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Some of the latest Biden-camp excuses coming up seem plainly and on their face delusional. I'm paying close attention to who is saying what, using what words, to see their degree of participation in this farce. The obvious logical implications of these claims are, well, obvious.
Exhibit 0: Biden himself talked about his debate the next day. He said:
Are we supposed to be impressed about telling right from wrong? That he knows how to do the job he's been in for four years? These are not reasons to be elected President again, they are basic pre-requisites. For that matter, "speaking smoothly" and "walking" might actually be core requirements as well.
Exhibit 1: He traveled too much before the debate. He did go on some global travel, but then spent 11 days at Camp David afterward preparing and recovering. But who on earth takes a whole week and a half to recover and is still at the point where he, as he himself said at a recent fundraiser, almost fell asleep on stage? Even on its face, that's worrying. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.
Exhibit 2: Biden struggles after 4 p.m.. Staffers say that he really does everything between 10 and 4. Six useful hours is, on its very face, a very worryingly short amount of time to not "make verbal mistakes and become tired". The debate was at 9pm local time. But the job of President isn't really seen as a part-time gig! If I said to you, "yeah my grandpa has six good hours, but after that he gets tired and makes a lot of mistakes" I wouldn't go "great, let's put him in charge of the country for four years and hope that that window of time doesn't shrink too much". This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.
Exhibit 3: It was "preparation overload". Okay, fine, some candidates self-destruct for no reason on the debate stage, or lean too hard on canned phrases (Marco Rubio I'm looking at you). But usually this is limited to a few occurrences. Biden was consistently off all night and responded to comments Trump was expected to make, but did not yet make, on at least four separate occasions. If a candidate takes 11 days to prepare for one 90 minute stretch and still blows it, surely that says something about the candidate? That's like saying "I did poorly on the test because I studied too much". Like, it happens, but not to this extent. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.
Exhibit 4: It's hard to debate when the other person lies a lot, says Nancy Pelosi and others (though, credit due, just today she said whether it was a condition or episode is a fair and legitimate question). But a candidate lying in the debate should make your job easier, not harder, because even if the moderators don't fact-check, what's to stop you from doing so? Biden did at least once or twice, or tried to, so clearly it can work. Sure, you don't have notes per the rules, but surely if there are 20 false statements (per NYT's count) you can pick out at least a few with your week+ of prep. On its face, this is not a good excuse.
Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic. Yes, he got votes in the primaries. However everyone knows that the party endorsed and supported him before other challengers even got going, which makes this argument eerily similar to the obvious horseradish of saying Iran is democratic because people vote (ignoring how candidates are selected). Furthermore, there's evidence the Biden team has withheld information and exposure to Biden on purpose, and as at least one media outlet likes to remind us, "democracy dies in darkness".
Sidenote, related: Here for example, you get stories about the insularity of his team recently. Corporate wants you to find the different between this picture:
...and this picture:
Pam: They're the same picture.
Okay, well to be fair, one is an intelligence briefing (Trump) about core national security issues and the other (Biden) seems to be more domestic political briefings (I think, from context), so the level of severity is actually quite different but... I'm still struck by the similarity.
tl;dr: We all know a debate is not the same thing as actual governing. But just like how excuses tell you hints about the character of the individual, I think the excuses given by the people around Biden give you hints about Biden, too. Good on the press for calling them like they are: excuses.
I'm going to be contrarian and say I thought Biden's debate performance was horrifying but I think it's still fine to run him if voters were like me and not like normal people.
I realize he looks terrible but is the President not being in peak fitness actually that important? Biden doesn't strike me as insane, or malevolent, or like he's so completely out of it that he'll launch nukes because he mistook the big red button for the toilet handle.
I'm probably too cynical but I think the President's job is probably a lot like a doctor's job in a hospital: the nurses all know more or less what the patient needs but they need the MD to make decisions. Sure you'd like a brilliant doctor like House for the truly difficult problems but any doctor that just did what the nurses told him to would probably make for an okay hospital. Biden probably spends his days picking from a set of reasonable proposals offered by his handlers. If he makes too many batshit decisions in a row too often he'll eventually get replaced.
I also don't think Trump has any edge on the mental side that would make up for the fact that he's him. Also his edge isn't great anyway, he's also incoherent, except he presents with speed freak energy. I wouldn't expect his judgment to be any better and he could just as likely start sundowning any day now as well.
It'd be sweet if they ran a Biden that was 20 years younger, but I still think he's better than Trump.
I think the doctor-hospital analogy is incomplete and presents a bad mental model.
I agree that there's no way for the President (or most of Congress for that matter) to be knee-deep in substantive issues across the entire breadth of current affairs. There's just too much going on too fast. So, you have to be able to delegate and this act of delegating begins by selecting appropriate subordinates to help with your overall management strategy. You have to trust these people to handle the issues because you, the President, don't have enough time to double check all of their work.
In the MD-hospital-nurses example, I would think that the MD just signs off on run-of-the-mill stuff, but slows down to double or triple check higher risk courses of care. The MD can do this because there's a little bit more time (i.e. a patient with a broken leg isn't going to literally die if they have to wait another day or something) and because patients are independent from one another. The guy in room 1 has no bearing on the condition of the guy in room 6.
Not so with the Presidency. "All politics is local" and all that. Your broad economic policies are full of cross pollination influences with one another. There's no such thing as isolated bilateral foreign policy (that isn't secret). What you do with one country is seen by the entire world. Even domestic and foreign policy aren't fully separated domains. As we've seen with Israel-Gaza, a fairly uninvolved foreign policy can whip back to smack you in the face at home (Ivy League protests etc.) In reality, you're managing a complex system with a lot of non-linear feedback loops.
So whom you pick to do what matters or else you're going to have to try to manage a ton of fast moving non-linear parts on your own. Or, you just don't manage much and chaos and Congress pick up the slack. This is bad not only for self-evident reasons, but because your administration is now playing a reactive policy game instead of a pro-active policy game. That's a fantastic way to lose reelection.
Biden has demonstrated that he picks loyalists from way back who mostly serve to insulate him from the real world and create policy with overly deliberative, consensus driven, PowerPoint processes. I think this is pretty self evident, especially from the recently leaked comments from staffers. They're also myopic and tend to gravitate towards personal issues that effect themselves and their social circle. This is why the Biden admin has tried multiple times to grant sweeping student loan forgiveness despite the fact that those loans are hyper-concentrated among a tiny demographic that already reliably votes Blue. But a lot of senior advisors and staffers (who make pennies, especially in the HCOL area of Washington, D.C.) probably carp about "student loans" enough that it feels like a big issue.
This style of policy making might be okay if the rest of the executive were allowed to just function on its own with mostly rubber stamps from the Oval Office, but it doesn't seem that's the case. To me, it appears the Biden Admin doesn't want anything to happen without, at least, their awareness and approval. But how does that square with 10-4 hours and an insular inner circle that doesn't fully brief The Big Guy?
I watched the messaging on Israel-Gaza constantly get fucked up again and again. "We support Israel's right to defend itself ... but also the Palestinians deserve freedom....worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust....don't attack Rafah...let's talk about a ceasefire....also free hostages...on both sides." Tony Blinken had to wait for hours to meet MBS in Saudi because MBS knew Blinken had zero authority himself and it was all about getting The Big Guy (and his circle) on board in order for anything to happen.
This U.S executive branch isn't a hospital or corporation. It doesn't have smooth self-sustaining ongoing operations. It's more like a startup every 4-8 years, but with tens of thousands of new employees and also tenured, deeply embedded lazy people. The President has to delegate fast and effectively and try to build solid communication and feedback loops both to him and to chief subordinates. Failing to do that yields either chaos (Trump admin) or utter gridlock (Biden).
Biden and the Democrats got here by thinking in these oversimplified terms. "He's a little old, but the team around him can handle it." This has not been true since FDR invented the imperial presidency and specifically transformed the office from a figurehead position. The President matters.
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