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I don't particularly have an interest in getting dragged into an argument where I'm forced to defend Biden or the DNC, but:
Ezra Klein is one of the few people on the left who publicly pushed for Biden to step aside and for an open Democratic convention since at least February. Of all the people who could be said to have failed...he must be pretty far down that list?
Bernie is and 82 year old who had a heart attack in the last 5 years. I haven't heard him speak lately, but I doubt the dems would be in much better shape were he their candidate.
Nobody is dragging you into anything, Chris.
An open Democratic convention strategy was always doomed. The people who say that an open convention would never work, that as Klein put it on his podcast it was Aaron Sorkin fanfiction, are correct. The D candidate chosen to replace Biden is probably doomed by the weird relationship they'd hold to Biden, both in the tension between running on the last four years of Democratic policy while not being an actual incumbent, and in the "they tried to foist a senile man on us as president" argument.
Part of the argument for Biden from the beginning, in the NYT opinion section et al, was that he could always be a one term president replaced by someone younger near the 2024 election. That turned out to be impossible, for all the reasons we're seeing now, chief among them Biden's choice in the matter.
And Klein remains optimistic! He acts as though the start date for all thought is today, we just found ourself here. There's no examination of the decision making process that got us here.
Bernie is old too, but they didn't have to pick Biden to rally behind. Klobuchar or even Liz Warren would have been fine choices. Even Kamala, for all her flaws, would still be upright at this point. It was their choice in putting Biden on the ticket that I'm criticizing, not endorsing Bernie as an alternative. And the fact that no one is grappling with this decision making process, and how we wound up here, is maddening to me.
Clearly you haven't met my in-laws...
...and yet here I am, defending Klein and the DNC.
That's utterly beside the point.
So you single out Klein (I'll reiterate, one of the only voices on the left who called for Biden to step down), and then give examples of three other organizations (unless 'NYT editorial page' is a stand-in for 'Ezra Klein wrote an editorial' or 'Ezra Klein works for the NYT and is guilty by association').
'Vote blue no matter who' - so what, people were supposed to abstain or vote for Trump in 2020? How is that in any way advantageous to the party?
'Trump is a threat to democracy so we need to prioritize "electability" and get behind Biden' - so in your hypothetical, it's a given that any candidate could have beaten Trump? Not to mention you assume that a handful of news organizations could coordinate to tank Biden's candidacy after he won nearly a dozen primaries on Super Tuesday to Bernie's four. He beat Warren 48% to 7% in South Carolina! The idea that Vox and the NYT editorial section have that much power is ludicrous. You, and most everybody else here, engage in these absurd contradictions where mainstream media is failing (go woke go broke, fox news viewership compared to CNN, clearly The People hate the product the media is selling) while simultaneously crediting them with godlike powers over elections and public opinion. You take it as a given that anyone holding a ballot on the left is some moronic, sheep-NPC milling about waiting for Ezra Klein to gently shepherd them towards the Uniparty's chosen puppet.
Not to mention that even if this had happened, I guarantee you there would be a firestorm in the media (conservative, liberal and the motte) about the subversion of democracy, the people wanted Biden and the party machine intervened to foist a woman/gay/black/Jew/communist/whatever candidate on the country, because idpol.
Biden was popular because people cared about electability more than anything else in 2020, and because he crushed the black vote. Who's more electable, the Jewish communist from Vermont, or the centrist former Vice-president in a popular (on the left) administration?
And the fact that Biden is choosing to cling to power due to ego rather than follow in the footsteps of his betters and step aside when his time has come is entirely his own fault. I am disappointed in the president and his family, not Ezra Klein.
Whose choice, the voters? Are you even confident that Klein was shilling for Biden prior to his wins on Super Tuesday? The list of episodes of his podcast has two episodes on Biden after Super Tuesday, after which Biden already had a commanding lead of the field. Perhaps his coverage of the debate on January 16th was slanted towards Biden, I don't know, but that's a pretty deep cut to be holding him responsible for. Or do you think he should have been putting out attack pieces on Biden for being too old after he was the frontrunner?
It's easy to act smart and opine on how glaringly stupid the establishment is with the benefit of hindsight. Actually running a newspaper, or a political party, or a company is orders of magnitude harder.
I think we have a misunderstanding in terms here. I don't think I was very clear.
I don't really care if Ezra or the PSA guys or any particular Dem personally did or advocated for this or that. In their work, they refer to Democrats/Liberals/#Resistance/People of Good Will/Etc. types under the rubric of "We." What will we do? What should we make of this?
In the same way that a Cowboys fan speaks of we. We beat the Eagles, what a thrill. We lost to the Bears, this is embarrassing for us.
It's not particularly important which person did what. It's important to take a look at the process and how Democrats got here. If one is a Democrat, that's a we issue. That's something you have to figure out how you avoid next time.
I don't want to get into the weeds here, but you're doing the same thing I'm accusing them of here: you're starting the clock very late in the day. The endorsements poured into Biden well before Super Tuesday, the election might have gone very differently if they hadn't done so. We might have gotten to a different outcome. We can argue about coordination versus a sort of stochastic chance and follow the leader, but what we can't do is start with a fait accompli, start the story in medias res and say "Ok what should we do right now?" without ever discussing all the past prologue that got us here. That's a recipe for repeating one's mistakes.
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What's wrong with the dem party, do they literally have no-one younger to push up there? Any senators perhaps? No? Is AOC too unelectable? Do they consider Mommy Tulsi Gabbard too much of a problem for the war machine?
I would be slightly more surprised at Gabbard being the Democrat candidate than Mitt Romney.
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With Trump's huge unfavorables, it does seem like Generic Democrat™ would do very well. Someone like Jack Johnson or John Jackson. Swing state. Nice looking family. Good hair, but not too good like Gavin Newsom.
The problem is that how do the Democrats actually get this person on the ballot when it involves stepping over so many obvious front-runners? The Republicans were able to do it in 1920 with Warren Harding, but dark horse successes are rare. It's also a problem that Democrats (with rare exceptions) are so in the upper class bubble that they can't talk to proles anymore. So, to be acceptable to the Democrat elite, the magical Generic candidate has to act a certain way that makes them maybe not so generic to the average voter.
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Gabbard is no longer even a Democrat.
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Ezra Klein is just a representative of the podcasting liberal smug class. This particular example isn't perfect, as you say, but to his outgroup he's identical to all of the others of the reporter priestly caste.
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