Joe's adieu
The arrogant capo parts ways with an ungrateful party, upending Trump's prospects
Author note: Yes, French typo wound up amber-preserved in the URL
Here we are again
It would seem that in 2024 no controversy can arise which does not provide another invitation for me to remark on the “claim/reality” fallacy: Over and over, the story of the day demonstrates that American academia, media, and the most plugged-in of mainstream media consumers lack any conception of a distinction between a claim about reality and reality itself. (Again, a link to my comments from February.)
The problem, again: For the oft-termed “Professional Managerial Class” at large, whatever is in effect an “official” claim — that is, a statement about something produced by Whoever Within The PMC Claims Authority Over that same something — whatever is this, is “True.” It enters the discourse as gospel; all other statements and claims take the first claim as a given and are constructed accordingly. And of course the inevitable corollary, is that “True,” in the epistemic universe of the PMC, has somehow simply and scandalously come to signify “Claimed.”
The otherwise seemingly natural, invincible notion of “truth” as describing claims which possess the quality of describing something that actually is happening in reality, and conversely of this quality not being automatic but in a certain sense arbitrary, or optional — a downstream effect of the randomized discernment and also mental tastes of the person making a claim — is entirely alien to the PMC, which is to say almost everyone performing the make-work jobs of the now ironically-termed knowledge economy.
Biden tweet-quits
Biden’s stepping down is a particularly astonishing case: After several weeks of the octogenarian incumbent’s attempts to rebuke calls for his resignation in person, rebukes delivered in explicit defiance of certain pretexts including polling numbers, a screenshot uploaded to one of the President’s managed social media outlets was taken as a formal surrender. This occurred of course when the President had already been in absentia for some time to “isolate for Covid” at his home in Delaware.
Hours and then days passed without any on-camera appearance from Biden, and meanwhile the only news account which seemed to corroborate that the man himself had any role in producing the claims that he had stepped down was a multi-author NBC news story on the night of the twitter post which described the hours before and after the twitter post. In these hours, Biden “reviewed polling” — the same polling he has vehemently dismissed in the flesh — and then called “40 to 50” undefined individuals to discuss the decision. In the meantime Harris was already campaigning, and Democratic state delegates were pledging fealty. From Sunday’s NBC story:
By the time Biden convened a call with his full complement of senior advisers at 1:45 p.m. Sunday, an official statement announcing his decision had already been written. One minute later, his [twitter] account posted that statement, telling the public that he would remain in office but cede his party’s nomination — making him the first eligible incumbent president to do that since Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Less than 30 minutes after that, he endorsed Harris, blessing her as the best choice to beat Trump in a four-month sprint to Election Day.
After his announcement, Biden made 40 to 50 phone calls about his decision Sunday night, according to sources.
In recent days, as calls for him to step down mounted, Biden asked to see polling his campaign had solicited on how Harris would fare in a hypothetical matchup against Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter. They said he also reviewed public polling as he wanted to know more about her standing against Trump. The Harris polling was very tightly held, and it circulated to only a handful of top campaign aides, including Donilon and O’Malley Dillon, the two people familiar with the matter said.
At no point in the bizarre rush of activity which followed the Biden account twitter post did it seemingly occur to anyone in the entirety of our mainstream news apparatus to question whether Biden had actually done what it was being claimed he had done. A screenshot of a document posted to twitter, and some rumors delivered to NBC about phone calls were the paltry goods accepted to substantiate that Biden’s stepping down was not just a claim being made on his behalf, but something that he had done. This even though the inside story of why he was now doing it (polling) — though it might please those who before were arguing he must do it (polling) — was out of character with his previous rejections of the same rationale (polling); even though he is an elderly man who had just contracted an infection wont to suddenly inflict disability or death; despite a reversal on Friday night and Saturday in media reports and AOC’s instagram acknowledging the down-sides of replacing Biden as the nominee; despite the cluelessness of his own White House staff who at the time of the Sunday twitter post were stepping out the door to drum up more support; and etc.
And so it truly seemed for the next two days like Biden was leaving office the same way he had entered — via an apparent fix that would never be questioned or investigated in the mainstream.
Only yesterday did Biden finally appear on-camera, confirming that the stepping-down-via-twitter-screenshot American President was even still alive and able to walk on his own feet. Yet of course this delayed dispelling of ambiguity regarding the health and agency of the sitting POTUS was simply not an event to the media; the claims in this case turned out to be true, (perhaps,) but only in the alien-to-PMC language in which “truth” has some separate quality in opposition to simply being an official claim to begin with.
Finally, the momentous news of Sunday received in-the-flesh confirmation of a sort; and as such although the news that “Biden steps down” is already several days old, I finally consider it a topic worth spilling ink over.
1: Was it a coup?
Biden is still alive, and will address the nation in a few short hours on the subject of his Vice President becoming the Democratic candidate in the upcoming election.
This itself does nothing to rule out that his “stepping down” was a palace coup. Everything described above is my clumsy attempt to convey the unreality, the surrealism of the last few days, in which the news organizations of America have accepted a twitter post as official proof of Biden’s surrender to their own month-long assault on his fitness for reelection. With a media organ so ready to consider a single twitter post as sufficient and necessary to coronate Harris as Biden’s replacement, why wouldn’t anyone with access to the Biden twitter account be compelled to make such a post?
This is a question that will probably never be seriously asked or answered.
More tangible, is: Well, what would Biden do after such a post? This would depend on the time it took for him to receive word. Given that he was in convalescence, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where Biden became aware that he had “stepped down” hours after the twitter post and even after the NBC story explaining the rumors of his behavior the day of doing so. What I mean to say is that none of the behavior in the NBC story may have occurred until Biden was already informed of the only script that wouldn’t explode the legitimacy of both the current government and whichever Democratic one follows it. What, then, could he do, but play along — beginning with an obviously pre-recorded call-in to Harris’s first rally and continuing with tonight’s address? The Party has already explicitly abandoned him on the pretext of his twitter-posted “choice” — he cannot “re-choose” them to his side.
So, Biden is competent, at least roughly as much as he was in 2022. He isn’t stepping down because of an acknowledgement that he cannot serve as president, but rather, allegedly, that he cannot be reelected as such. But none of this will make certain in the present or future that he has not in fact been made to “step down” by social media ventriloquism.
2: But still, it’s likely (imo) that in the end it was Biden
With all this said, I would place my bet that Biden was the author of his own resignation.
My guess would be that the NBC story on Sunday, describing Biden’s sudden total deference to negative polling, is still so much Washington Kabuki — rather, the real prompt for his bowing out was Trump’s miraculous survived assassination attempt.
3: Kamala’s jubilee
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the conflict between the media’s default mindset — to drink its own Kool-Aid, and believe that if it is reporting that “so-and-so claims Biden must step down” then Biden must step down — and Biden’s more sanguine and forward-looking steadfastness, is that both parties inadvertently collaborated to create the conditions to erase Trump’s near-assassination from the headlines.
Had Biden stepped down several weeks ago, Harris would have been the one whose momentum and energy would have been depleted by any upswing for Trump; thanks to Biden’s obstinance, she was insulated. Beyond that, Trump’s triumph in Butler, PA laid the narrative groundwork to convert any drastic change in Democratic tactics from an acknowledgement of hopelessness into a recovery of strength.
Even Biden’s evasion of the camera, since contracting The Virus in Nevada, has helped set stage for all that has transpired since Sunday. In the moral logic which has prevailed in media coverage since Biden’s debate, Biden has been “The Problem.” Now that Harris is all-at-once occupying the role of the media’s “Good Guy” candidate, MSM-consumers have erupted on TikTok and at rallies into a rapturous frenzy.
Thus what should have been a solemn, perhaps demoralizing flag of leadership weakness for the Democratic party, has turned into a spark rekindling the messianic energy of 2008: This has only been possible because Biden remained invisible, and so ironically would be just as possible and just as successful if the whole thing were an iteration of “Term-End at Bernies.” Biden lives, but by playing dead, has revived his party.
Post-80’s America’s so-called democracy is essentially an analogue of American Idol, in which the news overtly instructs the viewer which singer to vote for. Modern news makes a very obvious portrayal of certain ideas as “Good,” and one party more credibly represents those ideas. Democratic presidential candidates since West Wing are all stand-ins for Sorkin’s Jed Bartlet, and American white political volunteers, primarily women and gay or gay-ish men, root for the “Good Guy” to triumph by showing up at rallies and by casting their votes; or they flail about on city pavements when the media’s “Good Guy” doesn’t sit behind the desk. Opposing this constituency are those white Americans who are vilified by the media for having interests that are threatened by the media’s portrayed “good” ideas: i.e. rural and southern whites.
Regardless or because of such media-meta-politics, it is still essential that the avatar of the Democrat party can step up to the mic and sing, or else the media has no basis from which to assert its narrative of what is “right” to sing. It is Biden’s failure, last month, to sing — rather than his long-poor fitness to actually “be President” — which precipitated the crisis ending (by coincidental assassination attempt) in his finally stepping down. This has perhaps for example triggered a groundswell of single-issue-abortion-voter enthusiasm for Kamala — but so what? Biden already locked those voters under his belt in 2022.
The last month might simply be characterized as a crisis in the mind-meld between MSM consumers and the MSM producers; a soap opera writer’s block.
Does resolving this crisis with Biden’s stepping-down at the perfect moment really portend well for Harris?
I tend to think not. Harris has a certain type of charisma, but not at all one that would inspire affluent or older male whites to vote for her. She might rely on Black and Hispanic voters of all stripes, but as I mentioned several weeks ago, a good number of these voters are so under-informed that they will go until November still understanding per instructions that they should vote for “Biden,” and having no idea who “Harris” is.
In short, the current burst of enthusiasm for Harris is mostly meaningless. All that Biden’s accidentally well-timed quitting has done — and it is still very significant — is give Trump an opportunity to self-sabotage in new ways; by trying even harder than ever to bate Black votes, or attack Harris from the left on crime, etc.
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Uh, that would be…adieu.
Great analysis. Biden is an example of someone guided into power because they can be controlled in some way (Starmer is another example), but in this case his declining mental faculties precluded him from taking the strong hints that his time is over...
It's telling that he couldn't annouce his stepping down from the candidacy in a live press conference, but in a photo of a signed letter posted on twitter. One can imagine there were some tense moments with his handlers when they wanted a signature on that letter...
These days the established media serves as a kind of proxy of reality for politicians and the PMC who aren't highly exposed to the real world. The NBC article may come across as a heavily fictionalised account to us, but their target market will take comfort in it none the less.