Denial is a river in Delaware

One thing you can say about the late Jimmy Carter is that whatever his faults the seemed to have a genuine humility and sense of perspective that is unusual for anyone crazy enough to seriously pursue the American presidency. His very real virtues notwithstanding, Joe Biden has the self-regard more common to the type:

Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Aides say the president has been careful not to place blame on Harris or her campaign.

Look, despite the stories people tried to tell themselves after the debate dispositively showed that Biden made a very serious error by running again, 1)the 2024 polls were accurate within a typical range of error, and 2)to the extent they were off they underestimated Trump’s disproportionately-dependent-on-sporadic-and-first-time-voters support (just much more modestly than 2020 or 2016.) Combined with Biden’s inability to run a normal presidential campaign, the question is not whether Biden would have won, but whether he would have been able to win New Jersey and Virginia. Biden staying on would have meant Trump winning a majority of the popular vote and (most importantly) Republicans probably would have won every Senate Battleground and gotten a more substantial House majority as well. It’s dismaying that Biden and his inner circle are still deluded about that.

He is, on the other hand, right about this:

In private, Biden has also said he should have picked someone other than Merrick Garland as attorney general, complaining about the Justice Department’s slowness under Garland in prosecuting Trump, and its aggressiveness in prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter, according to people familiar with his comments.

During the 2020 presidential transition, Biden’s attorney general selection pitted some of hisclosest aides against each other. Former senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) and Mark Gitenstein, both longtime friends of Biden, advocated for the president naming then-Sen. Doug Jones (D-Alabama) as attorney general, arguing that as a politician he would be better able to navigate the bitterly partisan moment.

But Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, pushed for Garland. He stressed that Garland — a federal judge with a sterling reputation for independence and fairness — would show Americans that Biden was rebuilding a department badly shaken by Trump’s political attacks.

Biden was persuaded, and some Democrats believe the decision had devastating results. Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, they say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election. (Others blame the Supreme Court and a Trump-appointed judge in Florida for repeatedly siding with the former president and delaying the cases; the Justice Department declined to comment.)

I know some progressive analysts have divided the administration into a good part (the Klain era) and a less good part (the Zients era.) This shows that the truth is almost certainly more complicated, and the differences after the 2022 midterms more about Dems losing the House and Biden’s declining energy as opposed to the shift in chief of staff. And ultimately you can’t blame Klain — Biden was also getting some good advice from trusted figures about the AG pick and just picked the wrong one. And while the final qualification about how various Republican judges were going to be a formidable barrier to federal prosecutions are true, Garland also made it a lot easier for them, which Biden at least now recognizes.