To the President's Health

At Top Cottage, Hyde Park in 1941, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, granddaughter of one of the gardeners. Via.

In March 1944, not long after his 62nd birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt, who was taking too long to recover from a bout of flu the previous December, went to Bethesda Hospital for a battery of tests meant to find out why, and diagnosed with a pile of serious heart problems: hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure. The doctors' recommendations focused on rest—no business guests at lunch, and two hours' rest after lunch—not easy, as he was pretty busy prosecuting World War II and running for his fourth presidential term. They also prescribed some drugs, and thought he should cut down smoking, and try to lose some weight, which last turned out awkward: Roosevelt was anxious to hide his health problems from the public, as he always had been, going back to the paralysis he'd been concealing since contracting polio at Campobello in 1921, and the successful dieting ironically left him looking sick to the public, not his robust, jaunty, grinning self but gaunt and haggard, sparking exactly the rumors he was most anxious to avoid. 

That was a kind of bad thing, as everybody understands nowadays, in the wake of Eisenhower's heart attacks, Kennedy's Addison's disease, Nixon's stress-related alcoholism, Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's, Trump's obesity, severe personality disorder, and possible psychoactive drug use (sniff, sniff!), and whatever was going on with President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign last year on June 27, during the presidential debate with Trump, when he spoke in an almost inaudibly hoarse whisper, and altogether lost the thread of what he was saying at at least one point early in the show. Just an hour or two later he seemed fine, as loud and as on message as ever, but the damage (thanks in part to a long campaign on the part of The New York Times and other organs, not to claim that Biden was suffering age-related infirmities but that the public thought he might be, based not on observation of the president but on a bunch of rather pushy Times-Siena public opinion polls) was done.

Netanyahu's Other War. II

Dadanite statues dating back to 4th to 1st century B.C.E., found in a funerary temple in Al-‘Ulā, Saudi Arabia, March 2024. Photo by Ali Lajami, via Wikimedia Commons.

The prisoner exchanges of November, five weeks into the war, as I wrote at the time, seemed aimed at a broader purpose than simply freeing the hostages captured by Hamas: permanent peace, on a scale most of the world had stopped imagining, towards which this was a step. Biden had signaled it himself, in a Washington Post op-ed the week before the exchanges began:

for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released....

The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources.

In fact, the program was to move toward the outcome US and Saudi negotiators had been envisaging in Doha, before the war began: while the Israelis stubbornly refused to think about what the end of the war might look like, Biden had already imagined it; a plan already existed, in some detail, with the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia providing the political-diplomatic framework within which the Palestinian state could be constructed from the bottom up, from infrastructure to social safety net, as we now understand, though my readers may have thought it was kind of fanciful at the time, and I didn't really have any evidence of the kind Foer has now provided.  

As long as the hostages were being released, the cessation of hostilities could be maintained, the food and water supply in Gaza could be replenished, the health system restored, a ceasefire evolve into a genuine peace; the release of Palestinian detainees from Israeli jails would supply the makings of a political class to replace not only Hamas but also the elderly and corrupt rulers of the old Palestinian Authority, often seen as Israeli puppets. And then there was the political economy, as Biden said:

Netanyahu's Other War. I

  

Abbott ID-NOW™ COVID-19 2.0 detects SARS-CoV-2 in 6‑12 minutes with the option to add on an ID NOW Influenza A & B 2 test without collecting another sample. About six pounds, comes with a kit of 24 tests and 24 nasal swabs. This is the machine of which Donald Trump is said to have sent "a bunch" to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in spring 2020. Or maybe it was one machine and a bunch of test kits. I can imagine Putin needed several, though, including some for his retainers, so that the one he used would be dedicated to his snot and his alone. Via. 

The most exciting for me of the revelations from the teasing of Bob Woodward's new book on the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and US politics (it's titled simply War) wasn't about Trump's and Putin's continuing relationship, anyway, though it was nice to have some confirmation about that. I was more impressed by the stuff reported by CNN on the relationship between Joe Biden and Binyamin Netanyahu: 

“What’s your strategy, man?” Biden asked Netanyahu during an April phone call, Woodward reports.

“We have to go into Rafah,” Netanyahu said.

“Bibi, you’ve got no strategy.” Biden responded....

“I know he’s going to do something but the way I limit it is tell him to ‘Do nothing,’” Biden told his advisers, according to Woodward.

But Biden’s frustration with Netanyahu boiled over as the war continued to escalate.

“He’s a fucking liar,” Biden said privately of Netanyahu, after Israel went into Rafah, Woodward writes.

“Bibi, what the fuck?” Biden yelled at Netanyahu in July after an Israeli airstrike killed a top Hezbollah military commander and three civilians in Beirut, according to Woodward.

“You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor,” Biden said to Netanyahu.

Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

The Rules of the Game

 

So French voters did that thing they do periodically, usually in a presidential election, and rejected fascism decisively in the second round of the snap legislative election. Somewhat grudgingly—they don't want the candidates they voted for to think they're impressed, but they know their duty.

As did the parties, which showed commendable discipline in carrying out the program of dropping out candidates to turn every race into the two-person race in which they had the best chance of defeating the Rassemblement Nationale. But it was the massive turnout that completed the job and defeated not just the fascists but the pollsters as well, who kept predicting a majority for the Rassemblement well into yesterday afternoon,  even as they noticed an unexpectedly large number of voters.

I couldn't help thinking I was seeing a repetition of a pattern we've been seeing a lot of lately, of voters breaking the poll predictions when they're voting to say there's a degree of authoritarianism they can't tolerate, in Brazil and in Poland, Spain and Iran, even when it's not enough to really change anything, as in the losses endured by authoritarian rulers of India and Turkey, and Hungary (in June's EU election), and of course in the United States of America in elections going back to 2018 reacting against the chaos of Trumpery, the terror of the incompetent COVID response and the racist violence of police forces, the overturning of Roe and rush to outlaw abortion.

I mean, it's not just heartening, but it's also interesting that the polls keep erring in that direction, with authoritarians underperforming. It doesn't happen when authoritarianism isn't a primary issue, like in Germany in June (where the appeal of the fascistoid Alternativ für Deutschland is still only in the former East Germany, while voters in the former West were punishing the sort-of leftist government by voting for the normie conservatives). Though in Britain one survey had Nigel Farage's "Reform Party" winning 18 seats in Thursday's general election (they won four).

Kenobi v. Vader

Image via Lovepop.

I. Senility

Tim Miller of The Bulwark, a month ago:

Biden didn't do that on Thursday, though he did really lose the thread for one awful moment early in, trying to process this torrent of falsehood, delusionality, and incoherence from Trump supposedly explaining the enormous budget deficits of his time in office

Because the tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to COVID, and even after COVID. It was so strong that we were able to get through COVID much better than just about any other country. But we spurred – that tax spurred. Now, when we cut the taxes – as an example, the corporate tax was cut down to 21 percent from 39 percent, plus beyond that – we took in more revenue with much less tax and companies were bringing back trillions of dollars back into our country. The country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt. We were ready to start using the liquid gold right under our feet, the oil and gas right under our feet. We were going to have something that nobody else has had. We got hit with COVID. We did a lot to fix it. I gave him an unbelievable situation, with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with. We – we gave him something great. Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration, and we were right in the middle of it. Something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about, but he had far more people dying in his administration. He did the mandate, which is a disaster. Mandating it. The vaccine went out. He did a mandate on the vaccine, which is the thing that people most objected to about the vaccine. And he did a very poor job, just a very poor job. And I will tell you, not only poor there, but throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership. They don’t respect the United States anymore. We’re like a Third World nation. Between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation. And it’s a shame the damage he’s done to our country. And I’d love to ask him, and will, why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country

When Tapper asked Biden to respond to "this question about the national debt", he managed to remember more or less what the question had been two minutes earlier, and started off fine, too, answering the question as he'd expected to get it, with the right numbers, though he sometimes struggled for them:

In the Unlikely Event

5/27: Updated version at the Substack

I hate the hypercorrect "whom" in that headline: a headline is a truncated sentence, and surely the truncated question it's answering is "Who is the presidential candidate voters say they'll support?", not "Whom do voters say they'll support as a presidential candidate?"

It's something from the Other Nate (Cohn, at The Times) that I'm taking a personal interest in, because I've been asking somebody with the resources to do it for a long time: going in search of the unlikely voter. Except he doesn't know that's what he's doing.

That is, when he was looking into the factors that might be associated with voter preference for Biden, he found that people who were otherwise likely to vote for Biden—self-identified Democrats, people who voted for Biden in 2020, minority members, the relatively young—it was those who didn't vote at all in the 2022 midterms, who were more likely to express a preference for Trump or no preference at all:

Moral Equivalence

Larry Thomas and Bret Mendenhall in Uwe Boll's 2008 Postal, via The New York Times.

On the prospect of the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants on Yahya Sinwar (the head of Hamas in Gaza), Ismail Haniyeh (head of the Hamas Political Bureau), Mohammed Deif (commander-in-chief of the Qassam Brigades), and the Israeli prime minister and defense minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, there's been a lot of angry talk about the ICC prosecutor practicing "moral equivalence", including from President Biden—

The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.  We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.  

A truly weird error in this connection from NBC News, which ran an interview with Netanyahu yesterday in which the prime minister complained that he was being given a "bum rap" (Trump's language choices are a bad influence, now Bibi too sounds like a 1950s gangster):

Echoing Biden's comments, Netanyahu said Khan's decision to seek arrest warrants for both Israel's and Hamas' leaders reflected a "false symmetry" that he said was comparable to the arrest warrants that were issued for both President George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Remember when ICC put out a warrant on Bush? I was so startled I looked it up, but of course it didn't happen (the court did open a preliminary investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan after the country ratified the Rome statute in 2003, but after 11 years of that, from 2006 to 2017, it took until 2020 for them to decide to move on to a full investigation, upon which Trump put sanctions on them, which Biden has reversed). And Netanyahu didn't say it did. You can get a more accurate report of what he said on NBC from The Times of Israel:

Newsletter: Summer of 2024

This looks like the development I've been imagining for the last five months among the Israeli public, as the hostages become more and more salient and the need for revenge less and less so. It's evidently connected to the video released a little over a week ago by Hamas of the American-Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin (Hersh was my dad's Yiddish name, as it happens), in which he denounced Netanyahu for abandoning the hostages and made the claim that 70 of the hostages have been killed, so far, by Israeli bombs, which may well be true (I've expected from the start that IDF would kill more hostages than Hamas would), even though the video is plainly released for propaganda purposes, and it seems that a lot of Israelis believe it.

The really curious thing is it seems to be where the Hamas leadership is at too, asking for a permanent ceasefire and release of many prisoners in Israel in return for release of hostages held in Gaza. The odd man out is Binyamin Netanyahu, who can't accept the permanent ceasefire, which would prevent IDF from killing everybody in the Hamas leadership.

I know, I know, Hamas is bad (but "you don't make peace with your friends," as a wise man once said, "you make it with very unsavory enemies"). At the same time, if you think about it, you can understand why they might be reluctant to get killed. That's definitely not the most evil thing about them. It's even kind of normal. 

The Chatbot Did It

 

Another Substack post.

Newsletter in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) in the Capitol just after midnight, January 7, 2021, helping to clean up the garbage left by the marauding Yahoos. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NBC News.

Unbelievable torrents of news over the last few days, as if coming down on us from one of those "atmospheric rivers" they have in California now (of which I have a mental picture like a Dr. Seuss drawing, with foamy, roiling blue waves at the border of the stratosphere and lots of careless but energetic fish doing aerial maneuvers).

***

In New Jersey, First Lady Tammy Murphy dropped out of the Democratic primary race to replace the abominable Senator Robert Menendez, now under indictment for (among other things) representing Egypt instead of New Jersey on the foreign affairs committee, though he still claims to be running as an independent. The presumptive nominee, Rep. Andy Kim of the suburban district 3 east of Philadelphia, filed immediately after Menendez's indictment, but Murphy seemed inevitable, with her husband's political might behind her and the special Jersey trick known as the County Line, where 19 of the state's 21 counties print their own primary ballots with a top line which the voter can pick to vote for all the candidates endorsed by their party machine at one blow, which generally always wins.

Much Worse Than Bloodbaths

 Something from the Republicans on ci-devant Twitter:

Folks, I think President Biden is merely trying to take the Ex-Guy seriously but not literally, as the very serious journalist Salena Zito advised us back in the day, and the very serious billionaire investor Peter Thiel, cheerfully plagiarizing her (he has nothing to fear from Christopher Rufo) in a talk at the National Press Club:

I think one thing that should be distinguished here is that the media is always taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. ... I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment, their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’ What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.

So Trump never told people to inject themselves with bleach as a COVID cure, not literally; he merely said he thought it might be a good idea, injecting it or using it for "almost a cleaning", that or light, or UV, that was the bit that got me, the idea of injecting people with light, or sticking it in you "some other way", which he believed William Bryan, head of science and technology at the DHS, had just told the press conference about, while Trump complacently "clasped his hands in front of his stomach", as Politico later wrote, before offering his own remarks:

Trumpery

 

Michael Cohen on television is so great at punching through the punditical assumptions of people scratching their heads to understand what Trump's lawyers are doing in the New York civil case against him and his organization, behaving like idiots and antagonizing the judge, trying to figure out what is Trump's legal strategy or Trump's political strategy: no, Cohen explains, they're doing what Trump wants them to do, and it's more political than legal, but it's not very strategic at all! Or, it's just bad! He's "fighting", is what he's doing, and convinced this will get him reelected and enable him to take care of his legal troubles, and he's wrong about that, as he has been ever since he started insulting judges with Gonzalo Curiel on the Trump University case in spring 2016 and eventually had to pony up $25 million, where this case is going to cost him up toward ten times that and put an end to the Queens-boy-makes-good-in-Manhattan part of his career, but that's probably OK because he's been in trouble before and he always gets out of it, more or less. There's always been money somewhere!

That's Trump the individual, a narcissistic and intellectually challenged fool whose success in life began with the half a billion dollars his father was able to invest in him and continued through daddy after daddy down to the Republican party and the grassroots movement of his own donors. Or maybe the kindhearted taxpayers of Florida

We need a fund to support this in our state. We can use our record budget surpluses to do it. That way ANY Floridians who run for President can have a way to defend themselves from politically motivated lawsuits that just magically appear during an election cycle. (2/3)

— Jimmy Patronis (@JimmyPatronis) November 4, 2023

as suggested a couple of days ago by the Chief Financial Officer of Florida (Florida has a CFO, is that socialism?).

More Happy Warriors

Theme of my weekend Substack post,

an extended version of  Friday's blogpost here, following on a discussion in the comments, which you've probably had a chance to read. 

There was more in those comments I wanted to address, starting with a complaint from longtime blogfriend (and frequent legal adviser to Rectification Central) Jeff Ryan, who put up a very grouchy dismissal of Vice President Harris, in the following terms:

Jeff: I disagree. I haven't been particularly enthralled with her as V.P.

Me: Jeff, you're sounding like one of those kids Scott Lemieux makes fun of, who think voting is supposed to be the expression of your personal consumer choices.

To which he offered a more serious response:

Polarization

A surprising little instance of what looks like personal butthurt on the part of young Matty Yglesias, in the Substack Notes, aimed toward the Australian economist and Blogger Hall of Fame member John Quiggin:

So the first thing to say is that Quiggin's note is marked with a mock HTML tag <sarc off> suggesting we're possibly not meant to take it literally, and it's definitely not an accurate summary of Yglesias's post ("Polarization Is a Choice"), which doesn't even mention the polarization between parties that would like to overthrow US democracy and those that would not. 

Rather, it's the story of less inflammatory issues in the careers of two originally "moderate" presidents who were (according to the author) practically the same political person during their respective presidential campaigns, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and then decided, apparently for personal reasons, to radicalize in oppposite directions, Trump to the "right" and Biden to the "left", when in office. Thus, in the case of Trump:

Mid-80s

 

Senator Romney's $15-million Park City ski lodge. After he leaves politics, he won't have to take vacations in Utah any mre

That crack from Willard Mitt Romney announcing his coming retirement from the Senate

“At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s,” Romney, who is 76, said. “Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.”

seems particularly aimed at President Joe Biden, who will himself hit 85 in November 2027, as the 2028 campaign gets underway, as opposed to Romney's personal bête noire, the presumptive Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, who will be a sprightly 81.

It should be noted that Romney himself wouldn't be in a position to make decisions that might shape the world in any case, as perhaps the dead weakest of all the senators, with no faction and no allies, which is the real reason he's leaving it, as far as I'm concerned, ever since his lonely vote to convict Trump in the first impeachment. Whereas Biden has that job Romney wanted and will never have, with all its privileges and appurtenances, and is making those decisions on a daily basis (something Trump wasn't cognitively able to do, as Romney is well aware, as he told McKay Coppins, dishing about Trump's "warped, toddler-like mentality").

Annals of Whatabout

 

Ignore the psycho-freak affect and language. Note that like all Trumpers, 6 years on they’re still mimicking the language of the Russia scandal in some kind of grand neener-neener gotcha. Collusion, election interference, etc. https://t.co/HXnoJYFXkP

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 1, 2023

I've been noticing that too, without as clear a sense of what it was I was noticing. It's just pervasive, especially in the attacks on "weaponization" echoing the word as Rep. Adam Schiff introduced it in 2019:

“Bill Barr, on the president’s behalf, is weaponizing the Justice Department to go after the president’s enemies,” Schiff said on ABC‘s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “He’s demonstrating once again that he is merely a tool of the president, the president’s hand, not the representative of the American people.”

And I think there may be a reason, beyond the usual catchall that "it's always projection". It's a rhetorical trick of some kind they're playing, and a form of "the tribute vice pays to virtue": they're using this language to attack Biden and his family and his Justice Department because it was effective when applied to Trump.

If You Can't Think of Anything Nice to Say, Ask Me

Unisex cotton tee from lookhuman.com, $19.99.

Josh Marshall wrote something I thought was extremely important yesterday, in his Backchannel blog for subscribers. I'm not going to work through the whole thing, but read it if you get a chance; this link ought to get you behind the paywall.

It was about Joe Biden's age, and the basic message was that Democrats should stop worrying about it—not because it doesn't matter, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, but because there's nothing anybody can do about it other than learn to live with it. It was baked into the 2024 campaign during the 2020 campaign four years ago, and because he was far and away the best candidate then, he's the only candidate now; he's the incumbent, he's very popular inside the party (consistently around 80% in the Reuters-Ipsos tracking poll), and it's just structurally how it works with an incumbent willing to seek a second term. They virtually always get the nomination. Truman in 1952 and Johnson in 1968 volunteered not to run, for different reasons, and it was terrible for their parties.

And it's not just about Biden, but the whole party:

No one runs to be a one-term president. And no one runs for president and succeeds without an overweening level of ambition. So what the incumbent president wants is never going to be in doubt. That’s a given. What matters is that a whole apparatus of patronage, expected appointments, intra-party compromises and incumbent advantage for the political party as a whole is layered over that individual president’s overwhelming ambition. All of that gets tossed aside if the president just decides out of the blue he’s cool with a single term. Countless people are heavily invested in that reelection effort. And while others who aren’t as clearly sold on or allied with the incumbent are less invested, they don’t matter as much since their guy isn’t in power.

There's not going to be a way of getting rid of him, if you did want to. Even a Ted Kennedy couldn't dislodge a relatively unpopular Jimmy Carter—all he was able to do was get Reagan elected. You don't want to do that. 

So you need to deal with it. And look, it's not an accident. Biden is an extraordinarily skilled politician and he's been an exceptionally good president. He's got the whole Democratic coalition, the labor unions, the organized minority groups, the intellectuals, and a whole bunch of those soccer moms, behind him. He ought to have the literal left behind him too, given the amount of work he's put into making a reality of the Elizabeth Warren agenda, but I realize you can't have everything. Nevertheless, he's the best positioned to beat Trump and has done it already once.

And the fruits of Bidenomics are starting to become really evident, as the inflation finally goes down and the stock exchanges go up. So do the charging stations for EVs, all over the place, and the other infrastructure projects in the congressional districts, and the number of jobs and the prevailing wage. 

Sure he's old. He's also incredibly fit for 80, exercises and is good at making sure he gets his down time, and you can see by what he's been doing with the legislature and the regulatory work and on the foreign policy circuit and in the campaigning, and the occasional flashes of Dark Brandon, that he's not in any kind of cognitive decline, regardless of what some Republicans want you to believe (they also want you to believe that he's a brilliant and ruthless fiend, personally throwing all his enemies in jail the way Trump tried and utterly failed to do with his). Somebody who's made it to that age in that condition is more likely than not to continue the same to 85 and 86. Nothing is certain, he could have a catastrophic health issue at any moment, chas veShalom, but it's going to be something unpredictable, and then we'll have to deal with that.

My first mother-in-law, a woman of great generosity and indefatigable cheer (at least compared to her daughter, heh-heh) was down on worrying. "Worrying never fixed anything," she'd say, and she was right. You can try to be prepared for likely problems, but the unlikely ones are the ones you can't prepare for, and you just have to deal with them as they come.

The most likely catastrophe on the horizon is, duh, the re-election of Donald Trump, the unkillable Grigory Rasputin of American politics. I don't really think that's ineluctably likely either, but there's no denying it's a serous danger. That, too, has already happened once. 

I think what Democrats need to be doing right now is defending our country against that, and one of the ways they could be doing it would be if they could learn how to say Biden is worth voting for, instead of moaning in every forum about how unsatisfactory he is, and predicting his imminent physical collapse. And as far as that goes, showing some love to vice president Kamala Harris, too. Criticize Biden by all means, for cause, on the specific ways he's let you down (I've had trouble with the places where he's failed to turn around from Trump-era policy especially on immigration and trade, though I think for those we need a better Congress more than a better president), but don't panic in public over the idea that he's the wrong nominee.

Yas's Corollary

Libertarians are conservatives focused on the "laws that protect but do not bind" the ingroup.

Authoritarians are conservatives focused on the "laws that bind but do not protect" the outgroups.

They don't really have any conflicts.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) July 27, 2023

What's Next on the Debt Ceiling?

Random denomination. too. Via.

So Joe Biden, having sworn never to yield to McCarthy's blackmail and negotiate appropriations under the threat that the House could refuse to do its constitutional duty and pass a rise in the debt ceiling and allow the nation to default on its debt for the first time in our history ...

... has started negotiating appropriations under the threat that the House could refuse to pass a rise in the debt ceiling, and so forth. Have we got that right?

Possibly not. David Dayen at The American Prospect, who certainly knows more about these matters than I can even imagine, has come up with a more benign way of looking at it, anyway, based on the fact that McCarthy really did pass a rise in the debt ceiling, in his own peculiar way, even though it was in a bill the Senate and White House couldn't possibly agree to; that changed the situation, as Dayen said:

I do believe there was some inkling, at least within the White House, that McCarthy would never get that bill passed. It took a fairly superhuman effort for him to thread the needle of his caucus and find a majority, and then only when two Democrats missed the vote. You can’t fight something with nothing; if McCarthy couldn’t get consensus, at some point he’d have to acquiesce to a clean debt ceiling increase. That would have been humiliating and reasonably possible. It was worth going for from the Democrats’ perspective. 

I remember thinking that way myself, and it came agonizingly close to being true. But in the end it wasn't, and Democrats (and Mitch McConnell) had to turn to a different approach. What they're up to now is negotiating, but politely disagreeing on what they're negotiating about: the debt ceiling is "off the table", say Schumer and Biden; the debt ceiling is "off the table", says McConnell; "No it isn't," says Kevin, and it's a free country, so he has a right to his opinion. But the fact remains that when the solution comes, over the next couple of weeks, it will include a rise in the debt ceiling.