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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30267 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden

The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.

By Olivia Nuzzi

Just read the whole article. If not, the best parts:

Obsessive efforts to control Biden were not a new phenomenon. But whereas in the last campaign, the incredible stagecraft surrounding even the smallest Biden event — speaking to a few people at a union hall in rural Iowa, say, or in a barn in New Hampshire — seemed to be about avoiding the so-called gaffes that had become for him inevitable, the stagecraft of the 2024 campaign seems now to be about something else. The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there.

...

In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”

Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.

...

[April 2024] The first person I saw upon entering the subterranean space was the First Lady...

In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …

I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.

I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.

Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth. This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.

My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.

“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.

As context, Nuzzi's writing was critical of Biden's age in 2020, and Biden people have had a grudge against her ever since.

And from a tweet, when asked why she's reporting this now and not earlier:

I work on most of my stories for months. This piece is about a conspiracy of silence that made people reluctant to talk. I’ve been chasing down what I heard since January. That’s how long reporting takes. Debate changed people’s calculations about how candid they would be, and even then not on the record.

Not a great look, and especially bad to only publish it now. All that work covering it up, and it accomplished nothing for the Democratic Party, just significantly increased the chance of Trump winning. Few could put together the bravery to speak out about the age issues of the eighty year old, despite this being The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime v3. Sadly, no competent elites in smoke-filled rooms pulling the strings. At best Ezra Klein with a column and podcast or two saying maybe we should replace him.

I think my earlier comment that this was a surprisingly bad Biden debate performance was true, and that this wasn't a problem for him in 2020 (and Nuzzi agrees), but I was definitely underestimating his decline.

Excellent article, thanks for flagging it.

-- It's obvious at this point that Biden does not have control over his administration. Which brings the relative normalcy of the past four years into stark relief. The Biden years, especially coming after the Trump years, have updated my priors significantly and combined with other readings I think we need to come to terms with the idea that the President personally exercising effective control over the administrative state is actually a pretty rare occurrence. Biden is clearly too out of it, at best he might make it to a few meetings between 10 and 4 with a nap in the middle. Trump was consistently thwarted and lied to by bureaucrats throughout his tenure, from the lowest levels up to Cabinet posts, and was never able to achieve any kind of effective administration between people being forced out and people openly defying him; notably top Generals lied directly to him about the US presence in Syria to prevent him from pulling troops out. Obama was effective at times, but notably clashed with "The Generals" early in his tenure before settling into a more blob-approved foreign policy. Dubya early in his admin was running on autopilot with guys from his dad's admin who had cut their teeth under Reagan or even Nixon, Cheney was widely seen as the real power. Clinton and Pappy, I'm actually not aware of any allegations that they weren't running things. Reagan was notably fading by the end of his second term. And before Reagan, after Watergate the entire federal governing apparatus was in a bit of chaos from the time the scandal broke (Nixon did almost no presidential work, often as little as half an hour a day, after the story broke in the press) through two weak presidents until Reagan reasserted control. Nixon's early years, in turn, were marked by a permissiveness that lead to Watergate, though overall he was an effective president. LBJ was probably a pretty strong president, but let's not ask too many questions about JFK ranting about getting railroaded by the CIA into launching the Bay of Pigs invasion. Scoring it on the back of a napkin, it seems like we've had a really effective executive only maybe half the time since 1960? The administrative state is truly out of control when we don't even notice having a president who can't remember what day it is.

-- Related: good leaders are actually rare. Biblical Israel had, what, two great kings and two mid ones? Rome has a steep dropoff in the rankings after the top 15 emperors, far more bad than good, and far more mediocre as well.

-- My dark joke at barbecues the past few weeks: it's deeply unfair to an aging president to have the same issues that he's seen over and over for decades. This is, what, the tenth time the Israelis and Arabs have gone to war since Biden was in some federal office? And we're still chewing over the same two or three unsatisfactory and impossible solutions: two-states but Israel will never allow a real Palestine to exist, one-state but neither side really wants to live together, some kind of UN-Lead recolonization of important parts of the holy land. We've been mooting those same ideas since the 80s! When I saw The Capitol Steps when I was 12, they did parody duets between Yassir Arafat and the Israeli PM where the punchline was something like "well your great great grandfather once planned an attack, it's been hundreds of years who could ever keep track, no one can remember anymore!" How's anyone supposed to keep all this straight, let alone a fading old man?

-- In an update to my prior post: I've continued to schadenfreude-listen to several political podcasts. The Pod Save America guys are delusional, in complete denial at this point. What Nate Silver and the other FiveThirtyEight guys brought to politics was a little bit of the rigor and logic that had colonized sports analytics years ago. Listening to PSA is pure, pre-analytics, talk-radio call in level analysis of the race as a contest. They kept asking why Biden hasn't been doing tons of events and press conferences and rallies in the past week, clearly that would benefit him to appear on top of things, why isn't his campaign making that choice? They don't even ask whether he is capable of doing those things. This is what sports analysis looked like before the modern obsession with roster construction. FiveThirtyEight meanwhile has more intelligently asked, Does Biden Have the Juice to make a comeback, or is he too old to make that kind of push? Both are starting to acknowledge that the main question isn't who wins the POTUS race, but how it impacts down-ballot races. The problem is that Dems have backed themselves into a corner: how do you acknowledge that Trump is going to win if you've said that would be a world-ending event?

-- The dam is breaking. I expect Biden to step down by the end of the month. Kamala seems most likely, for legal-fundraising reasons. That is the primary obstacle at this point: the campaign has raised ridiculous sums of money, which must be spent on a Biden-Harris campaign. It is unclear by what mechanism they could be redirected anywhere else. Unless such a method is found, Newson or Big Gretch remain pipe dreams.

My uncle mentioned the fundraising issue yesterday, but upon further research it isn't as big of a sticking point as it may seem. Campaigns are allowed to make unlimited donations to the national committee, so the money won't be wasted. That and that I doubt lack of funds will be a deciding factor in this election.

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