I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.
| Donald Trump
Biden in the Crosshairs
Jonathan Chait, in Biden and Harris’s Absurd Case for Complacency, undermines one of the campaign's arguments against having Biden step down from the 2024 nomination:
By the logic offered by the Biden and Harris teams, the ticket is frozen in place. Biden can’t step down because he would have to hand the role to Harris, and the party doesn’t trust her in that position. Harris’s allies are aiming a gun at the party, and Biden is pointing at Harris, pleading his own helplessness.
If this reasoning characterized the situation accurately, then the party is indeed doomed to shuffle forlornly toward November and the likely restoration of Trump and all the horrors he would bring. But I find the rationale not only suspiciously self-serving but also wrong on several key points.
First, while there was good reason to believe a year ago that Harris was clearly worse than Biden, there is much less reason to think that today. His catastrophic debate performance was an out-of-sample event. We will await more polling to measure the scale of the destruction, but Biden’s campaign had been pointing to the debate as the event that would redirect public attention from Biden’s faltering performance and onto Trump’s maniacal unfitness. Not only did Biden fail utterly, he achieved the opposite of his intention. It’s difficult to imagine anything Trump could do or say that would attract more attention than Biden spending an hour and a half sounding like a cast member in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Is Harris a mediocre politician? At this point, mediocrity at the head of the ticket would be a welcome improvement.
Now, while I think Harris is probably a better option than Biden, she is not the Democrats’ best option. If you undertake a change as radical as swapping out your presidential candidate because he’s losing to a sociopathic criminal, then you should really go ahead and pick a candidate whose political and governing skills have the confidence of the party elite.
Chait goes on to say the argument for selecting a replacement other than Harris -- say a Gretchen Whitmer/Cory Booker ticket -- would inexorably lead to Black Americans defecting from the party. Except Black Americans already are. And this is a party that nominated Obama twice. But Harris is not another Obama.
At the moment, according to one post-debate poll, only 27 percent of Americans believe Joe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. This poses an almost-insurmountable obstacle to his election, even with Trump’s manifest unfitness. Biden is losing, and he has already squandered what his own campaign considered his best chance to change the race.
Again, even with all her limitations, Harris is probably a stronger candidate now than Biden. I also think there are better options than Harris. My choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, who’s displayed a repeated talent at appealing to swing voters and who could be paired with a Black running mate like Cory Booker. There are other promising options, but I won’t pretend I can offer any single solution with any confidence that it’s the best way to go. I do believe that almost any change, including a Harris nomination, makes more sense than keeping a nominee who has so deeply forfeited public confidence.
I, too, support Gretchen Whitmer.
My overarching point is that Democrats need to summon the collective willpower to make political choices in the interest of their party and their country. It’s not too late, but very soon it will be. The Biden campaign has brought the party to a crisis point by a series of choices dictated by personal comfort, short-term thinking, and narrow self-interest. These decisions may be rational for the individuals involved, but they add up to a collective disaster.
If that persists, they will continue to drift toward a potentially irreversible setback for American democracy. If Biden and Harris haven’t opened their eyes to what we are now facing, everybody else in their party with influence has a duty to grab them by the shoulder and force them to.
…
The wave of discontent in the Democratic party and donors is growing, as cataloged in Biden’s Team Scrambles to Contain First Democratic Defections. I find the President's defense, regarding his debate performance, that he was tired from travel unconvincing, since as a president after the next election he would likely be in the same circumstance regularly. We need to know now how he would perform then in an emergency despite being jet lagged. Time to step aside, Joe.
…
A few shorts on Biden in the Crosshairs:
The Ghastly vs. the Ghostly | Maureen Dowd
precis: Dowd thinks Joe should have started his presidential era earlier, when Obama passed him over for 'the immoral alleycat' Clinton. She also suggests that Jill Biden is calling the shots.
Great copy from James Carville, who 'said a while back that the president should renounce a second term' and that 'Biden should call former Presidents Clinton and Obama to the White House and decide on five Democratic stars to address their convention in August. “You know what the ratings for that would be?” he asked. “The whole world would watch and people would go, ‘Oh, God, they have real talent!’”
And she asked Carville 'What if Joe and Jill cling on?' and 'Carville quoted Herb Stein, a top economist under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: That which can’t continue, won’t'.
This Isn’t All Joe Biden’s Fault | Ezra Klein
precis: Klein recasts his plea from February that Biden should step down for the good of the Democratic party and the county. He is too old to run and far too old to serve. He rebuts the arguments as to why the party should support him, despite his disastrous debate. The purpose of a political party is to present candidates that can win elections and serve in their elected offices; it is not to support the established leadership, especially when the electorate are indicating that they don't want the candidate being offered up. He spoke with Sam Rosenfeld, one of the authors of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics. '“The idea,” Rosenfeld told me, was “that parties subsume individual ambition, that you commit to the party and to the cause, never to the man.”'
The democrats have an abundance of alternatives, and if Joe Biden was hit by a meteorite tomorrow, the party would move heaven and earth to pick one of them at the upcoming DNC to oppose Trump in the November election. That might be risky, but it would be a necessary risk in the case of Biden dying. It's unclear if the risk of an open convention is higher that Joe stepping aside: he's deeply unpopular, and there is little chance that he can turn that around by November. The highest risk might be moving forward with Biden as the candidate.
The barriers to convincing Biden to step aside are self-imposed by the party machinery, and compounded by the fact that 'It doesn’t serve any individual Democrat’s interest to oppose Biden'. Such a person would be considered disloyal, and if an official serving in the White House -- or an aspirant for presidential office in 2028 -- they might torpedo their career. Party grandees like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Obama are not in that situation, or elders like James Carville (he's 79 himself).
In the final analysis, 'Biden was headed for a loss before the debate, and he is likelier to lose after it. To the extent his team has articulated a theory of what was supposed to turn the race around, this was the theory: the unusually early debate, in which the American people would see Biden and Trump on the stage and be reminded of why they backed Biden in 2020. That theory failed. Biden couldn’t pull it off.'
'Because there is not a plausible way for Democrats to convince voters that the man they saw on Thursday’s stage should be president three or four years from now.'
'To go back to Newsom’s question: What kind of party would be trying to make a change after Thursday night? A party that was doing its job.'
Gerontocracy
Hamilton Nolan, in Dictatorship Of The Old, starts in on the Biden in the Crosshairs theme, but dives into how our society is dominated by old people (emphasis mine):
You can imagine this as a workplace system where advancement is based on seniority and nothing else. If you have ever worked anywhere with old people who are also idiots, you can see the problem here. Age is not directly correlated with wisdom or good judgment, and it is inversely correlated with “being in touch with the world outside of your own house.” In a field like politics, where a keen understanding of the lives of all sorts of regular people is vital, this sort of thing has deleterious effects on all of us. Allowing very old people to be in control of everything warps society in predictable ways. Not least is that things that are important to younger people, like economic mobility and entry level housing and free education and not being thrown in jail for 25 years for youthful hijinks, fall to the bottom of the priority list, and the analytical worldview of political and economic leaders is shaped more by the crazy shit they see on cable news than by walking the streets themselves every day.
Letting the oldest people be in charge is some primitive shit. If that is the outcome that a system produces, it is quite clear that the system needs to be modified in order to produce, instead, something closer to meritocracy. In the case of the economy, it is easy to see that society as a whole will be healthier if younger people, who have not had time to accumulate wealth, are nevertheless able to access quality education and quality housing and quality child care and other such necessities without plunging themselves into debt. The yoke of debt that America forces young people to carry in order to access all of these things ultimately benefits the investment class, made up of older people, at great cost to the young. An economic policy that taxes the free money that accrues to older people via investment gains and subsidizes necessary public goods for younger people who have not yet built wealth is just common sense. The bulk of the political donations from the investment class in America, of course, goes to prevent this outcome. But here, as everywhere, the old rich people are vastly outnumbered by the young and broke. There is hope.
Reminds me of that Janet Yellen concept, that we have a set up for people to 'buy' houses and 'buy' an education by getting long-term loans, but no way to finance childcare, although young couples are least able to pay for it when they most need it:
The report that Treasury is releasing today finds the most parents need child care at the exact moment when they can least afford it – at the beginning of their career when their income is lowest. There’s no financing to help them pay. If you walked into a bank, and asked for a daycare or nanny loan, no one would give it to you. Economists call this particular market failure, “a liquidity constraint.” Instead, families have to spend out-of-pocket, and they have to spend a lot. Our estimate is that to get quality child care, the average family would have to spend 13 percent of their income, more than they spend on food.1(app://obsidian.md/index.html#fn-1-6a501edf5792be88)
But even this spending isn’t enough to ensure an adequate supply of child care. The United States has a severe child care shortage. Roughly half of Americans live in “child care deserts,” areas where there’s only one daycare spot for every three kids. The child care centers that do exist are often in disrepair, operating on razor-thin margins, with workers whose wages keep them at the edge of poverty. About ninety percent of child care workers are women, and disproportionately women of color. They make, on average, $27,000 a year, which puts “child care worker’ in the bottom two percent of occupations. Many rely on social services to make ends meet.
The free market works well in many different sectors, but child care is not one of them. It does not work for the caregivers. It does not work for the parents. It does not work for the kids. And because it does not work for them, it does not work for the country.
Child care is a textbook example of a broken market, and one reason is that when you pay for it, the price does not account for all the positive things it confers on our society.
You can be sure if old people needed daycare banks would be offering financing for it.
The Bear
‘The Bear’ Season 3: Tastes Great, Less Fulfilling | James Poniewozik
Great exposition on the third season of The Bear. What comes next, after this confounding and inconclusive season, is unknown, but Poniewozik mostly applauds what he's seen, although he wants both the haut cuisine and a beef sandwich, too. (See Word of the Day: Perseverate.)