If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity:  

Please Stop

 

I'm really bent out of shape over this cover, partly no doubt because I've been using one of these devices myself (a wheeled model like the one assigned to the Speaker Emerita here), though I'm younger than any of them, having broken my leg in a physical exploit only one of them, Biden, could possibly have attempted—in the process of being liberated from it now, I'm pleased to report, but my PT advises me I should hold on to it for the purpose of cutting the line at Trader Joe's.

But I'd note that Speaker Pelosi has already left the leadership in favor of an extremely dynamic and skillful young successor, 53-year-old Hakeem Jeffries, while McConnell, in what's clearly a last act (he has real physical issues, as we all know, and a 61-year-old successor apparent in John Thune) is doing everything he can to save us from the fecklessness and incompetence of the House's 58-year-old Kevin McCarthy. And don't tell me it's not age-bashing:

Trump's only been a politician for 8 years, is he in the picture by mistake?

— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) September 26, 2023

Also, the magazine's editor, David Remnick, was defending the cover on the radio this morning, and didn't try to hide the fact that the cartoon really has only one target, President Joe Biden, and the "age issue" that somehow attaches to him alone, though he's clearly the healthiest of the pictured persons, and the most effective president since Harry Truman at least, in every department, including some I could wish he wasn't so good at (does he have to work so hard at creating a Middle East condominium between Saudi Arabia and Israel?). It's "out there, it's our job to cover it," Remnick said, or words to that effect, like a latter-day Cokie Roberts, citing the polls that show it's a "concern" even when they don't (every poll that shows Biden at around 46% is now interpreted as a comment on Biden's age, even though that's not one of the questions addressed). When the interviewer mentioned that Barack Obama had the same kind of poll numbers at this point in the 2012 campaign, he hemmed and hawed and said that was influenced by different factors, which is no doubt true. So what does that prove?

Remnick also talked a lot about the gerontocracy of the dying Soviet Union, which he witnessed up close as a reporter, without drawing the obvious inferences from the fact that those leaders much more sick than old (Brezhnev, the king of stagnation, was broken in health when he died in office at 75; Andropov was just 70; Chernenko left office at 72 and died the following year, while 54-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev began overseeing the country's dissolution brought on by their mistakes; Boris Yeltsin was 60 and already suffering from heart disease and alcoholism when he became president of Russia). Why not mention West Germany's Konrad Adenauer, proudly known as "der Alte" (the old one), who spearheaded his country's Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) and the invention of the European Union, and stayed on as Chancellor until he was 86, sufficiently on his toes to continue as party leader, watching over his successors, for another four years after that?

Just stop it, OK? 

Josh Marshall blames it on Trump terror—the fear that he might win makes people crazy

This is the moment we live in in the history of the American republic, a man who talks like a character out of a dystopian novel about the end of America is the choice of about half of Americans to be the next President.

 

The prospect is so horrible and terrifying that virtually everyone looks for someone else to lash out at or blame. It’s Joe Biden’s age; it’s Democrats’ ineffectiveness; it’s this or that other thing.

and maybe it is that, but it keeps looking to me like an effort to make Democrats lose, by saddling us with an unneeded candidate, Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer, or maybe replace Vice President Harris with some candidate more appealing to the Times op-ed page, thus breaking up the 2020 coalition. Not that that's going to happen (Newsom in particular has made it clear), but it keeps making the party's situation look more and more discouraging, and it's starting to drive the polls into self-fulfilling prophecy mode.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

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