Yer blues

Joe Biden is addressing the Democratic National Convention tonight, in what will likely be the last major speech of his 52-year career in national politics.

This Axios piece quotes a bunch of White House insiders, off the record inevitably, about the the extent to which Biden is, totally understandably, “stunned and pissed” about how his re-election bid ended with such sudden and shocking definitiveness.

On the opening day of their convention, Democrats are ecstatic — giddy at how far Harris has come in the 29 days since Biden bowed out. But among some in Biden’s innermost circle, there’s astonishment about how instantly Harris became a celebrated, glamorous star.

• Some Biden stalwarts blame the press for forcing him out, and now seethe at what they see as fawning coverage of Harris.

They know that the best thing for Biden’s place in history is for her to win. But after four years of doubts about her governing chops and reliability as a politician, they see the party’s instant embrace of her as an even more brutal rejection of Biden.

• They’re not fooled by the patronizing praise of Biden by public officials who were knifing him just last month.

Biden and his aides long rationalized staying in the race because they worried Harris wasn’t up to beating Trump.

• They thought her chaotic 2020 presidential campaign and initial year as vice president showed she wasn’t ready for prime time, people familiar with the matter told Axios.
• There was also resentment and a belief among some that she ran away from responsibility — particularly on immigration — rather than trying to tackle a complex issue. Biden felt that as vice president, he embraced tough assignments early on, including withdrawal from Iraq and implementing the stimulus package.
• The Biden team also saw Harris churn through staff at a far higher rate than Biden had when he was VP.

Yet two national polls yesterday gave Harris a slight lead over Trump. “They’re still in shock,” a Biden insider told us. “It just shows how isolated they were from the world around them.”

Now a lot of this is no doubt court gossip, but Joe Biden wouldn’t be human if he wasn’t very angry and emotionally wounded by both the ruthlessness — totally justified in my view, but ruthlessness nevertheless — with which the elites of his party decided over the space of less than four weeks that the nominating process that he had gone through essentially unopposed needed to be cast aside by Biden himself, in order to save the party from an increasingly likely electoral disaster, from the the top of the ticket on down.

Everything looks inevitable in retrospect, but everything is contingent before the fact. Biden absolutely could have decided that he wasn’t going to withdraw, despite the enormous pressure put on him to do so, and the fact that his withdrawal and simultaneous endorsement of Kamala Harris now looks like something that somehow seemed in some sense destined to happen, given the course of events in the weeks after the June 26 debate catastrophe, does not mean it was destined to happen, because this is one of those historical situations where structural forces interact with individual agency in mysterious and unpredictable ways.

Speaking of which, three days before he withdrew, I argued that Biden had eleven days (this was on July 20th) to make a genuine final decision regarding whether he was going to stay or go, and, if he ultimately decided to stay in the race, he needed to address the calls from so many people at the highest levels of his own party to withdraw, at some event where these same people would pledge their renewed support for his campaign, despite their doubts.

Needless to say the LGM commentariat thought this was just about the most ridiculous thing they had ever read, since as a countless number of comments in this thread pointed out, Biden had already said definitively many times that he was staying in the race, and furthermore there was no real alternative to this, since if he withdrew chaos would ensue, since the same people who were knifing Biden also had their knives out for Harris. This turned out to be less than completely accurate.

The alternative to this remains straightforward: if Joe Biden chooses to withdraw, he gives his passionate, unambiguous endorsement to Kamala Harris, and urges his delegates to vote for her. This would produce an enormous upwelling of good will across the party. That would combine with an understandable unwillingness to engage in a bizarre and inevitably fractious process to choose from among a group of potential candidates who, under these circumstances, can hardly be expected to produce any real evidence that any of them would be a better choice than Harris. These factors, I believe, would assure her nomination.

It’s all to Biden’s great credit that he did just that, but it’s sentimental nonsense to ignore how desperately he didn’t want to do any of this, and what a wrenching thing it must be for him to see what has happened in the four weeks since he made the most important decision of his political career.

Again, this is the historical juncture at which structural forces and the ultimate loneliness of the man in the arena, making a decision that he alone can make, collide in mysterious and ultimately unpredictable ways.

So tonight Joe Biden will pass the torch with the self-effacing grace the moment calls for, because he’s capable of. both the necessary sacrifice, and the social grace to carry it through before the adoring crowd (Donald Trump, needless to say, would be unable of doing a similar thing if his own life literally depended on it). And everyone will stand and shout and cheer for him one last time, for a long long time, and he and we will go on to tell ourselves the stories we need to tell ourselves in order to live.