, but to design around them, if not leverage them towards good outcomes (when possible).
A party (and particularly a a party's elected officials) is supposed to reflect the views of its members. If elected officials can't even call on its leader to step aside when that's what an overwhelming majority of its members wanted, no mechanism is going to prevent that level of cowardice
There are obviously mechanisms that could do this. For instance, if there were an anonymous box where members of Congress could call for the party to do something, and at a weekly closed doors meeting members are told what is currently in the box, then no one needs courage to be the one that starts the conversation, and it can quickly become clear when a consensus is being reached so that then the Speaker can make a public statement with the backing of the party, but without anyone having to take the risk of speaking publicly first, or with publicizing dissent.
I wish more elected officials had called for Biden to step aside, but it's really really hard to openly call for your party leader (and President) to be defenestrated. This unique case may not be the best one for demonstrating how strong a party is.
Someone's gotta have the courage to point out that things are not working the way they are. And then do something about it even though their career might be on the line.
I would add Dean Phillips to the courage list at a time when nobody was questioning Biden. And it wasn't a vanity challenge like Gabbard or RFK Jr. because he first attempted to recruit candidates with higher profiles, senators and governors.
Cabinet members and VPs aren’t selected for courage.
Play it out for me: What should they have done? When should they have done it? What do you think they knew and when?
Outing him - if there truly even WAS anything to out him on the basis of - would have fallen short of the 25A standard, thus leaving them in the unenviable position of having demonstrated themselves to be the most disloyal cabinet and VP ever, in the face of a campaign against America’s most credible authoritarian threat ever.
The Cabinet member situation is actually pretty easy. "I spoke with the President and expressed my concerns about his decline in physical stamina and mental acuity. It didn't go as I hoped. As a result, I have tendered my resignation. I support the policies of this Administration and will continue to fight hard for Democratic priorities."
The path for the VP is much more difficult, as resignation is a very, very extreme step that would likely cause more problems than it would solve. But I suspect there are ways for the VP to get the message out short of resignation.
I’m not trying to let the perfect be the enemy of the good… but when Donald Trump has made himself an enemy of democracy, any of those plays — in fact, EVERY play you can dream up — needs to have a MUCH higher certainty of success than was ever feasible before or during the July Crisis.
I would argue the "certainty of success" metric would have led to taking the actions I describe when there was more time to react than merely hoping it might all work out. It would have invited scrutiny and that scrutiny would have either shown Biden to be fit-as-a-fiddle or not. And on a timeline that would have made defeating Trump more likely in my view.
You’re only capturing one factor in certainty of success. There are others.
The further back you go on the timeline, the more fit Biden actually is. It’s even entirely possible that the debate was his first major event of that magnitude! I’d give it a 30% chance, with another 60% that he had a “minor event” that should have been recognizable but was minor enough to be explained away, and only 10% that he had a major event that [ed: anyone other than his wife] had actually observed and were covering up.
Again, these likelihoods all shrink as you go back up the timeline. They were probably a total of 0-2% in 2022, maybe only 50% at the end of 2023.
Which means that it’s most likely that the party would have waved away any major attempts to undermine him from within his administration. In fact, such attempts may have ended up counterproductively creating a “muscle memory” of the party to ignore later reports or even the debate performance itself.
This discussion always reminds me of literary tragedy. The point of the genre is that some tragedies simply can’t be prevented, even when they are utterly — if not maddeningly frustratingly (!) — easy to predict. I reiterate my comment to the other David that it’s too easy to cast about for some way, ANY way, that this “could have been prevented”. But hindsight is 20/20.
In response to your link - no, the Cheney endorsement should be read as "even the human wad of scum that is Dick Cheney, champion of the worst excesses of the American response to 9/11, thinks Trump is a bridge too far, so Trump is in fact really really bad, and with the election in eight days the only other choice is Harris, so vote Harris to keep out Trump." The Democrats could do better, but the Republicans have picked one of the worst and most dangerous men in the country as their standard bearer for the third time in a row, and are *delighted* about it.
You are being rather officious. The 25th Amendment does not specify an objective, determinate standard any more than the equal protection or due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. If the vice president and a majority of cabinet members declared Biden unfit, the issue would ultimately rest with Congress. Republicans in Congress would then have to put up or shut up. If they voted to oust Biden and Democrats split evenly, they could have been gone.
There were also milder plays on the table. Any cabinet member could have resigned his or her portfolio and said “I cannot in good conscience serve under President Biden when he is too infirm to be effective.”. Any one of them could have done it. They all would have landed more comfortably than a mid career middle manager who got downsized. Alas, one gets to be in a cabinet by being a “team player” and so we are led by a gaggle of sheep and a couple shepherds who win their commissions by being beautiful sheep for decades.
I think you’re wishcasting how it would have gone.
It’s one thing to be angry about how it got so far and so close to absolute disaster. I share that sentiment! But it’s a step too far to cast about looking for people to blame - someone, anyone, who “could have prevented this”, but didn’t. And the error in that is that it’s not entirely certain that it could have been prevented in the first place. I believe too much in the power of uncertainty to accept what I view as your overconfident thinking on this.
The person who could have prevented this is Joe Biden, had he announced in early 2023 that he would step down after one term, as he'd led everyone to believe he would do. Instead his narcissism and selfishness dragged his party and the country to the edge of oblivion, into which it still may very well topple.
Agreed. And it would have generated a lot of goodwill for the party, although at the risk of a 2020-like primary squandering it.
In the end, a lot of the structural forces driving this election so close would have kept it close no matter what the party had done. Like Biden, the voter themselves are stubbornly stupid and don’t really understand what’s driving the cost disease crisis that they hate so much.
Amidst all the anger and fear we ourselves here have about the possibility that our fellow Americans might plunge us into autocracy, it’s important not to succumb to the Green Lantern Theory that the actions of a few good people who simply “will” a good outcome are enough to actually make that outcome happen.
Because that’s the sort of thing that fascists and woo-woo hippies believe, and it’s why those two groups are in a coalition together under their chosen idiot-savant pretending to be a hero. We have to be more pragmatic than that.
Speaking about counterfactuals is fraught because only the actual is possible. Some counterfactuals seem “likelier” than others but all counterfactuals were equally impossible, it’s just our minds are too frail to see the future clearly.
I cannot in good professional conscience get high enough this early in the morning to do proper justice to this discussion about the nature of time and counterfactuals. ;-)
Can I try one more time to get you to explain why you ever bring this up, especially since it makes nonsense out of your own statements like “There were also milder plays on the table”?
I have a different impression. He’s way crazier and less coherent than he used to be, and some of that has to be age. He rambles and speaks in borderline aphasia, punctuated by ever more occasional moments of sharpness.
Trump acts like he has dementia, but he's still fairly energetic and alert looking while rambling crazy talk, which makes him look comparatively younger.
Sure, she can attack Trump while saying that for the good of the country Biden -- by infinitely stronger contrast -- decided that he wasn't up to running the country for four more years.
On the one hand, you're correct. On the other hand, the MAGAverse clearly believes that attacking Biden's age still has some electoral advantage to it given the sheer quantity of "Biden's old" stuff they continue to circulate on Twitter and rightwing forums that doesn't even passingly attempt to be an attack on Harris. (Whether any polling supports the effectiveness of that, I don't know, but my guess is that there is something suggesting it has benefits for Trump in the race given how much it still turns up.)
>Harris cannot convincingly attack Trump’s age because she was complicit in enabling Biden.<
Or, more basically, he's still president! Back in August when I broached the topic—I was explicitly making the argument that the "age" issue would be neutralized much more effectively if he were gone—I was dismissively told it wouldn't be tenable for Biden to resign the presidency (I was thinking maybe after Labor Day) because Harris couldn't possibly run the country AND campaign. And that's not a terrible argument.
>>Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?<<
Pelosi, the most consequential Speaker of our era, deserves massive props for her decisive action in forcing Biden off the ticket—no argument from me. But let's be clear: she didn't take action until after the debate, and at that point lots of prominent people (our blog host included) were calling for the president to drop out of the race. The actual person with the most "courage" in all this was one Dean Philips.
As for cabinet officials, well, I'm not sure how much face time with POTUS most of them enjoy. But sure, some people (Harris? Zients? Sullivan? Burns? Blinken? Pelosi? Schumer?) must have noticed signs of significant decline. And Jill Biden surely did, as well. But at that point a coordination issue comes up: unless you're quite certain going public will success in forcing Biden to resign (or unless you know you have the votes both in the cabinet and in Congress to invoke the 25th), publicly accusing the president of suffering serious cognitive decline risks giving a giant assist to Donald Trump. Anyway, scheduling a debate for June was absolute genius, and agreeing to it might prove the mother of all campaign errors by the Trump people.
I agree with StrangePolyhedrons: it's not about courage so much as it's about suboptimal structures, practices, precedents, incentives and so on. America has a seriously creaky system of national governance and politics. Reform is very much needed!
I am with you on Dean Phillips the unsung hero, who I donated and campaigned for, but got no traction whatsoever. That imo is the problem. It wasn't as if he was a crazy vanity candidate like Gabbard or RFK Jr. He first tried to recruit Senators and Governors. He was a mainstream Dem who was absolutely correct when he said that Biden was the only candidate who could win in 2020 and the only one who could lose in 2024.
When I was campaigning for him it seemed as all Dems just wanted to circle the wagons around Biden and ignoring that they were headed for the waterfalls in the Biden canoe.
And even two days before he withdrew Bernie Sanders had a NYT op ed about how great he was and should stay in the race.
If the problem with the GOP is that other than blind allegiance to DJT it is the anarchy party, the Dems in this iteration are the go along party.
I don't know, everyone around Trump seemed to be able to coordinate to subvert a lot of the crazier stuff he wanted to do, it's not that hard to coordinate with fellow Cabinet members.
I don't think this is a prisoner's dilemma situation. If cooperate is "try to remove Biden" and defect is "retain Biden," then we'd have to say that the highest reward you could get is if you are loyal to Biden while other people are trying to remove him, while everyone coordinating to remove him is a middle level of reward.
That doesn't seem to fit facts on the ground. This is maybe more of a Deer Hunt situation, which is an easier coordination problem to resolve exactly because the biggest reward is for cooperate/cooperate.
Wasn’t familiar with the deer hunt, but reading about I would say in this analogy that going after Biden while everyone is covering their ass and hunting rabbits would mean you go hungry (get punished) while they do okay. Only if a critical mass of you go hunt the Biden will you be okay.
If Biden's decline was relatively recent, like Matt's source said, that would explain a lot of this though.
Biden haters like to claim that he's always been senile going back to 2008 (if not 1988!) but that's clearly not the case. Something really did seem to change in the last spring.
Courage? nancy Pelosi wascovering up for Biden until the very end, calling him "fit as a fiddle" up until his disastrous debate performance. Pelosi has been claiming that college kids protesting against genocide were funded by Putin/amnd or China and should be investigated! She is a hundred millionaire coward like the rest of them, as Biden was incapable of even his first term. Democrats are cowards in so many ways, not the least of which is allowing Israel to run our government. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/dick-cheneys-kind-of-democrat
I will never, ever understand why those on the left who are anti-Israel believe for a second that things will go better for them with a Trump presidency than a Harris one.
I don’t think they do. I think they want to punish the Democrats and hope that the Democrats come to the conclusion that they need to listen to Arab voters in the future.
Also a lot of them are probably just thinking emotionally, which I won’t fault them for.
There surely has been international funding intended at stirring up dissent. I don’t think the students themselves would likely be directly aware of any of it, though perhaps some insiders at SJP or some other group might be. That’s where the investigation would need to be.
Seems like you are just trolling here as a far left Jill Stein populist that hates Dems and pushing your substack. "Hundred millionaire coward". Thank you from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Most of us are here because we respect Yglesias.
While this is true, it's much better to have a system that doesn't depend on immense political courage. I have bottomless contempt for figures like Cruz, but the fact is that Democratic lawmakers were not tested the same way. I think we'd have done better if a Trump-like figure arose, but it helps that our party structure is more robust.
Even the hollow party has considerable power to discourage strong candidates from challenging their incumbent President. If the party and the donor base made it clear that they could challenge Biden without being punished in future, we could have had a competitive primary and forced Biden out early. Maybe Biden would have won anyway, but he would be forced to debate in a primary with well known names like Newsom, Whitmer and Shapiro and would've gotten exposed.
PS: He was already exposed to everyone except partisan Democrats.
Where were they??? Congratulating themselves on being in the "right side of history" by being baldly for their own self interest. Drawn from a long line of symbolic capitalists, they are just as craven as the people who ruined or relented and kissed the ring for Trump. These people are only accidentally on the right side of policy or views, because the electorate is what it is. Ya want comprehensive immigration reform... We'll see what public sentiment allows you to have. It's tough out there... With few interested in the slow boring of any issue.
If they had read the polls accurately, they would have moderated on immigration in ‘21. Enforcing immigration laws has always polled well. They just thought they could get away with caving to cosmopolitan elites.
They probably thought that, given the dire national conditions that greeted them upon taking office, simple *healing* (the economy, the heath of the people, our alliances) was the optimal path to a second term. And I'm sure they had no inkling that highly damaging inflation was in the cards. Normally, a very strong recovery with modest inflation and a very favorable contrast with the previous terms does the trick. That's always the way it's worked in the past. Bill Clinton won a second term with utterly massive illegal immigration inflows. George W. Bush, too.
I really doubt there was a Machiavellian conspiracy to "get away" with rewarding Globalist Open Borders Elites. They were caught flat-footed. It happens. Had the inflation burst not materialized, I reckon the migrant spike would not have been enough to sink Harris.
Being caught flat footed on the Afghanistan withdrawal was forgivable because of the timeline. The border surge started under Trump so there’s no valid excuse here. They wanted to fool people by claiming that it wasn’t a big deal but that didn’t go the way they wanted.
I don't think this has to be true if it substitutes for depressed demand (?). But I think by the time spring 2021 rolled around, it was clear that things were getting back to normal and the $1.9T American Rescue Plan was mostly unnecessary. I believe I've seen estimates that this was responsible for 1-2% of inflation.
People say this, but everyone who does say it is unable to articulate a complete theory of what's actually happening. The M2 and M3 money supply remains hugely elevated compared to 2019, and has dropped on slightly -- but inflation has now dropped back to trend. We raised interest rates with the theory that higher rates -> cooler economy -> lower inflation would be the mechanism, but then the economy remained "hot" across measures of consumer spending, wages, and stock market indices -- yet inflation dropped to trend.
I don't expect random Internet posters to explain what's going on, but the lack of curiosity from professional economists is pretty shocking.
Wouldn’t a onetime increase in M whatever create a temporary rather than permanent inflation? Once prices increase commensurately with the M supply, no further increases are needed to achieve equilibrium.
Conversely, if M keeps growing faster than the economy, inflation will persist
I think Biden's liberal Catholic faith was a real soft spot here. I think he has genuine sympathy for the plight of the migrants coming to the border, which is part of the reason it took him so long to pull the trigger on stricter enforcement. Plus the timing of Mexico's election--AMLO cracked down on the internal migration there after his chosen successor's win in that election.
Exactly... Or not stoned Amy klobuchar, or never have let Elizabeth Warren get any air time.... I think of “the Munger test.”
1) Go ahead, make your argument for what you want the State to do, and what you want the State to be in charge of.
2)Then, go back and look at your statement. Everywhere you said “the State,” delete that phrase and replace it with “politicians I actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist.”
3) If you still believe your statement, then we have something to talk about.
The motley crew of the Democratic party seems to think they can outlaw gravity... And they have no cohesive policy goals or aims that sit well with a lot of the electorate. Imagine the better narrative they could have had if they had not got deranged on this last awakening and stayed disciplined and aligned with votes that actually exist.
Covid made me question my commitments to social democracy. When I saw his risk averse and school marmish the hand of the state was throughout the West, I became significantly more libertarian. I’m not a full bore libertarian because empowering unaccountable billionaires is worse than empowering the state, but freedom loving gentlemen need to steer between two rocky and unappealing shores.
It's striking that MY does not use the word "coalition" anywhere in today's interesting column. I think that a lot, albeit maybe not all, of the phenomena that he is pointing out arise out of the fact that the Democratic Party is now, and really, is now obliged to be, the biggest-tent party anywhere in any democracy. If you are trying to manage a coalition that runs from the Cheneys to proto-Maoists, through a variety of loyalists and funders spread across a relatively wide part of the political spectrum, there will be lots and lots of coordination issues, mysterious process dead-ends, responsibility-diffusion and temporary repositories of power in sometimes hard-to-understand places. That is sometimes going to risk looking incoherent - goes with the territory. If the Republicans were magically transformed back into business-friendly center-right normies uniting behind Nikki Haley (or Brian Kemp or Chris Sununu or Glenn Youngkin (although I have some candidate-specific doubts about his staying power even in an entirely re-normed GOP)), with the MAGAs relegated to a few social-media swamps, the Democrats would look significantly different - and maybe less "hollow", in MY's terminology here.
Some of Matt’s writing on third parties argues that this gets the causality backwards. In a system with strong parties that could exclude certain priorities, the only option is to form your own party. Given how porous American parties are, most factions decide to try to move a party from within, which is how you end up with coalitions with no internal logic.
I largely sympathize with this, but I do wonder if there is just a deep partisan asymmetry here. Some share of the hard core MAGA voters are rust belt Obama and Kerry voters who got bitten by deindustrialization and turned to Trump, but many more of them are just former Bush/McCain/Romney voters who believed equally in their vision of the GOP as they now do Trump's. I wonder if active Democratic voters of all stripes are just more ideological than Republican voters, and thus Dems struggle more with the coordination games because voters have more entrenched views. Should Harris win, I kinda doubt that Haley running on a reset platform would really struggle all that much to win over the vast preponderance of triple Trump voters, even as she articulates a break from him. Meanwhile, Bernie was running against Obamaism in 2015 *while he was the incumbent president.*
A lot of my family hates Trump and sees the risk and would jump off a cliff for older Republican politics. However the tribalism and viewing the Democratic party as a bunch of I can't wait to take all your money and make communism and handouts to whoever is the flavor of the month perspective makes it to where they are just not culturally able to vote Democrat. (And I will save the behavior of a lot of democrats and resentment of big tent politics doesn't help them defect either)
I just turned in my ballot here in California and left many of the races blank. It turned out to be very refreshing and empowering (no vote for you, Ted Lieu). I hope those members of your family will feel the same and give Trump a pass even if they could never vote for Harris.
That seems to be the sentiment but I'm pretty certain more than a few will just not talk about it and check Trump and hold their nose. Many of them had said real patriotic civil servants will make sure it doesn't go too far... That I feel is a scary gamble
Great point, definitely some of this too. I wonder if some of it is a dynamic of education polarization as well. The voters you describe are more likely to understand the stakes of politics in some sense, and revert to their priors even with a bad avatar like trump. Whereas a different group of downstream voters isn't thinking of politics terribly hard and is being wagged along by trump. Ending up in a similar place but for different reasons. On net tho, I think this makes the GOP much more malleable than dems, where a larger share of voters are ideologically baked into their factions even as there is a bigger tent for Dems than the GOP.
No it's not a lack of education we've got medical doctors, nurses, lawyers, some with ivy League pedigrees. The identity politics of the left have been a complete failure to win people like them over even when they agree to a larger extent on items like freedoms for individuals to include LGBT people. They also don't agree with the broader economic goals as stated in the policy positions that are taken by politicians signaling to their left in the popular press. And with the ones being in the medical field they don't forget that anti-vaccine sentiment started on the left so it is a giant mess.
I didn't take it as a slag at all.. I just want to push back (for the peanut gallery) on this view that a lot of Trump voters are some uneducated weirdos from the hinterlands. They have a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and educational attainments. One thing that has been frustrating for me while trying to bridge the gaps and trying to bring as many people over to team Harris and previously team Biden... Is that the same people that say some one needs to " do the work ". Will not do the work at all to really get to know the ins and outs of the variety of Republican neighbors they may have. And our scandalized that people across the aisle from them find a lot of their policies suggestions dumb. I don't disagree that they are dumb a lot of the time either.
There's a logic that explains the last ~24+ years and does not require assuming asymmetry between the parties:
- ANY president can dominate the mechanics of her or his party
- ONLY a president with overwhelming popular support from within the party can avoid being beholden to the party coalition
Biden's presidency is best understood as a deal he made with major elements of the democrat coalition to trade policy focus for supporting Biden's run for a second term. He pursued the unpopular elements of democrat interest groups' policy agendas. For that he got things like states more favorable to him (e.g. S. Carolina) hold officially sanctioned primaries before those that weren't (e.g. Vermont) and lawmakers willingness to sit on their hands after the debate. But he didn't drive the agenda, he had to buy it off.
By contrast, Trump is so popular within the republican party that he can both direct the party and largely ignore interest groups. there are exceptions, like the religious right, but they are exceptions.
Obama comes closer to Trump in terms of both popularity within his party and influence over the coalition. Whether the gap is because of the size and intensity of Trump's most ardent supporters, the asymmetry in how diverse each party's coalition is, or both, is unclear. But note that Obama was able to effectively make Hillary the next nominee by clearing the field of serious, moderate competitors.
I don’t disagree but Matt’s column is focused on the idea THAT the party is hollow not why, as kind of a response to folks who say “it’s not hollow it just pushed out an incumbent president from seeking reelection.”
This is part of why Harris and Biden before her is struggling. Seriously wtf is an “opportunity economy”? You have at most two reconciliation bills in your term, I don’t think ‘reshaping the economy’ is on the table.
Maybe I’m being overly harsh but at least “tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation” is an actionable plan. A bad one, but a real one.
I think the undercurrent of all of this is that every Dem wants to run the Obama 2008 election when the American people really were wanting a transformative break with the past, so you could just run on that and sort out priorities later. But it just sounds like an echo of an echo at this point, like a middle school performance of Henry IV Part I. You get what they’re going for and how it could be great in other circumstances, but they need to just do a little musical instead.
Yep. "targeted giving money to those whom we deem worthy - NOT billionares".
I think it's flat because it doesn't address the central crisis of center-left politics - the ability to actually build/do things and the affordability crisis (which I view as two sides of a coin). As long these are problems in deep blue America, the Dems don't have a message.
People aren’t voting for Trump because of a well-articulated platform. They are voting for him as the transformative candidate without thinking deeply about where that transformation may lead.
It takes courage to be a leader. And it seems our elected representatives, save for a few notable exceptions, lack courage. Only seven Republican Senators voted to convict Trump in 2021 (Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, Toomey), while the rest looked at the evidence of his wrongdoing and chose cowardice.
Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?
I feel like to immediately start talking about "courage" is to completely miss the point of the column.
It's not about courage. It's about having rules mechanisms within the party that give formal power for people to make decisions and know they have the support of the party even if they aren't particularly brave.
To some degree, but it also takes courage to go against groupthink and the groupthink was that you couldn't challenge Biden and you had to ignore his disastrous polls. Just two days before Pelosi or whomever (?Obama) pulled the tablecloth, or Biden just succumbed to reality, Bernie Sanders wrote an op ed about why we needed Joe Biden.
Now, true that courage is not anything we can design so we might need structural change. I dont know what structural changes would help. It was not that the leadership was any better than the rank and file, they were both smoking the Joe is fine cigarettes. If there was any hero, imo, besides Pelosi, it was the media. And cudos to Dean Phillips for playing the Cheney for the Dems.
Indeed, courage and groupthink are ultimately natural human characteristics. The imperative is not to design them out of existence, but to design around them, if not leverage them towards good outcomes (when possible).
How would you do that?
A party (and particularly a a party's elected officials) is supposed to reflect the views of its members. If elected officials can't even call on its leader to step aside when that's what an overwhelming majority of its members wanted, no mechanism is going to prevent that level of cowardice
There are obviously mechanisms that could do this. For instance, if there were an anonymous box where members of Congress could call for the party to do something, and at a weekly closed doors meeting members are told what is currently in the box, then no one needs courage to be the one that starts the conversation, and it can quickly become clear when a consensus is being reached so that then the Speaker can make a public statement with the backing of the party, but without anyone having to take the risk of speaking publicly first, or with publicizing dissent.
I wish more elected officials had called for Biden to step aside, but it's really really hard to openly call for your party leader (and President) to be defenestrated. This unique case may not be the best one for demonstrating how strong a party is.
I think I will be telling my grandkids about how weird this era was.
Someone's gotta have the courage to point out that things are not working the way they are. And then do something about it even though their career might be on the line.
My congresswoman was one of the ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and as a result, got primaried by a guy who then lost the seat.
Did you see this? Ballot drop box was burned, presumably in your district, and presumably targeted at MGP voters. Not great Bob!
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/ballot-box-fires-oregon-washington/index.html
I was going to talk about this in the general thread today! Haha
It's haha but it's also 😬😬😬
Team MAGA is already claiming it's to supress their votes. They have no clue what type of neighborhood Fisher's Landing is. 🤦
I'm imagining Harris calling out Biden for being too old to run and then putting herself forward as the nominee.
Yeah, that would go down just fine.
I would add Dean Phillips to the courage list at a time when nobody was questioning Biden. And it wasn't a vanity challenge like Gabbard or RFK Jr. because he first attempted to recruit candidates with higher profiles, senators and governors.
Harris cannot convincingly attack Trump’s age because she was complicit in enabling Biden.
Cabinet members and VPs aren’t selected for courage.
Play it out for me: What should they have done? When should they have done it? What do you think they knew and when?
Outing him - if there truly even WAS anything to out him on the basis of - would have fallen short of the 25A standard, thus leaving them in the unenviable position of having demonstrated themselves to be the most disloyal cabinet and VP ever, in the face of a campaign against America’s most credible authoritarian threat ever.
The Cabinet member situation is actually pretty easy. "I spoke with the President and expressed my concerns about his decline in physical stamina and mental acuity. It didn't go as I hoped. As a result, I have tendered my resignation. I support the policies of this Administration and will continue to fight hard for Democratic priorities."
The path for the VP is much more difficult, as resignation is a very, very extreme step that would likely cause more problems than it would solve. But I suspect there are ways for the VP to get the message out short of resignation.
I’m not trying to let the perfect be the enemy of the good… but when Donald Trump has made himself an enemy of democracy, any of those plays — in fact, EVERY play you can dream up — needs to have a MUCH higher certainty of success than was ever feasible before or during the July Crisis.
I would argue the "certainty of success" metric would have led to taking the actions I describe when there was more time to react than merely hoping it might all work out. It would have invited scrutiny and that scrutiny would have either shown Biden to be fit-as-a-fiddle or not. And on a timeline that would have made defeating Trump more likely in my view.
You’re only capturing one factor in certainty of success. There are others.
The further back you go on the timeline, the more fit Biden actually is. It’s even entirely possible that the debate was his first major event of that magnitude! I’d give it a 30% chance, with another 60% that he had a “minor event” that should have been recognizable but was minor enough to be explained away, and only 10% that he had a major event that [ed: anyone other than his wife] had actually observed and were covering up.
Again, these likelihoods all shrink as you go back up the timeline. They were probably a total of 0-2% in 2022, maybe only 50% at the end of 2023.
Which means that it’s most likely that the party would have waved away any major attempts to undermine him from within his administration. In fact, such attempts may have ended up counterproductively creating a “muscle memory” of the party to ignore later reports or even the debate performance itself.
This discussion always reminds me of literary tragedy. The point of the genre is that some tragedies simply can’t be prevented, even when they are utterly — if not maddeningly frustratingly (!) — easy to predict. I reiterate my comment to the other David that it’s too easy to cast about for some way, ANY way, that this “could have been prevented”. But hindsight is 20/20.
Certainty of success is a chimerical delusion.
You're making an assumption that Democrats are good, which they are most certainly not. They are morally and spiritually bankrupt and playing their base for the fools that they are. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/dick-cheneys-kind-of-democrat
I disagree with your characterization. I hope you still vote for Harris because the alternative is worse.
Barry, you've convinced me. I was a stalwart supporter of the Democrats but when I read your comment I completely changed my mind.
In response to your link - no, the Cheney endorsement should be read as "even the human wad of scum that is Dick Cheney, champion of the worst excesses of the American response to 9/11, thinks Trump is a bridge too far, so Trump is in fact really really bad, and with the election in eight days the only other choice is Harris, so vote Harris to keep out Trump." The Democrats could do better, but the Republicans have picked one of the worst and most dangerous men in the country as their standard bearer for the third time in a row, and are *delighted* about it.
You are being rather officious. The 25th Amendment does not specify an objective, determinate standard any more than the equal protection or due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. If the vice president and a majority of cabinet members declared Biden unfit, the issue would ultimately rest with Congress. Republicans in Congress would then have to put up or shut up. If they voted to oust Biden and Democrats split evenly, they could have been gone.
There were also milder plays on the table. Any cabinet member could have resigned his or her portfolio and said “I cannot in good conscience serve under President Biden when he is too infirm to be effective.”. Any one of them could have done it. They all would have landed more comfortably than a mid career middle manager who got downsized. Alas, one gets to be in a cabinet by being a “team player” and so we are led by a gaggle of sheep and a couple shepherds who win their commissions by being beautiful sheep for decades.
I think you’re wishcasting how it would have gone.
It’s one thing to be angry about how it got so far and so close to absolute disaster. I share that sentiment! But it’s a step too far to cast about looking for people to blame - someone, anyone, who “could have prevented this”, but didn’t. And the error in that is that it’s not entirely certain that it could have been prevented in the first place. I believe too much in the power of uncertainty to accept what I view as your overconfident thinking on this.
The person who could have prevented this is Joe Biden, had he announced in early 2023 that he would step down after one term, as he'd led everyone to believe he would do. Instead his narcissism and selfishness dragged his party and the country to the edge of oblivion, into which it still may very well topple.
Agreed. And it would have generated a lot of goodwill for the party, although at the risk of a 2020-like primary squandering it.
In the end, a lot of the structural forces driving this election so close would have kept it close no matter what the party had done. Like Biden, the voter themselves are stubbornly stupid and don’t really understand what’s driving the cost disease crisis that they hate so much.
Amidst all the anger and fear we ourselves here have about the possibility that our fellow Americans might plunge us into autocracy, it’s important not to succumb to the Green Lantern Theory that the actions of a few good people who simply “will” a good outcome are enough to actually make that outcome happen.
Because that’s the sort of thing that fascists and woo-woo hippies believe, and it’s why those two groups are in a coalition together under their chosen idiot-savant pretending to be a hero. We have to be more pragmatic than that.
Speaking about counterfactuals is fraught because only the actual is possible. Some counterfactuals seem “likelier” than others but all counterfactuals were equally impossible, it’s just our minds are too frail to see the future clearly.
I cannot in good professional conscience get high enough this early in the morning to do proper justice to this discussion about the nature of time and counterfactuals. ;-)
Can I try one more time to get you to explain why you ever bring this up, especially since it makes nonsense out of your own statements like “There were also milder plays on the table”?
this is kind of a red herring. trump doesn't act particularly old, which is why that doesn't stick. he has other problems.
I have a different impression. He’s way crazier and less coherent than he used to be, and some of that has to be age. He rambles and speaks in borderline aphasia, punctuated by ever more occasional moments of sharpness.
Polling shows that concerns over Trump’s age and fitness have been steadily increasing over time. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/50808-americans-are-increasingly-concerned-about-donald-trumps-age-and-fitness-for-office
Or to put it another way, being old is the absolute least of his downsides.
Sorry, DONALD Trump doesn’t?
Trump acts like he has dementia, but he's still fairly energetic and alert looking while rambling crazy talk, which makes him look comparatively younger.
Sure, that I can agree with! I think if Biden had never been in the picture, that "comparatively" wouldn't apply, though.
Yes, very fair point.
Don't overlook that the hair and makeup, which he's worn for decades, mask age-related changes to his "natural" appearance.
Oh, I didn't know Biden was still running.
Sure, she can attack Trump while saying that for the good of the country Biden -- by infinitely stronger contrast -- decided that he wasn't up to running the country for four more years.
As for her "enabling" Biden, oh please.
On the one hand, you're correct. On the other hand, the MAGAverse clearly believes that attacking Biden's age still has some electoral advantage to it given the sheer quantity of "Biden's old" stuff they continue to circulate on Twitter and rightwing forums that doesn't even passingly attempt to be an attack on Harris. (Whether any polling supports the effectiveness of that, I don't know, but my guess is that there is something suggesting it has benefits for Trump in the race given how much it still turns up.)
>Harris cannot convincingly attack Trump’s age because she was complicit in enabling Biden.<
Or, more basically, he's still president! Back in August when I broached the topic—I was explicitly making the argument that the "age" issue would be neutralized much more effectively if he were gone—I was dismissively told it wouldn't be tenable for Biden to resign the presidency (I was thinking maybe after Labor Day) because Harris couldn't possibly run the country AND campaign. And that's not a terrible argument.
On the other hand, here we are.
>>Nancy Pelosi had the courage to state the obvious that Biden was incapable of a second term. But where was the courage from his Cabinet (and his Vice President) to expose his decline long before the debate?<<
Pelosi, the most consequential Speaker of our era, deserves massive props for her decisive action in forcing Biden off the ticket—no argument from me. But let's be clear: she didn't take action until after the debate, and at that point lots of prominent people (our blog host included) were calling for the president to drop out of the race. The actual person with the most "courage" in all this was one Dean Philips.
As for cabinet officials, well, I'm not sure how much face time with POTUS most of them enjoy. But sure, some people (Harris? Zients? Sullivan? Burns? Blinken? Pelosi? Schumer?) must have noticed signs of significant decline. And Jill Biden surely did, as well. But at that point a coordination issue comes up: unless you're quite certain going public will success in forcing Biden to resign (or unless you know you have the votes both in the cabinet and in Congress to invoke the 25th), publicly accusing the president of suffering serious cognitive decline risks giving a giant assist to Donald Trump. Anyway, scheduling a debate for June was absolute genius, and agreeing to it might prove the mother of all campaign errors by the Trump people.
I agree with StrangePolyhedrons: it's not about courage so much as it's about suboptimal structures, practices, precedents, incentives and so on. America has a seriously creaky system of national governance and politics. Reform is very much needed!
I am with you on Dean Phillips the unsung hero, who I donated and campaigned for, but got no traction whatsoever. That imo is the problem. It wasn't as if he was a crazy vanity candidate like Gabbard or RFK Jr. He first tried to recruit Senators and Governors. He was a mainstream Dem who was absolutely correct when he said that Biden was the only candidate who could win in 2020 and the only one who could lose in 2024.
When I was campaigning for him it seemed as all Dems just wanted to circle the wagons around Biden and ignoring that they were headed for the waterfalls in the Biden canoe.
And even two days before he withdrew Bernie Sanders had a NYT op ed about how great he was and should stay in the race.
If the problem with the GOP is that other than blind allegiance to DJT it is the anarchy party, the Dems in this iteration are the go along party.
I don't know, everyone around Trump seemed to be able to coordinate to subvert a lot of the crazier stuff he wanted to do, it's not that hard to coordinate with fellow Cabinet members.
It takes coordination. The penalty for getting caught out on a limb in the prisoner's dilemma is harsh punishment.
I don't think this is a prisoner's dilemma situation. If cooperate is "try to remove Biden" and defect is "retain Biden," then we'd have to say that the highest reward you could get is if you are loyal to Biden while other people are trying to remove him, while everyone coordinating to remove him is a middle level of reward.
That doesn't seem to fit facts on the ground. This is maybe more of a Deer Hunt situation, which is an easier coordination problem to resolve exactly because the biggest reward is for cooperate/cooperate.
Wasn’t familiar with the deer hunt, but reading about I would say in this analogy that going after Biden while everyone is covering their ass and hunting rabbits would mean you go hungry (get punished) while they do okay. Only if a critical mass of you go hunt the Biden will you be okay.
If Biden's decline was relatively recent, like Matt's source said, that would explain a lot of this though.
Biden haters like to claim that he's always been senile going back to 2008 (if not 1988!) but that's clearly not the case. Something really did seem to change in the last spring.
Courage? nancy Pelosi wascovering up for Biden until the very end, calling him "fit as a fiddle" up until his disastrous debate performance. Pelosi has been claiming that college kids protesting against genocide were funded by Putin/amnd or China and should be investigated! She is a hundred millionaire coward like the rest of them, as Biden was incapable of even his first term. Democrats are cowards in so many ways, not the least of which is allowing Israel to run our government. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/dick-cheneys-kind-of-democrat
I will never, ever understand why those on the left who are anti-Israel believe for a second that things will go better for them with a Trump presidency than a Harris one.
I don’t think they do. I think they want to punish the Democrats and hope that the Democrats come to the conclusion that they need to listen to Arab voters in the future.
Also a lot of them are probably just thinking emotionally, which I won’t fault them for.
JPO exactly it is a better is the enemy of the good argument. If I may suggest something that I find hilarious but I have an odd sense of humor https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/jill-stein-isnt-even-pretending-to
There surely has been international funding intended at stirring up dissent. I don’t think the students themselves would likely be directly aware of any of it, though perhaps some insiders at SJP or some other group might be. That’s where the investigation would need to be.
Seems like you are just trolling here as a far left Jill Stein populist that hates Dems and pushing your substack. "Hundred millionaire coward". Thank you from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Most of us are here because we respect Yglesias.
The impeachments were just partisan politics. But they did leave the Donks with nothing but lawfare.
While this is true, it's much better to have a system that doesn't depend on immense political courage. I have bottomless contempt for figures like Cruz, but the fact is that Democratic lawmakers were not tested the same way. I think we'd have done better if a Trump-like figure arose, but it helps that our party structure is more robust.
Even the hollow party has considerable power to discourage strong candidates from challenging their incumbent President. If the party and the donor base made it clear that they could challenge Biden without being punished in future, we could have had a competitive primary and forced Biden out early. Maybe Biden would have won anyway, but he would be forced to debate in a primary with well known names like Newsom, Whitmer and Shapiro and would've gotten exposed.
PS: He was already exposed to everyone except partisan Democrats.
Where were they??? Congratulating themselves on being in the "right side of history" by being baldly for their own self interest. Drawn from a long line of symbolic capitalists, they are just as craven as the people who ruined or relented and kissed the ring for Trump. These people are only accidentally on the right side of policy or views, because the electorate is what it is. Ya want comprehensive immigration reform... We'll see what public sentiment allows you to have. It's tough out there... With few interested in the slow boring of any issue.
If they had read the polls accurately, they would have moderated on immigration in ‘21. Enforcing immigration laws has always polled well. They just thought they could get away with caving to cosmopolitan elites.
They probably thought that, given the dire national conditions that greeted them upon taking office, simple *healing* (the economy, the heath of the people, our alliances) was the optimal path to a second term. And I'm sure they had no inkling that highly damaging inflation was in the cards. Normally, a very strong recovery with modest inflation and a very favorable contrast with the previous terms does the trick. That's always the way it's worked in the past. Bill Clinton won a second term with utterly massive illegal immigration inflows. George W. Bush, too.
I really doubt there was a Machiavellian conspiracy to "get away" with rewarding Globalist Open Borders Elites. They were caught flat-footed. It happens. Had the inflation burst not materialized, I reckon the migrant spike would not have been enough to sink Harris.
Being caught flat footed on the Afghanistan withdrawal was forgivable because of the timeline. The border surge started under Trump so there’s no valid excuse here. They wanted to fool people by claiming that it wasn’t a big deal but that didn’t go the way they wanted.
Print $6 trillion or so, spread it liberally through the middling echelons of the economy, and inflation is rather predictable.
I don't think this has to be true if it substitutes for depressed demand (?). But I think by the time spring 2021 rolled around, it was clear that things were getting back to normal and the $1.9T American Rescue Plan was mostly unnecessary. I believe I've seen estimates that this was responsible for 1-2% of inflation.
People say this, but everyone who does say it is unable to articulate a complete theory of what's actually happening. The M2 and M3 money supply remains hugely elevated compared to 2019, and has dropped on slightly -- but inflation has now dropped back to trend. We raised interest rates with the theory that higher rates -> cooler economy -> lower inflation would be the mechanism, but then the economy remained "hot" across measures of consumer spending, wages, and stock market indices -- yet inflation dropped to trend.
I don't expect random Internet posters to explain what's going on, but the lack of curiosity from professional economists is pretty shocking.
Wouldn’t a onetime increase in M whatever create a temporary rather than permanent inflation? Once prices increase commensurately with the M supply, no further increases are needed to achieve equilibrium.
Conversely, if M keeps growing faster than the economy, inflation will persist
I think Biden's liberal Catholic faith was a real soft spot here. I think he has genuine sympathy for the plight of the migrants coming to the border, which is part of the reason it took him so long to pull the trigger on stricter enforcement. Plus the timing of Mexico's election--AMLO cracked down on the internal migration there after his chosen successor's win in that election.
Exactly... Or not stoned Amy klobuchar, or never have let Elizabeth Warren get any air time.... I think of “the Munger test.”
1) Go ahead, make your argument for what you want the State to do, and what you want the State to be in charge of.
2)Then, go back and look at your statement. Everywhere you said “the State,” delete that phrase and replace it with “politicians I actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist.”
3) If you still believe your statement, then we have something to talk about.
The motley crew of the Democratic party seems to think they can outlaw gravity... And they have no cohesive policy goals or aims that sit well with a lot of the electorate. Imagine the better narrative they could have had if they had not got deranged on this last awakening and stayed disciplined and aligned with votes that actually exist.
Covid made me question my commitments to social democracy. When I saw his risk averse and school marmish the hand of the state was throughout the West, I became significantly more libertarian. I’m not a full bore libertarian because empowering unaccountable billionaires is worse than empowering the state, but freedom loving gentlemen need to steer between two rocky and unappealing shores.
It's striking that MY does not use the word "coalition" anywhere in today's interesting column. I think that a lot, albeit maybe not all, of the phenomena that he is pointing out arise out of the fact that the Democratic Party is now, and really, is now obliged to be, the biggest-tent party anywhere in any democracy. If you are trying to manage a coalition that runs from the Cheneys to proto-Maoists, through a variety of loyalists and funders spread across a relatively wide part of the political spectrum, there will be lots and lots of coordination issues, mysterious process dead-ends, responsibility-diffusion and temporary repositories of power in sometimes hard-to-understand places. That is sometimes going to risk looking incoherent - goes with the territory. If the Republicans were magically transformed back into business-friendly center-right normies uniting behind Nikki Haley (or Brian Kemp or Chris Sununu or Glenn Youngkin (although I have some candidate-specific doubts about his staying power even in an entirely re-normed GOP)), with the MAGAs relegated to a few social-media swamps, the Democrats would look significantly different - and maybe less "hollow", in MY's terminology here.
Some of Matt’s writing on third parties argues that this gets the causality backwards. In a system with strong parties that could exclude certain priorities, the only option is to form your own party. Given how porous American parties are, most factions decide to try to move a party from within, which is how you end up with coalitions with no internal logic.
I largely sympathize with this, but I do wonder if there is just a deep partisan asymmetry here. Some share of the hard core MAGA voters are rust belt Obama and Kerry voters who got bitten by deindustrialization and turned to Trump, but many more of them are just former Bush/McCain/Romney voters who believed equally in their vision of the GOP as they now do Trump's. I wonder if active Democratic voters of all stripes are just more ideological than Republican voters, and thus Dems struggle more with the coordination games because voters have more entrenched views. Should Harris win, I kinda doubt that Haley running on a reset platform would really struggle all that much to win over the vast preponderance of triple Trump voters, even as she articulates a break from him. Meanwhile, Bernie was running against Obamaism in 2015 *while he was the incumbent president.*
A lot of my family hates Trump and sees the risk and would jump off a cliff for older Republican politics. However the tribalism and viewing the Democratic party as a bunch of I can't wait to take all your money and make communism and handouts to whoever is the flavor of the month perspective makes it to where they are just not culturally able to vote Democrat. (And I will save the behavior of a lot of democrats and resentment of big tent politics doesn't help them defect either)
I just turned in my ballot here in California and left many of the races blank. It turned out to be very refreshing and empowering (no vote for you, Ted Lieu). I hope those members of your family will feel the same and give Trump a pass even if they could never vote for Harris.
That seems to be the sentiment but I'm pretty certain more than a few will just not talk about it and check Trump and hold their nose. Many of them had said real patriotic civil servants will make sure it doesn't go too far... That I feel is a scary gamble
Great point, definitely some of this too. I wonder if some of it is a dynamic of education polarization as well. The voters you describe are more likely to understand the stakes of politics in some sense, and revert to their priors even with a bad avatar like trump. Whereas a different group of downstream voters isn't thinking of politics terribly hard and is being wagged along by trump. Ending up in a similar place but for different reasons. On net tho, I think this makes the GOP much more malleable than dems, where a larger share of voters are ideologically baked into their factions even as there is a bigger tent for Dems than the GOP.
No it's not a lack of education we've got medical doctors, nurses, lawyers, some with ivy League pedigrees. The identity politics of the left have been a complete failure to win people like them over even when they agree to a larger extent on items like freedoms for individuals to include LGBT people. They also don't agree with the broader economic goals as stated in the policy positions that are taken by politicians signaling to their left in the popular press. And with the ones being in the medical field they don't forget that anti-vaccine sentiment started on the left so it is a giant mess.
Sorry I was unclear, wasn't a slag on your family's own educational attainment and totally agree with you on where the ill lies.
I didn't take it as a slag at all.. I just want to push back (for the peanut gallery) on this view that a lot of Trump voters are some uneducated weirdos from the hinterlands. They have a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and educational attainments. One thing that has been frustrating for me while trying to bridge the gaps and trying to bring as many people over to team Harris and previously team Biden... Is that the same people that say some one needs to " do the work ". Will not do the work at all to really get to know the ins and outs of the variety of Republican neighbors they may have. And our scandalized that people across the aisle from them find a lot of their policies suggestions dumb. I don't disagree that they are dumb a lot of the time either.
There's a logic that explains the last ~24+ years and does not require assuming asymmetry between the parties:
- ANY president can dominate the mechanics of her or his party
- ONLY a president with overwhelming popular support from within the party can avoid being beholden to the party coalition
Biden's presidency is best understood as a deal he made with major elements of the democrat coalition to trade policy focus for supporting Biden's run for a second term. He pursued the unpopular elements of democrat interest groups' policy agendas. For that he got things like states more favorable to him (e.g. S. Carolina) hold officially sanctioned primaries before those that weren't (e.g. Vermont) and lawmakers willingness to sit on their hands after the debate. But he didn't drive the agenda, he had to buy it off.
By contrast, Trump is so popular within the republican party that he can both direct the party and largely ignore interest groups. there are exceptions, like the religious right, but they are exceptions.
Obama comes closer to Trump in terms of both popularity within his party and influence over the coalition. Whether the gap is because of the size and intensity of Trump's most ardent supporters, the asymmetry in how diverse each party's coalition is, or both, is unclear. But note that Obama was able to effectively make Hillary the next nominee by clearing the field of serious, moderate competitors.
I don’t disagree but Matt’s column is focused on the idea THAT the party is hollow not why, as kind of a response to folks who say “it’s not hollow it just pushed out an incumbent president from seeking reelection.”
Factions and, importantly, factional leaders also missing. Need some hard heads behind the scenes willing to horse trade for power.
This is part of why Harris and Biden before her is struggling. Seriously wtf is an “opportunity economy”? You have at most two reconciliation bills in your term, I don’t think ‘reshaping the economy’ is on the table.
Maybe I’m being overly harsh but at least “tariffs, tax cuts and deregulation” is an actionable plan. A bad one, but a real one.
I think the undercurrent of all of this is that every Dem wants to run the Obama 2008 election when the American people really were wanting a transformative break with the past, so you could just run on that and sort out priorities later. But it just sounds like an echo of an echo at this point, like a middle school performance of Henry IV Part I. You get what they’re going for and how it could be great in other circumstances, but they need to just do a little musical instead.
I’ve heard this “what does the “opportunity economy” line mean?”
It’s very obviously just a stand-in that polls well for the suite of tax credits that Democrats would like to pass.
Yep. "targeted giving money to those whom we deem worthy - NOT billionares".
I think it's flat because it doesn't address the central crisis of center-left politics - the ability to actually build/do things and the affordability crisis (which I view as two sides of a coin). As long these are problems in deep blue America, the Dems don't have a message.
Almost spit out my coffee at "a middle school performance of Henry IV Part I".
People aren’t voting for Trump because of a well-articulated platform. They are voting for him as the transformative candidate without thinking deeply about where that transformation may lead.