Democrats Reap What They Sowed

President Joe Biden has announced that he is withdrawing his candidacy for re-election. Other incumbents have thrown in the towel, opting not to seek re-election, most recently Lyndon Johnson in 1968. But never has the towel been thrown in so late in the election cycle.

Biden’s exit brings to a close a tumultuous three weeks, during which the beleaguered President could not catch a break. Ever since his disaster of a performance at the CNN debate with Donald Trump in Atlanta on June 27, he has been unable to escape withering media and public scrutiny over the fact that he was simply too old to run for re-election. From the very first moment he shuffled across the stage—a walk he reportedly practiced several times—the full extent of his decrepitude was visible for all to see. Not even the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life eight days ago was enough to deflect attention from Biden’s frailty. Biden had a mere 48 hours of reprieve before the media hounds resumed their hunt. Indeed, it is doubtful that the events of last weekend interrupted for more than a few moments the campaign within the Democratic Party’s donor elite to force Biden to step down.

It's unclear what will happen next. Biden has already endorsed his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, to replace him at the head of the Democratic Party ticket. But former President Barack Obama conspicuously did not endorse Harris. “We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead,” he wrote in a statement released shortly after Biden’s. “But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”  We may therefore be about to witness a full-on liberal civil war heading into the Democratic National Convention.

You can see why Obama wants the party to keep its options open. It’s not immediately obvious what benefit over Biden that Kamala brings to the ticket aside from her youth. The most recent polling since last weekend suggests she would in fact do worse than Biden against Trump. Biden picked Harris as his running-mate back in 2020 mainly because of the elaborate system of identity patronage that now governs Democratic Party decision-making. Make no mistake, she is the DEI candidate. Given the importance of African American voters to his campaign, Biden was bound to have a black running-mate and committed himself early to picking a “woman of color.”

If the Democratic elite is ruthless enough to bully a sitting president off the party ticket, then why not go all the way? If they dump Kamala, too, and substitute a superior candidate, they might still defeat Trump in November. After all, it was Biden, not Harris, who won the overwhelming share of votes in the Democratic primary. Now that democracy is out the window, Democrats are free to select whomever they want.

How Did We Get Here?

President Biden’s mental and physical decline was not classified information. Whatever your preferred diagnosis, it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. At press conferences, public events, and speeches, the President slurred his words, made an uncountable number of gaffes and mistakes, and sometimes seemed to struggle even to read off a teleprompter. The public was repeatedly handed feeble excuses, such as his lifelong stutter, or jetlag.

The political crisis now roiling the Democrats is a disaster of their own creation. It was not so much a conspiracy to cover up the extent of Biden’s senility. It was more a strange act of collective self-delusion.

The White House certainly attempted a cover-up. In the aftermath of the debate, White House correspondents revealed they were “gas[lit]” and “bull[ied]” by the administration for pursuing the issue of Biden’s age in 2022 and 2023. White House staffers would “lose their minds,” “go ballistic,” or accuse reporters of contributing “to the downfall of the American Republic,” if they pushed the age question, three different reporters told Vox. Aides would also complain to the editorial boards of outlets that did run stories on the subject. The crowning moment came when the Wall Street Journal published a large exposé with dozens of interviews detailing the behind-the-scenes perception of Biden’s decline. The White House exploded. Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates pilloried the Journal, tweeting hysterical refutations of the story 74 times. Less than a month later, the Journal was vindicated.

The same harsh treatment was extended to members of the party who stepped out of line. After the debate, one CNN reporter recounted, on air, a conversation she had with a Democrat official, who said, “Everyone who expresses any level of suspicion or contrary views, they call everyone, and they beat the shit out of them and say stay on message.”

We shouldn’t cut the Democrats or their lackeys in the media any slack. Whether it was the result of tacit bias, private political loyalties, or a pervasive atmospheric progressivism, the press mostly went along with the campaign to protect the President from scrutiny and delude the public.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough deserves the gold medal in this respect. He took to his widely listened “Morning Joe” show to lampoon the Journal story, calling it a “Trump hit piece on Joe Biden.” In March, Scarborough also said, “I undersold [Biden] when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent.” Scarborough then uttered what must go down as the most risible sentence in the whole campaign cycle: “This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.” Only since the debate has Scarborough publicly called on Biden to drop out of the race.

“I think the press, most of the White House press, did suffer from a bit of lack of curiosity,” one White House reporter said. “The right-wing media was calling him senile from day one, and that wasn’t true,” another reporter said. “Then whenever you report on the age you were in some ways solidifying, giving credence to some people that were actually of bad faith.” Rank partisanship blinded the media from spotting what has turned out to be the biggest scandal of the decade.

Democratic politicians also covered for Biden. These are people who knew perfectly well the extent of Biden’s decline and refused to come forward until it was too late. Just last week, Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton recounted in an opinion piece how Biden, a longtime friend of his, didn’t even recognize him at the 80^th anniversary of D-Day. This is the same D-Day anniversary from which clips emerged of Biden seemingly wandering off into the distance as if confused. The media and the White House called this and other clips like it “cheap fakes” and trotted out the familiar “experts say” claim that Republicans were engaging in a disinformation campaign.

Perhaps the most obstinate group was Biden’s core of loyal liberal supporters who relentlessly bullied anyone who drew attention to the President’s frailty, even after the debate. This group of devoted partisans feel deeply betrayed by the press’s newfound interest in Biden’s age. Whether they will say it or not, the liberal base believes deeply that the media are an instrument of their will and thus have a moral obligation only to report on Trump’s age, mental acuity, or threat to “our democracy.”

One reporter at Vox shared how “every time I appear on CNN or the BBC to discuss the Democratic Party’s post-debate state of crisis, I get messages from liberal viewers who believe I’m helping hand the election to Trump.” Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, these frenzied liberal boosters, eager to shout foul play, remind me of the Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific islands who continued fighting long after the war in the Pacific had ended.

The important takeaway from Biden’s withdrawal is that the entire establishment lied. They lied to us about Biden’s health, they kept lying, and many of them lied until the very last moment. Each group — the White House, the press, the politicians, and the liberal base — played the game, punishing anyone who dared step out of line. They held fast to the lie they had told, I suspect, because they knew the lie implicated them as well. It would be one matter if the debate was the first rupture in the Biden team’s narrative, but it wasn’t. Everyone outside the liberal bubble knew that Biden had experienced a sharp mental and physical decline since the start of his Presidency, the only question most people had was “how much?”

But America is not a police state and so this campaign of press intimidation was doomed eventually to fail. After the debate in June—an event instigated by the liberal network CNN—the dam broke. The question is, “Why?” It was surely not just because Biden’s performance was especially bad. 

President Biden, back in 2019. Credit: Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

It is worth pondering this point because I think it explains why the media was the first to turn against Biden, and overwhelmingly so. A coverup of this magnitude is a generational scandal. The White House was planning to slide Biden through the primary, lock up the votes, and win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention before anyone could challenge him. In one swoop, the debate showed just how far the lie had gone. People expect politicians to lie, but the press is supposed to be the arbiter of facts, the first author of history, the voice speaking truth to power. Republicans haven’t believed in such self-indulgent, onanistic shibboleths for decades, but Democrats do. Democrats are, of course, the backbone of the entire establishment regime. If they lost their blind faith in the media, then it’s game over for the Joe Scarboroughs of the world. To salvage the situation, the media had to throw Joe Biden to the wolves.”

But there is more going on here than a revolt by liberal journalists against their would-be controllers. What we have witnessed in the weeks since the debate has been a factional struggle within the Democratic Party that has pitted San Francisco against Aspen, Chicago against the Hamptons.

What Next?

I do not generally believe in the capacity of the Democratic Party to do soul-searching, but perhaps a crisis of this magnitude will force them to look within themselves. Here are some of my suggestions for what they should do between now and November.

First, tough questions must be asked. No politician was closer to Biden than Kamala Harris. If Harris really is going to succeed Biden on the ballot, then the press needs to grill her. What did she know about the President’s health and when did she know it? Was she involved in meetings with White House doctors? Did she believe the President was fit to serve? If Harris knew about the President’s decline long before this weekend, then she is equally unfit to lead the country. She was a co-conspirator in the attempted cover-up.

Second, there needs to be a swift public discussion about whether Biden is fit to remain in office. To be clear, if a sitting President is not well enough to run for re-election, then he is not well enough to serve out the remaining six months before that second term would begin. Perhaps he is remaining in office to give Harris the leeway to campaign aggressively. If so, this is tantamount to sacrificing the competent administration of the country for her campaign. If Biden is out to lunch, and Harris is on the campaign trail, then who is running the country?

Third, swapping Joe for Kamala may or may not be a prudent move electorally, but it is hardly democratic. Even at this late juncture, Democrats deserve an opportunity to pick their candidate. An old-style open convention would be the appropriate way for Democratic delegates of all stripes to ditch the identity politics that put them in this bind in the first place. Nate Silver, a brilliant and moderate Democrat, has made some excellent recommendations as to how this could happen. There could be a debate or series of debates between a handful of candidates to make their case to the public. Democrats could pick a small number of states to host a non-binding caucus, the vote from which would help delegates gauge public opinion.

It is hard to believe that such a process would go smoothly. Indeed, there is a risk that the party might publicly tear itself apart. On the other hand, there is also a chance that the old methods might deliver a better ticket than the rigged conventions of recent years. Now the Democrats, too, can (to borrow the other side’s new slogan) “Fight! Fight! Fight!” With one another.

Joe Biden’s bid for a second term lasted 24 days after his fateful debate in Atlanta. Another 29 days lie between us and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. No one can say for sure what will happen next. But one thing is certain. The Democratic Party’s strange conspiracy of self-deception, which a generation of spineless liberal journalists aided and abetted, is over. No matter the outcome, do not pity the Democrats.

They did this to themselves.