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I Read It So You Don’t Have To
Jake Tapper’s Historic Misnomer in Original Sin
How do you come clean without coming clean? How do you take your team out of a tremendous, historic, catastrophic failure and yet manage to convince everyone involved to change absolutely nothing? How do you protect the power and position of yourself and your personal friends, while letting everyone know that you’re Taking Responsibility? How do you present yourself to society and strongly say Mea Maxima Culpa while avoiding any consequences?
Well, Jake Tapper has gone back to an old standby in Original Sin: you find a goat, you put all the sins of the community on the goat, and then you drive the goat out of town never to be seen again. For Tapper and the Democratic Party, they want to put all the sins of the 2024 election loss on Joe Biden and his immediate subordinates, get rid of Joe, and ride off free of guilt or blame. Unfortunately, for all the promise of the title, Tapper fails to grapple at all with the earlier sins of the Democratic Party which lead them to the Biden presidency. It’s a fakakta head fake, a cheap attempt at a false accountability that leaves Tapper and the rest of the Democratic Party machinery safe to keep doing the same things they were doing before.
Personal opinion: This book was horrendous. I knew it would be bad going in, but my wife wanted to read it so I downloaded it off libgen and loaded it on our shared Kindle account, and we decided to read it together and discuss it. That part was fun. The book itself just made me mad.
What Tapper offers is a mostly-disconnected and somewhat confusing series of anecdotes that add up to what a lot of people around here were absolutely on top of years before Tapper: Biden was cooked. However cooked you think Biden was, you’ll see evidence that it was worse than you thought it was. I won’t bother going point by point, we’ve tortured every incident to death already. Tapper tries to throw Biden a bone here and there, but for the most part he adequately massacres his goat. In the process a few close Biden advisers come in for a bit of trouble. Tapper labeled them the Politburo, and they are the villain of the piece, lurking, a sinister and undefined presence. Everything is ultimately laid at the door of some decision maker in Politburo or with the last name Biden. Joe, Jill, Hunter, and a few close personal aides are responsible for the entire coverup: denying the obvious, blaming the lighting or a cold or a long night, pressuring underlings into silence, making never-specified decisions in the name of the president without his knowledge, and generally operating the entire process of Weekend at Bernies-ing the President of the United States.
What Tapper doesn’t offer is any in depth analysis of actual policy decisions or tactical choices in government. This book is pure politics. He doesn’t at any point question who was where and when during crises in the Ukraine or Palestine. He doesn’t look outside the standard West Wing cast of characters in the political circle of the President, what was going on in the State Department or the DoD, what did the kids get up to when it became clear that daddy wasn’t home? How was it that the SecDef was out of commission for weeks without the White House even knowing about it? Did people start metering what they told the President’s office? Did they feel more comfortable defying the President’s wishes? Well, you won’t find out about it here, instead you’ll get seventeen people telling you separately about how they couldn’t believe how OLD Biden looked when they met him…Except that time after time we get people telling us not that he looked old, but that he looked older. Meaning, it wasn’t a mistake to vote for Biden in 2020, when everyone with a calendar could tell you how old he would be in 2024; it just happened out of nowhere, and there’s no way you can blame the Democratic Party for it.
My disappointment stems from the title: Tapper promises to trace to the root cause of the problem. Everything was paradise until this, then after this everything went wrong. But ultimately, he seems to be aiming to skate by what, to me, seem the obvious candidates for Democrats Original Sin:
-- The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
-- Obsession with Identity Politics: Biden, of course, didn’t actually lose the 2024 race, that honor was passed to Kamala Harris. Why was she there? Because she was (marginally) black and a woman. Tapper is pretty clear on this one, and states it directly, but never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak. It’s the lack of a talented VP who could be president, or at least win an election, forced everyone to Ride with Biden until it became obvious that he couldn’t win. And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent, leaving you in a position where you couldn’t be seen to skip over a Black Woman, but because she had to be a Black Woman she had no chance in the election.
-- Trump Derangement Syndrome: The refrain from Biden and his handlers throughout the process was monotonous. We need to beat Donald Trump, Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever). Democrats convinced themselves that Trump was so uniquely evil that they had to throw out all sense of decency to beat him; this kept them from beating him. Democrats convinced themselves that voters would reject Trump so thoroughly that it didn’t matter they were running an empty shell of what was left of Joe Biden; this destroyed voter trust in the Dems as a whole and cost them the election across the country. The Dems lost the plot completely due to TDS, and started to think they could or should do things they never would have thought of otherwise.
But Tapper doesn’t address any of these actual deep sins of the Democratic worldview, because that would require actual change by the Democratic Party, and change might lead to Tapper and his friends being disempowered. Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Instead he just blames it all on ol’ Scranton Joe, who will shuffle off to the great used Corvette dealership in the sky and leave the Dems to keep right on sinning just as they always have.
Will this obviously wrong and tired narrative ever go away? Bernie doesn't win because people don't want a leftist candidate, even in the primary let alone the general, he would get slaughtered. His path to victory has always required all the more moderate candidates to split the more popular policy platform in so many ways that he could sneak through with a plurality but not majority. Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win by avoiding creating the specific conditions that they need to win without getting the popular vote is not "ratfucking".
On the other hand Bernie was the only candidate in both 2016 and 2020 that had any form of genuine charisma and generated genuine excitement. And his platform at a times was almost what Trump used in 2024. If he hadn't bent the knee to the identarians he could have won if the stars align.
He was a populist promising improbably handouts to the kinds of people who dominated the social media sites when he was running. Really not surprising he appeared popular.
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Bernie obviously wasn't a Condorcet winner even among Democrat primary voter preferences, and probably would have done even more poorly in a general election, sure. But the non-creepy-to-the-public solution to this problem is to switch to an election method that's more clone-proof, not to get all the clones in a smoke-filled back room together to play "draw the short straw" or whatever. (As a point of fact I dispute the collusion interpretation in this particular case - Klobuchar was getting creamed when she dropped out, Buttigieg too, and Warren was getting creamed well before she dropped out - but in theory "Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win" can be a good sort of strategy to collude on in a plurality race, if only you don't mind how creepy it is to see collusion in an election.)
They're not going to switch, partly because even the people who try to improve election methods these days don't seem to be very smart about it (IRV is only one form of RCV, and it's not clone-proof either), and partly because any party insiders who are smart about election methods are probably smart enough to realize that escaping Duverger's law is a bad thing for political party insiders.
But making people sit through these sorts of weird "your favorite candidate dropped out before you even got a chance to vote" races is still a self-inflicted wound. If you put Democracy in the very name of your party, you're signing a "we'll be good at democracy" check that you'd better not bounce. The drop-out-when-you're-losing-badly system and even the smoke-filled-back-room system are probably improvements over plurality voting at democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader (though in hindsight it's hard to see how they could have done much worse), but they're not an improvement over plurality at democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader.
Imagine what the primary could have looked like under approval voting. Plurality's "Buttigieg dropped out before 46 states could vote because Biden had nearly half of South Carolina's voters" kinda looks pathetic, doesn't it? Even if the final outcome were unchanged, "Buttigieg stayed in until the end, but he only had 70% approval and Biden had 80%" would have been much more inspiring statistics. It's arguable whether we can do that in a general election without a constitutional amendment, but a party can do whatever weird superdelegate shit they want in the primary, and they ought to be able to make their primary better too.
I do agree that another voting system might be useful but it's not even the first past the post thing, it's also that they do every state in sequence. It's actually pretty hard to design a system around this kind of thing, especially because the primary isn't just about the voting but had also kind of morphed into a narrative building function. If you get rid of them and ran it all at once then you'd have the campaigns be very driven by polling which has its own problems.
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
What we ought to have is an app where everyone ranks the field from day 1 of the campaign and can change at any point. Then we could get real time feedback on messaging. Of course the end problem is even if you were made godking of the docratic party you still have to implement a system like this where 95 year olds who can't handle technology more complicated than a television remote or deal wit the disengenuous claim that poor black people don't have cell phones.
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You didn’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people didn’t. You probably didn’t think Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell at winning either. If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him? And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly, and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth and losing the left wing of the party for good.
Lots of people like Bernie. After Super Tuesday, when the vote was no longer split between anybody but him and Biden, he still got millions of votes, something like a third as many primary votes as Biden. But "a third as many as Biden" isn't enough to win a Democratic primary, and he's much less popular with independents and Republicans than with Democrats.
The 2020 "heroic action" mentioned originally was that three candidates who were doing much worse than him or Biden dropped out of the race after (significantly after, in Warren's case) their trajectory became apparent, and picked someone to endorse instead. That's not heroic action by the Democratic Party, that's just what losing candidates do to make the loss less expensive and less embarrassing.
For other less inactive forms of Party action, though? Insanity happens at this level, where people have orders of magnitude more power than average but not much more brains than average. Why did Clinton push the "pied piper" strategy with Trump? Because she didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell at winning either. If her fans overestimated Bernie's odds in the primary too, well, clearly they're just not the best estimators.
3 to 1. Even counting the earlier votes from when the pro-Biden block was split, it was still 2 to 1.
What would it have taken? 5 to 1?
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
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They didn't. Refusing to do something stupid that is required for him to win is not a heroic effort. Bernie is not entitled to the people representing the more popular platform splitting the moderate lane 4 ways so that he can win with a minority of the vote. "why didn't you let the guy that your base didn't want lose so that his followers, who never liked you anyways would whine less" is jot a serious argument.
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