Tag: Joe Biden

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Amy Walter Gropes

I like Amy Walter, now the editor and publisher of The Cook Political Report.  I have been watching her on The PBS Newshour every Monday night for many years, usually teamed with Tamara Keith, a reporter with NPR.   They disappeared briefly when Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett succeeded Judy Woodruff as the anchors, then reappeared shortly afterwards.  I suspect viewers let it be known that they were missed.  I missed them.

Walter’s strength is in poll analysis.  Keith was more inclined to the political side.  I thought they complemented each other well, as well as adding a fresh, more youthful perspective to the Newshour, though Walter is now 56 and Keith is now 46.  That’s not really “youthful” but it is by TV news standards.

Walter is good at studying polls.  Who is ahead?  Who is gaining?  Which states are in play?  What effect will political developments have on a particular politician’s popularity or electability.  She is sober and serious and objective.

What she is not good at is the politics itself.  PBS is now beginning to give her more of the role played by Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks and previously by Mark Shields (whom I miss).  What does it all mean?  How do these recent developments fit into the overall tilt of the political landscape?  Where did this come from?  Where is it going?  What is Trump really up to?  Why is Vance such a bad pick?  Where might Harris run into trouble?

In a recent telecast (August 19) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Walter struggled and groped and poked and pumped but couldn’t stop repeating the same basic tropes and couldn’t find a breakthrough point that would give any heft to her commentary.

She was out of her depth.  After rambling somewhat aimlessly for a few moments, Judy Woodruff stepped in and pointed out what a peace agreement in Gaza might mean for the Harris campaign, a very important, consequential, and neglected point.  Walter missed it completely.  And it struck me immediately that that was unsurprising.  She could tell you how Americans feel about Hamas.  She struggles to tell you why Netanyahu doesn’t really want a peace agreement, or why Trump might want Netanyahu to not agree to a ceasefire.

I regret saying it because I do like her.   But this is not the first time I have watched her struggle to develop a coherent perspective recently.  She also appears on Washington Week with The Atlantic and occasionally on Meet the Press and Face the Nation.  And, apparently, on Fox News.  I rarely think to myself, “that is a good point”  or “I didn’t think of that” when she speaks.   She often gropes in vain for a striking or useful point and ends up repeating what she already said or what has long been obvious: Harris will need to get more votes in Pennsylvania than Trump to win the election.  We know.

I miss Mark Shields a lot.  I can’t count how many times he came up with something that nobody else on the panel had thought of, which all of them immediately agree is important and useful.  David Brooks is pretty good.  Occasionally, he seems desperate to rescue conservatism from Donald Trump and the current joke of a Republican Party.  He really likes Biden.   Jonathan Capehart went off the rails when the Democrats were trying to persuade Biden to step down this year irrationally insisting that he was entitled to the nomination even though he basically hide from primary voters for a year– deceiving them about his health and acuity–  and then stumbled through the worse debate performance against the worst imaginable candidate in history and followed it up with very weak public appearances when he desperately needed to prove he was fully capable.

I hope PBS takes a long sober look at Walter’s performance on these recent episodes and looks for someone else to provide commentary.  Walter should stick to the polls.

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Will Biden Drop Out

I suspect, at this moment, that Joe Biden will drop out.  And it will be astonishing.

Why will he drop out?  Because his blundering performance at the debate was not an anomaly, and, even when confronted with a very, very serious crisis in his candidacy, he is still unable to present a coherent, assertive presence to the media and public.

It wasn’t Biden being caught in an unexpected situation for which he  was unprepared and then responded with a poor choice of words or lack of command of the facts of the circumstance.  He had all the time in the world and all the staff in the world and all the resources in the world to prepare for the debate and he still managed to muff it on a ridiculous scale.  Then, after creating a dire crisis for his candidacy, he could not even muster a credible display of recovered command and assertiveness to even begin to counter-act the devasting effect of his debate performance.

He has offered excuses: he had a cold.  He had jet lag.  He works too hard and doesn’t get enough sleep.  The fact that he even feels the need to offer excuses in very telling.  He knows he has a serious problem.

Both Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn have indicated some reservations, when one would have expected fulsome support and a strong assertion of confidence.

There will be, in the coming days, a monumental clash between the insular coterie of family and friends surrounding Biden and the wider world of Democratic donors, strategists, Congressional delegates, party apparatchiks, and others, who will quietly begin to insinuate the obvious.  Will it penetrate?  I suspect it will, eventually.

And then… chaos.  Representative James Clyburn will surely expect Kamala Harris to replace Biden, but others in the party will be hesitant to back the loser of the 2020 primaries, someone the party has had persistent doubts about, and the challenge of a black woman winning a presidential race in America, particularly after the Hilary Clinton fiasco in 2016.

But what if, instead, they turn to Gavin Newsom, or Josh Shapiro?  Will this alienate the black voters the Democrats depend on to win elections?

More dangerously, a segment of the voting public has clearly shifted their support to the repulsive Donald Trump.  Having overcome their rational hesitation to adopt him as their candidate, will they, once they have overcome those reservations, hesitate to return to the Democratic candidate?  Will an embittered Kamala Harris withdraw from the campaign?  Or will she accept a VP nomination with the new candidate?

I doubt we will get a really great replacement like Sherrod Brown or Sheldon Whitehouse.  Getchen Witmer would be a terrific replacement.  Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar would be viable.  Newsom?  Probably.  Shapiro?  Maybe.

Trump is very vulnerable to attack by a vigorous, smart opponent.  The Democrats owe it to the world to find one.

If they don’t, history should be as unkind to Biden as it is now to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at least among the more sophisticated observers.  He will be the man whose bungling missteps and selfish narcissism gave us the worst president in the history of the United States, again.

 

 

 

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President Jill Biden

The only way Joe Biden gets re-elected president is if his opponent is Donald Trump.

The only way Donald Trump gets elected president is if his opponent is Joe Biden.

The history of aging, increasingly feeble presidents with younger, more vigorous wives is not reassuring.  And it is reassuring.  In some cases, as with Nancy Reagan and Eleanor Roosevelt , the results may be anodyne.  In the case of Woodrow Wilson in 1919, the result may have been catastrophic.

Jill Biden is a medical doctor.  She seems pretty smart, pretty capable.  If Joe Biden becomes enfeebled while president, if he suffers a stroke, if he is barely capable of leaving his bed, it would not shock me to see a situation similar to the Woodrow Wilson situation in 1919 develop.  Jill Biden relates Biden’s “directives” to his senior staff and does not permit any of them to directly converse with the ailing president.  When questions are raised, the president’s own physician reports to the cabinet and the vice-president that he is perfectly mentally capable of issuing instructions, even if, perhaps, he is not, really.   In that situation, Jill Biden speaks with the presumed authority of her husband, and it would difficult for others to bypass her to determine directly if the president is actually capable of executing his office.

The government, of course, is, for all practical purposes, actually run by the hundreds of high-level officials, White House staff, and cabinet appointees.  The president sets his agenda by appointing like-minded people to positions of power.  They will know what to do.

When it might matter, of course, is in a situation that demands a military response.  China might very well consider an ailing president vulnerable to aggressive moves by competing powers.  China might make a move on Taiwan.  Putin might become more aggressive in Ukraine.   Cuba might finally invade Miami.

It could all turn out well.  Jill Biden might be a wise and effective leader.  But she would not have been elected to be president.  Constitutionally, the cabinet and vice-president should meet to determine if Biden continues to be fit for office.  They could demand, perhaps, that an independent physician examine the president.

Here’s the thing:  it will be in the interests of many in the top echelons of political power to maintain the illusion that Biden continues to execute his office.  They were appointed by him.  They derive their power and status from that appointment.  His replacement may replace them.   His replacement may be politically weaker than he is.   Even the opposition party may be reluctant to see the presidency handed over to a younger potentially more appealing candidate.  (Right now, the thinking is that Kamala Harris is not a strong potential candidate, but given a year or two in office, who knows?)

People love to imagine unlikely scenarios and play them out but this one is strikingly possible.  It appears that Trump will be Biden’s opponent in 2024 and it is not unlikely that Biden, despite current polling, prevails in the swing states, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona.  He probably only needs one of them to win, whereas Trump needs all four.

He is obviously already suffering from various age-related challenges, physically and mentally.  It is difficult to imagine him surviving a debate with Donald Trump except for the fact that Donald Trump (strikingly, today, in an interview with Kristen Welker of NBC) also appears to be showing age-related challenges.

Here’s a prediction: neither of them agrees to a debate.

 

 

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The Gerontocracy

Obviously, most voters don’t want an incapacitated leader to remain in office. But in a district or state in which one party will always prevail because it has an unassailable majority, voters don’t get to choose. A minority– a tiny minority– of party officials and managers ensure that the incumbent stays as long as he likes, because they benefit from his patronage and influence. Kentucky won’t vote out Mitch McConnell and California won’t vote out Diane Feinstein because their parties have solid majorities among the voters. Their parties won’t remove them because of deeply embedded patronage. They won’t remove themselves because of deeply embedded egos (when Biden said he would only run for one term, I laughed). And the Senate won’t vote for term limits on themselves for obvious reasons. The Supreme Court?

The U.S. is ruled by a gerontocracy. Not much choice about that but it would be less distasteful if these people would at least stop insisting that some kind of invisible popular will actually wants them to stay in office no matter how old.

If, in some fantastical sequence of events, Ramaswamy ends up the nominee and has a debate with Biden, I’ll tune in. It would be wonderfully weird.

I also note that neither party is in a good position to argue that their opponents are too old. Maybe they could at least stop insisting that they are going to “clean up” Washington.