Now What?

I didn’t watch last night’s debate (I did ruminate about how much I’d need to be paid to watch it live; I did not find a specific number but settled on a range that was certainly more than $100 and probably less than $1000) so I can’t say authoritatively how badly Biden hurt himself. There are a variety of takes that I find terribly tiresome that amount to whistling past the graveyard; “it’s all just media spin,” “the debates never matter anyway,” “it was because of bad moderation,” etc. People were watching to see if Biden could still handle the job, and it seems that he did not demonstrate effectively that he could.

I personally have kept discussions of replacing Biden at arm’s length because the only consequential figures in the decision to remove him are Joe Biden and the very small number of people around Joe Biden, and thus there were limited returns to discussing the question in depth. I’ll admit that I’ve been a bit troubled, however, by the assumptions that are common in comment threads on this blog that folks like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver must necessarily be in bad faith when they discuss the mechanics and effects of an effort to replace Biden. It has seemed to me clear that there are levels of campaign trail performance that would require acknowledgement that Biden ought to be replaced and consequently that discussions of the mechanics of how that would happen (given, again, a degree of consensus in Biden’s inner circle) are, to a reasonable degree, sensible.

And so… here we are. I appreciate that I’m just echoing Scott, but I do wonder how close we are to a situation in which the folks that Biden listens to (Obama, among others) need to be heavily pressured to tell him to hang it up. As Scott says if it’s going to happen it should be earlier rather than later. This has nothing to do with Biden’s ability to perform the job of “President,” and everything to do with his ability to perform the job of “presidential candidate.” If he can’t manage this then he can’t manage it, and there’s no reason to believe he’s going to grow more effective over the next five months. It seems to me that in the case of replacement Harris should be the favorite, but perhaps not presumptively so if there’s a way to have some kind of competitive process before and during the convention. Open to reasonable argument on that, though.

Those are, at the moment, my thoughts. Fortunately I only drink when I’m in a good mood so it looks like sobriety will be the order of the day for a while…