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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.
If you want something else in the same vein, but even worse, check out Dave Winfield's book Dropping the Ball, where he goes through a laundry lsit of things wrong with professional baseball, from steroids, to unhealthy ballpark food, to high school baseball players getting worse girlfriends than football and basketball players, and then proceeds to blame it on nobody at all, saying that everyone in the game from Bud Selig on down is doing a great job. Anyway, to address your points:
You could have made that argument in 2016, when the superdelegate field was stacked against him, but they changed the rules in 2020 specifically for that reason, ran a competitive field, and he still lost. Anyway, Sanders did not win the first three primaries; he won one primary and two caucuses, and in Iowa and New Hampshire the totals were close enough that he was still behind in the delegate count. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but caucus states always seem to give outsiders a better chance, likely because of the low turnout compared to primaries. And while Biden did abysmally in the first two contests, he finished second in the Nevada caucuses. It made no sense for him to drop out at this point, as his star was rising and he had been consistently leading polls in South Carolina by a wide margin. And he ends up crushing it in South Carolina, moving into the lead in one fell swoop. Mayor Pete, meanwhile, has been trending downward, and it's pretty clear he has no purchase with black voters. It made no sense for him to stay in for Super Tuesday so he could get walloped in the South. It made no sense for Klobuchar to stay in at this point, either, as her campaign never really picked up speed. Had they both stayed in the race, I doubt it would have made much of a difference. Klobuchar wasn't winning any more delegates. Pete may have peeled some off in 5 of the 15 states that were contested on Super Tuesday, plus a few in California and Texas because there are so many of them, but winning anything was unlikely, and he would have bowed out immediately afterwards anyways. Pete was an outsider who debated well and overperformed in early states with low delegate counts. He was never expected to challenge for the nomination, and if it wasn't for a couple of fluke performances in heavily white areas nobody would be talking about any kind of Bernie screwjob. Sanders went head to head with Biden and lost, that's all there is to it.
It's identity politics, but not something you can blame them for. Nominees have a history of picking running mates for reasons not entirely related to their qualifications for the office (of which there really aren't any). Bush picked Quayle to shore up his support in the Bible Belt. Trump picked Pence for the same reason. W picked Cheney to counter suspicions that he was a lightweight. Kerry picked Edwards to shore up support among conservative Democrats. Obama picked Biden to compensate for his lack of experience. McCain picked Palin because unexpectedly picking a woman might have provided the miracle his campaign needed to win that race (which backfired, but nonetheless; also see Mondale picking Ferraro). And now we come to 2020, and the Democrats are running an elderly white man in the era of peak woke, four years after they lost a race in part because their candidate wasn't perceived as progressive enough, months after winning a campaign in which the nominee's biggest rival was a self-described socialist. They can be forgiven for wanting to shore up the progressive wing by running a woman of color with progressive tendencies, but not so progressive as to be at odds with the platform. I agree that they should have known at the time that vice president would have been a more important office than it normally is, but I don't see this as a huge blunder. You try to win the election you're running now, not the election you might be running four years from now.
Sure, but what else was he supposed to run on? His record? Biden's best chance was to keep the coalition that won him the presidency in 2020, and the best way of doing that was by reminding them of all the bullshit they'd be dealing with if Trump won again. The Democrats warned that something similar to this was going to happen, and Trump managed to exceed even the wildest expectations of Democrats, with talk of a third term, shipping people to Salvadoran prisons, talk of invading Canada, talk of firing Jerome Powell, the Epstein business, DOGE, tariffs, and countless more examples to name. His approval rating dropped like a rock upon taking office, and he's net unfavorable in every category. That there are people out there who are surprised by any of this boggles the mind. The biggest mistake they made was that once Kamala was the nominee, they didn't roll out a whole new agenda. She could have been sold as the way forward for Democrats, but in the end there was nothing but a few lukewarm proposals that didn't get any serious traction. You can blame that on the tight schedule, but I would have thought that by September they would have had a clear policy platform that was different enough from Biden's that Kamal could call it her own.
I was saying this loudly and from the beginning. She basically had a classic "fork in the road": do I stay the course and hope that Trump is too unpopular to win, letting me win by default, or do I try to do something notable to make me stand out, and run a more traditional campaign? She took the first road, and I was screaming the whole time that it was the wrong one.
In fact, the sloooooow roll-out of a nearly non-existent policy platform was excruciating to watch. Did you know I asked my (liberal, news-reading) family about if they could name 3 policy proposals Harris had? They could name ONE. ONE policy! In a major election! That's insane! They should be the demographic most knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, my mom phone banked for Obama twice and they are both white college-educated liberals (since ~2005). I'm a self-admitted news junkie, and I could only name three!
After reading "Original Sin", the impression I get is (1) she was really beholden to Biden and his supporters, e.g. a lot of his ex-staff or people connected to him ran her campaign, so she could not afford to piss off any Biden loyalists in the party and (2) she's indecisive: she takes a long time to make decisions, doesn't handle input from others well, and is constantly second-guessing decisions. See the Call Her Daddy appearance where she or her campaign were so terrified by the prospect of not being in complete control of the outcome, they picked this instead of an appearance on Joe Rogan. And she didn't even go on the podcast! Instead they spent campaign funds on "we'll mock up the studio in a hotel room, fly you out, and you feed her pre-screened questions where she gives prepared answers" for something that was essentially preaching to the choir: Harris already had the young white liberal college-educated female podcast audience as voters, she didn't need to chase after them.
So if she decided to strike out on her own, that would leave her wide open for "so why didn't you do any of this when you were VP? why weren't you speaking out and disagreeing with those policies?" and she just hasn't the flexibility to handle that sort of questioning without being prepared fifty ways from Sunday with soundbites from focus groups.
Hence the lack of any actual policies - the need not to be openly in dissent from the Biden administration, the need not to state anything definite that would piss off any of the million little splinter groups that would go for her throat online, and being hobbled by the 2019 run where she did tack too far to the left (and then left herself wide open on "yes I would use government money to pay for gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrants who are criminals locked up in jail", for instance).
I feel like (1) is partly a consequence of necessity: you have a major deadline, and so it doesn't make much sense to do a major re-org. Though of course staffing decisions at the top matter. Which brings us to (2), and I think that's probably very, very true. I remember reading even way before, during her own primary campaign, about how chaotic her organizational and decision skills were. That is, she'd constantly change her mind after listening to a few advisors outside the actual structure (such as her more-talented sister), and that chain-of-command was always super up in the air, and that made for constant inefficiency and poor messaging. So ultimately, yeah, I agree that it's fundamentally a Kamala issue, and she never really was going to take road #2, the road less traveled.
So to be clear, I think when people say that she was in an unwinnable situation, they are super wrong. The logic for what she actually chose was pretty attractive, but we shouldn't mix up the attractiveness of a choice with its actual truth. As someone who closely follows political polling and focus-grouping, Road #2 is what an advisor would recommend to you, almost every time, even if the political establishment as a whole would recommend road #1, the play-it-safe road. You actually can still do a roll-out of Kamala-specific policies even with a Biden-staffed crowd! Yes, Democrats writ large would moan and complain a lot, because that's their nature, but the actual core political machinery is usually still pretty good at following marching orders. She (or more specifically, a better-organized, more decisive version of her) could totally have pulled it off.
Still, again, she was chosen for being loyal, and a marginal GOTV help, and being loyal somewhat runs counter to ambitious competence. I do wonder if her selection, designed to bolster Biden rather than to be a protégé of any kind, was an early sign that Biden didn't actually intend to step down after one term, in retrospect...
She should have taken the second option, but I think it's a case of "there is no there there"*, Harris just did not have policies of her own (on a national scale at least). So a mix of being pushed not to change horses in mid-stream (don't drop Biden's policies) and not genuinely having anything to replace them (as mentioned by others, very very late in her campaign before her campaign page put up any tangible polices, unlike Hillary who had pages upon pages of policies for all sizes and all comers).
Was it unwinnable? Hard to say: we've seen that as Harris ran her campaign (and her staffers who really should have their feet held to the fire over this - that podcast has way too much whining over 'we had no time, it was so unfair Trump's campaign had all that money and time, things just happened and there was nothing we could have done') it wasn't winnable. She did get handed the rough end of the stick with Biden's campaign collapsing too late to do anything to prepare a better one of her own, and her failed run in 2019 left way too many hostages to fortune. But she did go on to make unforced errors, and her campaign staff for social media ran a terrible campaign, just awful.
*Ironically, a remark about Oakland by Gertrude Stein who grew up there and later returned to visit.
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