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Notes -
Did you know that Karine Jean-Pierre was a Black LGBTQ Woman? Of course you didn't.
The above link is to KJP's "interview" with the New Yorker. It's exceptionally horrible. I don't usually get too wrapped up in "bad interviews" because journalists routinely use them to get the other party tied up in knots with impossible to answer questions.
The thing about this interview is that Isaac Chotiner isn't even really asking questions. He's mostly politely asking KJP "what do you mean?" and she keeps answering it worse and worse. I'm having a hard time thinking of a worse written interview.
The culture war angles are too obvious. DEI, rejection of reality, identity politics. They're all here. What stuck me those most was the word salad. Trump is always ridiculed for his own word salad but the left, yet, this is the White House press secretary struggling to build cohesive thoughts.
I've held an unprovable theory for many years now that people who routinely hold demonstrably untrue ideas in their head do some sort of literal brain damage to themselves. A sort cognitive self-harm wherein an emotional appeal is so strong that it dulls the synapses. Again, unprovable, but this interview makes me hold that faith just a little more.
Reading the interview, the interviewer was on a warpath. KJP seems to have stepped outside the party line with her book and now she needs to be brought to heel or pushed aside. Lines like this from the interviewer:
Wow, what a shitball of a question.
This comes after KJP maintains that the Democrats had no idea if they had a better candidate than Biden. Which has to be considered at least somewhat true. So points to her for that.
Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics? The earnest defense of his honor, whilst admirable, is a political dead end. Suicide, even. She's a fish out of water and the interviewer is hammering on that fact again and again. To a point where it obvious, which KJP picks up on at the end of the interview:
I think these final lines sum up the interview quite well. A politically daft operator and a democrat establishment shill embarrassing one another. Sure, KJP was floundering throughout the interview, and I'm sure the book seemed incoherent to those who feel which way the winds blowing politically, but getting caught off guard by a political hitman in a hostile interview can happen to anyone.
To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala. My guess is that the people behind the scenes got greedy, pushed Biden aside and went with Kamala to their detriment. To that extent, KJP defending the honor of Biden is just as much a political dead end as the interviewers defense of the current democrat establishment. Two political losers fighting over lost scraps.
I wondered about that, too. Turns out (when I looked it up) that she served as "as the chief of staff for U.S. vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris during the 2020 presidential campaign."
Kamala Harris is making noises about running in 2028 (after a lot of people thought she was dropping out of politics altogether) so I wonder if this is less about Biden and more about positioning herself for Harris maybe hoping to get another job with the second campaign (if it happens)? And part of Harris pitch is loyalty to Biden so anyone hoping to be onside with her has to repeat the message (as much a signal that she can sell the same message Harris is selling as anything).
From Harris' book:
So the line is Joe was great, but yeah he had to step down, but yeah he was great and while he was president he was fine and that is what matters. It's threading the needle of "was he incapacitated while in office and if so, why didn't anyone speak up about it?" 'No he was fine so I/we didn't have to speak up but later on yeah he got tired and overwhelmed and that's ancient history now'.
It seems worth noting that, while this woman will never be in the limelight again, she clearly wants to stay in dem politics. And absolute, unconditional loyalty to the boss, even retroactively, is... something politicians value.
Except Biden isn't the boss anymore, and she's questioning the judgment of the people who are in charge now. If she had just kept her mouth shut then she might have had a future. Then again, maybe she knew she had no future, and figured her only chance was to criticize D leadership for the election loss.
I wonder. There does seem to be a power struggle going on between the faction of the party that is, let's take Platner as an example: "we need to ditch the more extreme progressive/idpol/lefty stuff and move towards the centre to appeal to a broader set of voters" versus the "hell no we need fifty Stalins" faction right now, in the wake of Harris' defeat.
Look at what Jean-Pierre was saying in that New Yorker interview about black women being the backbone of the party. I think she's pinning her hopes that the progressivists will come out on top, and she's staking her claim: you guys need the black vote, particularly since the Hispanics/Latinos are ditching you for the other lot. You need the blacks and the LGBT+ set, and if you want to make history by having the First Female President, you need Harris instead of (let's say) Newsom.
So she's signalling her loyalty to the party line about "we did nothing wrong, Biden was great, it was sexism and racism that lost the race for Harris not any flaw on her part, and giving in on any of this is throwing the black and queer vote under the bus and appealing to the Nazi fascist element in the party".
I wonder how much influence Biden (or his inner circle) still have. He had a long career in politics, he made a lot of alliances and presumably has a lot of favours still banked. Crossing him or his faction could be a real mistake, while signalling loyalty may be more of a help than we think. Who exactly is in charge of the Democratic party right now? The old guard are hanging on, even while others are attempting to shove them off the stage, and some of the ones wanting to do the shoving are the progressive elements. "I am a queer black woman and if you try to shove me out of the way I will cry racism sexism homophobia" is still a credible threat.
Biden has very little influence. He has cancer, he's bitter at people, he's blamed by almost everyone in turn, his presidential library (a useful barometer) has been receiving hardly any donations, and he never extended much trust to people outside the inner circle in the first place so it's no surprise as there weren't many true-believers to begin with. And he even managed to dumpster his own reputation in record time with stuff like breaking his promise and pardoning his family (handing an invitation to Trump on a golden fucking platter to abuse the pardon power himself). I'm a moderate, I liked Biden as a person, I even liked some of the stuff about his governance, but that last bit alone was more damning that anything else he ever did, in my eyes.
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