By Chris Satullo
One of the major party candidates in our presidential election has spent the last few weeks:
- Gaslighting the American people.
- Inventing poll numbers.
- Blasting the news media for asking reasonable questions.
- Putting his ego ahead of the national interest.
- Demanding blind loyalty from everyone in his party.
So what else is new, you ask? But here, tragically, is what’s new:
The guy who’s been doing all that is named Joe Biden.
It gives me zero pleasure to say these critical things about a man I’ve long known and admired, a president whose performance I have extolled (e.g., here, here and here) even as others stinted on the praise he was due.
My disappointment in Joe is so fierce I can scarcely find the words to convey it. The clincher was the last thing he said to George Stephanopoulos of ABC News during that weak and distressing interview – which the Biden gang expected all Democrats to treat as having put an end to all concerns.
In that dispiriting moment, Biden said (and this is what he said, despite all his team’s attempts to deny it) that if he did “the goodest” job he could do and still lost to Trump, he would feel OK, which is “what it’s all about.”
And millions of Democratic voices muttered, groaned or shouted: “No, that’s NOT what it’s all about, Joe. It’s not about you. It’s about defeating a felon, an insurrectionist, a sex offender and a madman who says he can’t wait to trash the Constitution.”
The simple fact, Joe, that you didn’t go into that disastrous debate with a 20-point cushion in the polls tells us that your goodest isn’t going to be nearly enough to do the needed job – and maybe never was.
Biden loyalists – and others who so far are going along for this sad ride for their own reasons – have hastily built a dam of pretense. It still may burst at any moment, but the situation is so unprecedented it’s hard to prognosticate with any confidence.
So let me examine the varieties of rhetorical mud that Team Biden has used to fashion its dam. My purpose is to make clear what a weak, ramshackle structure it really is. Here are some of the key claims and phrases being used:
He had our back, so now we have to have his.
Says who? Again, I think Joe Biden has been a very fine president. Which is the job he got elected (with my tiny help) to do, the job he gets paid very handsomely, in perks and power as well as money, to do. That’s not exactly “having my back,” in the sense of taking extraordinary, daring steps to preserve me from harm. I surely do not want evil to befall Joe the man, but I’m far more worried about evil befalling the office he now holds – and the nation that relies on the person holding the office to be neither corrupt, nor evil, nor nuts. That’s any sane American’s priority.
The Democratic voters have chosen Joe, and no unelected cabal can subvert their choice.
Please. Biden ran essentially unopposed. We primary voters weren’t given a choice. We were told that the incumbent was fully up to the task physically and mentally, so no other options need be considered. It is now clear we were lied to. So, it’s not unreasonable for us to withdraw support courted under fall pretenses and demand a mulligan (sorry for the golf allusion).
The whole age issue is a media creation.
I spent months grousing about the obsession of the New York Times and much of the Washington press corps with the Joe is old trope. I thought it was bullfeathers.
It tastes bitter in my mouth, but I now owe all those reporters an apology. They were onto the truth while I was buying the smokescreen.
Team Biden wants to frame concern over his current fitness for the job as a media concoction. This canard is debunked by every poll, every focus group and every conversation we’ve been having lately with friends, family or colleagues. On debate night, we saw for ourselves, vividly, the real question. It’s one many of us have painful personal experience with: “Darn, is it finally time to take the car keys aways from Dad?” Or: “Time to have that talk with Mom about assisted living?”
And Biden’s reaction – denial, indignation, stubbornness, whining about disloyalty – is one many of us recognize all too well. We’ve witnessed those petulant antics from someone we’ve long loved and been loyal to. And we know the inevitable denouement: Goodbye, steering wheel; hello, Sunny Acres.
The voters are with me; the elites are not.
I so hoped Joe and his loyal circle would have more integrity and taste than to fall back on the first refuge of the MAGA scoundrel: “The out-of-touch elites are only blasting me because I’m fighting for the interests of you, the little guy.” That’s cynical BS.
Must be a pretty supersized elite that the Dems have these days, given that 56 percent of party members contacted in a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll said they want Biden to step aside. (A new poll says it’s 65 percent.) Meanwhile, 7 out of 10 independents – a group Biden absolutely has to own to beat Trump – told the pollsters they want him to sit this one out on the beach in Rehoboth.
(And understand that, due to the quirks of the Electoral College, a Democrat has to win the popular vote by at least 3 percentage points to win the race. So, for a Dem to be tied in national polls is actually to be losing by quite a bit.)
There’s no time to make a switch.
Let me be the 895th person to mention that, in the time we’ve been jawing fecklessly about Biden’s debate disaster, the French (not exactly the hardest working people on the planet) have managed to hold two (count ’em 2!) national elections. Meanwhile, in a campaign that lasted all of six weeks, the British people just made the sensible decision to end the Conservative Party’s far-too-long grasp on power and give Labour a try.
The problem with our presidential elections, most voters would agree, is not that they are too swift, but that they are mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly long. That’s especially so in 2024, given the unappealing choice the tedious process produced.
Most voters, I’d wager, would cheer for, not rebel against, a sudden, intriguing reset of this election’s sour narrative. They’d relish the chance to meet and assess a new Democratic ticket in a brisk, but hardly skimpy, three-month timeframe. Plus, this all would be catnip for the political media. So, the idea that the new Democratic standard-bearer would struggle to gain name recognition or airtime strikes me as absurd.
You can’t transfer the campaign cash and infrastructure that Biden has amassed.
An email from the Biden campaign told Democratic voters that a replacement candidate would enter the campaign with “zero dollars.” This is…how can I put it?…a lie of Trumpian scale and chutzpah.
As Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic laid out recently, the only way the new ticket would begin with “zero dollars” is if Biden, with a vengeful wrath worthy of King Lear, insisted on it. His campaign treasury, as well as the campaign offices etc., can all be transferred to state or national party structures. This would be complicated, with legalities to be observed, but it’s doable.
Desperate people often label as impossible the very possible things they are petrified might happen.
The only other option is Kamala, and her polling is weak, too.
I, too, worry about Vice President Harris’ weaknesses as a candidate – some intrinsic to her, others tied to narratives in voters’ heads that may be unfair but which would take far too long to counter and unravel. But what I reject is this notion: Harris is the only possible replacement, ergo we’re stuck with Joe.
Demsas, the Atlantic writer, rejects it, too – fiercely. Demsas is, interestingly, a) a Black woman herself who b) saw Harris up close in 2020 while working on her blundering campaign for the Democratic nomination. Demsas argues that Harris in no way deserves to have the nomination handed to her.
James Carville, always as savvy as he is bombastic, proposed an appealing alternative in a recent New York Times piece – a set of national town meetings featuring eight candidates (including Harris) followed by an open convention in Chicago that would choose the ticket.
Unprecedented! Unworkable! Naive! Those were the scoffs from the party’s self-proclaimed “adults in the room.” But I would respond that everything about this is unprecedented, so it’s unlikely the best fix for the Democrats’ jam can be found on the shelf marked: Stuff We Usually Do.
Here’s what the realists who are so busy calling the rest of us naive bed-wetters are really showing us: They lack imagination. They lack guts. They lack energy. They have a hard time putting the nation’s best interests ahead of their own career preservation. When under pressure, they’re just as prone to gaslighting, falsehoods and loyalty tests as the MAGA horde.
Don’t fall for their muddy rhetoric. If you can peer over the desperate dam they’ve thrown up in last few weeks (indeed, in the last 24 hours), you’ll see a gang of very solid, even exciting, young Democratic office holders. They are the party’s best hope to avoid calamity on Nov. 5. One of them should top the ticket this fall.
A concluding anecdote: One recent morning, my wife turned on the TV to watch something she’d recorded. The channel happened to be set to ABC. The View, a show we usually don’t watch, was on. The featured guest: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (hmmm …). She was cogent; she was charming; she was funny; she was wise. She had the View panel and the studio audience eating out of her hand.
Here’s the show. Watch it and compare what you see from Whitmer there to Joe Biden’s blank, gaping stares and garbled syntax on debate night. Ask yourself: Which person has the better chance to inspire young voters, suburban independents, working-class cynics et al. to take a fresh look at the Democratic agenda and vote to stave off the apocalypse?
It’s not a hard question. It’s not a close call.
So let’s shut down the gaslighters’ lectures about what is or is not naive.Let’s pursue the unprecedented possible.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia