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Notes -
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.
I think this in various forms is why democrats won’t be winning anymore. Not so much that it’s TDS, but that the entire strategy of their politics is negative, not just because they don’t like Trump or the Republicans. They’re negative in the sense of *negative space”. We aren’t evil like those guys, those guys want to do [insert evil thing here]. But that’s not a vision. There’s nothing to build toward, no city on the hill, no “once we do these things your life will get better.” Republicans, whether you agree with them or not, absolutely have an idea of what they want, why they want it, and how it’s supposed to make the median person better off. It might or might not work, but they absolutely have a plan, and furthermore a plan to actually do what they said they wanted to do. So when people go into the booth, they know if they vote Republican, Theres a actual agenda that’s supposed to help them, where a democrat mostly is going to thwart that plan in favor of the status quo. If you’re looking for change, you want republicans, even if you’re not completely sold on what those changes are, at least it’s not the stuff you already know doesn’t help.
The Democrats' positive vision is more socialism and it's pretty popular with a lot of young people. The worsening economy will only fuel this fire.
So where exactly are they talking about it? They don’t say that as their agenda in most public facing platforms. Kamala didn’t run on “let’s be more socialist” nor was there a Socialist Agenda 2025 that would get that to happen. Kamala and most of the apparatus ran specifically as Anti-Trump, referring to the agenda as dangerous fascism, scaremongering about white Christian nationalism and Project 2025. They started calling JD Vance weird. And keep in mind that this was the Presidential Election Campaign, and they were pouring everything into winning, but they never really said “we want universal healthcare” or “let’s build a bunch of infrastructure” or “the government should raise the minimum wage.”
To me, this points to one of two things: either the agenda is unpopular and they know it, or they don’t have an agenda to run on. It just doesn’t make sense to say that socialism is popular and they want socialism, but they are running on Orange Man Bad Evil Fascist With Kooties.
Biden was running on "I beat Trump before" and Harris was running on "I'm not Trump" plus a helping of "I'm Black and Asian and a woman". Seemingly they brought Walz in as "well those racist sexist white guys need to see a white guy to vote for" which, God Almighty, no wonder they lost; if their view of being moderate is "let's pander to the deplorables" then they really are out of touch:
I don't know why Vance is "terrifying" (is it because he's Catholic?) rather than "he's a hick with no idea of how to govern" or "he's a blood-sucking capitalist".
An aside, but I still don’t understand this phenomenon either, how he came to be seen by so many people as the image of the “evil right” (as opposed to the “dumb or incompetent right”). My very liberal mom absolutely hates him, almost as much as she hates Trump, and I remember a lot of my lefty friends making offhand comments all through the election about how despicable he was. He’s far from unusual in being pro-life; I can see why pro-choicers hate him but not why they seem to hate him with such passion, or indeed to fear him. Was it just the cat lady comment? I think this image predates that, honestly, but I’m just not sure where it came from or when it started. Was there a particular hit piece or something like that? Maybe it’s his relative youth, it gave the lie to the comforting idea that the right is dying out with the elderly?
Incidentally, my idiosyncratic-but-liberal fiancée actually likes Vance quite a bit, she sees him as flawed but sincerely wanting to help the country. We are Catholic so maybe that helps get over the fear factor, lol. At one point, I think shortly after the VP debate, she even commented— much to my surprise— that she would gladly vote for him over AOC in a hypothetical future election. Although she despises Trump so I’m not sure if he’ll be tainted by association in her mind by the time 2028 rolls around.
Well, if to be conservative you need to be either stupid or evil, and you don't think someone is stupid...
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