Another post about that thing that’s happening

In regard to the very public attempt on the part of Democratic elites — the term is being used here strictly as a descriptor, with no necessarily negative connotation intended or implied — to get Biden to step down, it’s clear that attempt is ratcheting up quite a bit at the moment. Yesterday three of the most important people in the party — Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff — decided to make it known that they’re trying to get Biden to withdraw from the race. Others are likely to follow over the course of the next two weeks, which is the expanded time frame that the DNC agreed to before delegates begin to vote virtually. That agreement was clearly a compromise between Biden’s supporters in the hierarchy and the people attempting to get him to step aside. (Voting could have started as soon as five days from now under the originally contemplated plan for early virtual voting).

My sense at the moment is that this attempt is going to succeed. The sociological reality of most if not all of the top people in your political party no longer supporting your campaign trumps, in a non-authoritarian context, the formal fact that Biden can remain the nominee if he simply chooses to go through with this. I don’t think he will.

My own views on what Biden should do have shifted radically in the 20 years days since the catastrophic debate. That debate was a classic catalyst. In one fell stroke it revealed that the right wing caricature of Biden — as a feeble, frail, often confused old man, increasingly incapacitated by his age — was not nearly as much of a caricature as we, his supporters, had been misled to believe it was, by a White House that, it turns out, had gone to enormous lengths to make Biden’s declining state as opaque as possible. That is a very bitter pill to swallow, but that is what the last three weeks have revealed, and there’s no way to unring that particular bell.

Watch these brief clips from a 19-minute interview Biden gave with a friendly host a few days ago, and consider the following:

Twenty years ago, a friend of ours was observing the process by which Notre Dame’s then-football coach, Ty Willingham, fell out of favor. Willingham had a distinctive affect on the sidelines, which is that he never showed any emotion or animation during games. Camera shots of him would show him standing stolidly with his arms crossed, his face expressionless, no matter what drama had just unfolded on the field. Willingham’s career at ND started well, and his sideline affect was celebrated by fans as evidence of how his stoic, calm, unruffled demeanor was critical to keeping his team in a strong mental position, no matter what misfortune may have just unfolded on the field.

But then Willingham started losing. And the exact same sideline shot was almost instantly given a completely different meaning by its interpreters. Now Willingham was clueless, paraylzed, in over his head, and as a result unable to inspire his team, as illustrated by his wildly inappropriate robotic sideline affect.

The problem now for Joe Biden is that every verbal stumble — and there are many — and every time he loses his train of thought in even the most controlled and non-hostile setting — and this continues to happen quite a bit — is interpreted through a fresh lens of skepticism about whether his evident decline has made it possible for him to win the election in November. Not to be an effective president — that is a related, but not very closely related question — but to campaign effectively enough to convince enough voters in swing states to re-elect him.

The people at the top of the Democratic party who have decided that the answer to that question is likely “no,” are not part of some sort of malevolent conspiracy. They are not hysterical members of an out of control mob, swept along by irrational passions. They are intelligent sober political observers, with enormous amounts of lifetime experience to draw on, and they think that when the American public looks at who Joe Biden is now, in terms of what he will look like to that public over the next three months of campaigning, that public is both quite unlikely to re-elect him, and will quite possibly bring down much of what would otherwise be a very successful election for the rest of the Democratic party further down the ticket.

I think they’re right, unfortunately. I think Joe Biden was quite possibly the best president we’ve had since FDR, or certainly LBJ. I would have loved to see circumstances not conspire to make his re-election increasingly untenable. But they have.

That is, to quote a noted contemporary philosopher, a hard motherfucking truth. But that’s a truth Joe Biden is going to have to get realistic about. I think he will.

. . . Brief response to a few lines of criticism:

(1) Some commenters have asked if there’s something that Pelosi et. al. know that we don’t, with the implication that there isn’t. I would suggest these people, who interact with Biden regularly in person, might actually have a better basis for making judgments about how the campaign is likely to play out than we do.

(2) Others are citing Schumer’s response to the reports about his conversation with Biden that those reports are “idle speculation” as some sort of denial. That’s the opposite of a denial. A denial would be “those reports are false.”

(3) Ideally, we would want more information before Biden makes his decision. The problem is that everybody would agree that a withdrawal after Biden is the official nominee, and especially post-convention, would be far far worse than a withdrawal in July. The window here, practically speaking, is the two weeks before the delegates vote. After they vote and before the convention would be far worse. After the convention would be a catastrophe. So the decision has to be made now.

(4) The FPers who are in favor of Biden withdrawing have all been very clear that our preference is for Biden to endorse Harris, and Harris to become the nominee in the wake of that endorsement. That’s not a complicated plan.

(5) This is a bad situation with no good options. We’re looking for the least-bad option. It’s normal for people to disagree about what that might be. The correct solution is not obvious.