@curious_straight_ca comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Campaign research said yes — Biden could win with any of the four. Klain argued for Harris specifically. Obama played the role of sounding board, weighing the pros and cons of Biden’s options rather than backing anyone, including Harris, according to a person familiar with the conversation. But Harris was the only candidate who had the full complement of qualifications: She had won statewide, was a familiar name with voters because of her presidential run and enjoyed a personal connection with the Biden family, having been a close working partner of Biden’s son, Beau, when he served as attorney general of Delaware.

And she was Black, meaning the announcement would be met with enthusiasm rather than controversy. On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.

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curious_straight_ca 10mo ago · Edited 10mo ago

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.

Context

FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist curious_straight_ca 10mo ago

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.

curious_straight_ca FiveHourMarathon 10mo ago · Edited 10mo ago

I'll still give Biden some personal credit for the Afghanistan withdrawal though.

Kamala seems most likely, for legal-fundraising reasons

I think this is wrong and misses why people support Harris, it's not exactly a tactical decision. Money isn't as important as people think for presidential elections - voters are voting for, above all, a party and a candidate, it's the face they'll see and the voice they'll hear. And Dem donors will still have piles of money available for any non-Harris candidate. Harris is, in my opinion, not a good candidate. She's not popular, with an approval rating virtually equivalent to biden's 37% (although biden's disapprove is 6 higher). She was received poorly in the 2020 primary. I don't feel the charisma whe nwatching her. The clips of her going viral on social media are of her making statements that are ironically endearing for their strangeness, greatest hits compiled here, and I'm not sure this'll translate to excitement among swing voters. In head to head polls she doesn't do much better than Biden, and though none of the governor alternatives do better either Harris has less of a name recognition gap to make up for. And she's burdened with the Biden brand - inflation, the age issues, and a cloud of malaise generally. I don't think money can make up for this! The recent Republican local races demonstrate the importance of candidate quality over anything else.

Even ignoring that, though, I think the campaign finance issues are overstated. The articles claiming this supports harris say things like:

The campaign could also give it all to the Democratic National Committee, but even with the DNC, there are rules governing coordinating with candidates that curb how freely the committee can spend. “That’s not necessarily as effective as a campaign spending money itself,” Noble said.

UPDATE: There is a possibility that the campaign committee funds could be transferred to the Democratic National Committee. But the DNC could then only give up to $5,000 directly to a candidate. It could use the funds on behalf of the candidate, but again the coordination and ad rate questions come up. And it is possible that Kamala Harris would have to comply with a transfer of those funds in that manner, in a scenario where she was just passed over for the top of the ticket.

Sure, "coordination costs" and "ad rate questions" mean it's "not necessarily as effective" as if Harris gets the money directly. It's not ideal. That language is a bit wishy-washy though. And using it to justify "practically speaking, Biden and Harris are really the only two choices available at this late stage of the campaign" seems to overstep.

And reviewing the language in those articles

That hasn’t stopped the endless fantasy league scenarios from those who see no avenue for Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November. ... This is a tremendous insult to Kamala Harris, who Biden himself handpicked as his second in command.

And it is possible that Kamala Harris would have to comply with a transfer of those funds in that manner, in a scenario where she was just passed over for the top of the ticket

One gets the sense that the desire for nominee Harris doesn't come entirely from pragmatism. She's the First Black Woman Vice President, and denying her the nomination SHE deserves is an insult. I get the same feeling from other pro-Harris arguments - "voters will be outraged that you passed over the Black Woman VP". Someone will be outraged, sure, but is it really voters, or is it the author? I taste notes of RBG's and Sotomayor's potential retirements here. It's not just that though, speculating, I think a novel and complicated plan like 'hold mini-primaries' is difficult to believe in, and feels dangerous in, in an environment with a weak 'party' where power is very decentralized and depends on networks of relationships. "The CEO will just declare it's time for primaries and pick someone good to run them" isn't the kind of thing that happens, but "she's my guy so I'll support her" and "looks like the consensus is moving towards her so i'm moving there too" is something that happens a lot. It's not an environment that cultivates the agency of individuals or the group.

A Matthew Yglesias post, "VP selections aren’t taken seriously enough" (of course with Matt, there's a framing making it look like he isn't picking on Harris), touches on all of these issues.

All the wrong reasons

The Herndon profile in particular is really clear on two things:

Biden was facing a lot of pressure from various inside party actors to select a Black woman, which in practice meant Harris.

Despite this, nobody was telling Biden that selecting Harris had significant electoral benefits. There was no polling or data or demographic analysis that suggested this “you should pick a Black woman” vibe was correct.

Here’s how Herndon describes the final showdown between Harris and Gretchen Whitmer:

After Whitmer impressed Biden during an in-person meeting in the veepstakes’ final stages, one question rose to the top: Could two white Democrats win?

None of this is wrong, exactly. But note that in his telling, there is not a point in the process where Biden stops and thinks “who will be the best candidate in 2028?” or “if I die, who will be the best person to take over?” But note that even leaving Biden’s age out of it, the base rate for presidential death or resignation is nearly one in five!

Instead the decisive characteristic was that Harris would generate more enthusiasm.

And here I do think I should be clear about what I think this meant in practice: Picking Harris minimized short-term complaining. Plenty of people would have been thrilled with Whitmer and plenty of people were not thrilled with Harris. But as a rare person who criticized the Harris selection at the time, I know that given the atmosphere prevailing in the summer of 2020, that made me a kind of un-fun skunk at the party. By contrast, Harris proponents would have felt empowered to complain about a Whitmer selection. And to be clear, in Harris’ defense, she really is a properly qualified choice. The discourse around her has gotten so mean you’d think this was the greatest debacle in VP selection history when it’s not even close.

The problem is that this kind of fuzzy, short-term thinking is extremely common.

Again, the core absurdity of Democrats’ current Old President problem is that if you go back to the 2008 coverage of the Obama/Biden ticket, he was picked precisely because he was too old:

The choice by Mr. Obama in some ways mirrors the choice by Mr. Bush of Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000; at his age, it appears unlikely that Mr. Biden would be in a position to run for president should Mr. Obama win and serve two terms. Shorn of any remaining ambition to run for president on his own, he could find himself in a less complex political relationship with Mr. Obama than most vice presidents have with their presidents.

Oops!

Yes, indeed, Matthew. Oops. Oops all around.

But, of course, there are many worse screwups than this. If you go back to the fateful election of 1840, the Whigs put John Tyler on the ticket because he didn’t like Andrew Johnson without checking to see if Tyler was on board with Whig policies. William Henry Harrison died after 40 days in office, Tyler became president, and it turned out that — oops! — he did not agree with those policies

In the scheme of things, Harris is actually a totally fine choice. She is in line with the party mainstream on policy and ideology and is of appropriate age to take over, which sounds like a low bar to pass but is actually impressive in comparative terms.

Framing!

I believe that in part because I continue to think there is a pretty obvious way for her to get her mojo back. The basic reality is that Americans of all kinds put a good deal of stock into the personal identity of our political figures. And progressive Americans put even more stock into it than average Americans.

By the same token, there are certain things that Harris as a Black woman “can” say that Joe Biden as a white man “can’t” say — i.e., things that are moderate-coded about race and gender matters.

Sure. If she does this and wins the mini-primary with that, more power to her.

More Matt, "Kamala Harris should try to be really popular ... In spite of all!":

Perhaps the worst-kept secret in Washington is that tons of Democrats are terrified of the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party presidential nominee at some point in the future.

Indeed, it’s such a poorly kept secret that it’s barely even a secret. For example, even though officially Biden has not announced a reelection bid — and given his age, this is formally an open question — absolutely everyone wants him to run again. But the terror is that he might not, or even if he does, he might not make it all the way through eight years. But beyond the possibility that Biden would die or step down, if he serves through 2028, it seems overwhelmingly likely that she’d win a primary.

Why are people scared? Well, mostly because her approval rating lags stubbornly behind Biden’s.

Personally, I am not that scared of her current approval numbers. What scares me instead is the reaction that you hear from the Harrisverse to these worries, which is mostly to accuse critics of sexism or to attribute her political problems to sexism. Indeed, just typing this paragraph I can feel the people getting ready to yell at me on Twitter. But my point isn’t to deny that sexism is real (it clearly is) or that it’s felt by women in politics (it clearly is) but that this kind of fatalism is paralyzing and politically deadly. There are women in politics who are popular and successful at winning tough races, and they didn’t do it by making sexism vanish from the planet earth any more than Barack Obama and Raphael Warnock ended racism.

Powerful framing. I do kinda enjoy reading matt's subtle contortions.

To give the dems some credit, there's been a lot of talk about nominating someone other than Harris and miniprimaries, it could even happen.

(matt's source for obama biden age isn't great, but other reporting linked from here confirms it)

A core part of the priors that lead me to settle on Harris as the pick: I am pessimistic about the Dems chances in this situation. Any hot swap other than an assassination of Joe Biden, which would clearly result in a Harris pick anyway, likely leads to a doomed Quixotic post-Biden campaign, designed more to put up a good show and avoid embarrassment than it is to win the electoral college. Given that, there is value for Dems in avoiding other issues.

Imagine a group of three coworkers, who travel together for work and take turns picking the place for lunch. One of them has horrendously bad taste, picking Subway or Checkers or Cracker Barrel some other bottom tier chain. It's his turn today, and everyone is dreading it, but they stopped for lunch at a turnpike rest stop anyway and he's picking among those options. It's not worth fighting him on his turn, even though his pick will suck, because lunch is going to be mediocre at best anyway.

JulianRota FiveHourMarathon 10mo ago

Seems to me, none of the Democrats' options look great now.

Stick with Biden-Harris, come what may. But can he handle a full campaign season? Will he have another Senior Moment? Will all the big donors believe he can do a full campaign without one? If his handlers keep him hidden away for the whole season, the voters will likely guess why and may react accordingly.
Somehow dump Biden, full steam ahead with Harris-?. But is Harris much better of a candidate than Biden? What kind of influence will they need to convince Biden of this and how will it look if he doesn't go along so easily? But at least it isn't too bureaucratically weird.
Somehow dump both Biden and Harris and run a campaign with some decent Governor or Senator. Might be a better candidate than either of the others, but how will the bureaucratic weirdness that would be necessary to do this affect the voters' confidence in the Democrat ticket? How much of a mess might Biden and/or Harris make on the way out? Not to mention the optics of kneecapping the female POC with the progressive wing.

curious_straight_ca JulianRota 10mo ago · Edited 10mo ago

but how will the bureaucratic weirdness that would be necessary to do this affect the voters' confidence in the Democrat ticket

I don't really buy this. People are voting against Biden and Trump more than they're voting for them, and a young and confident voice saying all the right things will pick up a lot of votes, I think. "They're both too old" is an extremely common position, and I think that'll dominate any concerns about someone who wins a second "primary".

How much of a mess might Biden and/or Harris make on the way out

In terms of accusations / insults, past Dem nomination fights were bloody but that didn't really spill over into the general. And we're still months out, elections take around a month in some nations. In terms of throwing up procedural / legal issues, I doubt that's too big of an issue.

Not to mention the optics of kneecapping the female POC with the progressive wing.

I think it's a much bigger problem with the progressive wing of the elites than it is with the voters. Could just go Whitmer w/ black VP or something.

JulianRota curious_straight_ca 10mo ago

What I'm talking about is, most of the discussion has assumed that both Biden and Harris agree to step down voluntarily. What happens if one or both of them don't? Does the Democrat party actually have good options to replace them without their cooperation? How long would that process take, and how sketchy would it look?

If anything like that happens, I would presume the Dem party leadership expects it to all happen behind closed doors. If it ends up taking months and has at least bits of it leaking out into the public, well, it looks pretty banana-republic to me. Though maybe not necessarily more so than all the other stuff that's happened over the last 8 years? Maybe the voters won't care that much if they manage to get somebody young and confident in there somehow, or maybe not.

curious_straight_ca JulianRota 10mo ago

What happens if one or both of them don't

Yeah, most Biden-alternative discussion is premised on Biden choosing to back out, since he controls the delegates. There's a general sense there's a solid chance this happens.

Does the Democrat party actually have good options to replace them without their cooperation

Delegates could, in theory, reject Biden, the delegates are only obligated to "in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them". This seems difficult and unlikely though.

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