The Wobbly Comeback of Joe

Musings on a bizarre but (probably) over-hyped crisis

The schism of the American left

President Biden has just completed a 16 minute speech at a rally in Wisconsin (Washington Post at youtube.com), offering the crowd and home viewers a strong contrast with his pathetic evening debate performance last week.

As readers are likely well aware, Biden’s shambling and difficult articulation prompted a cascade of consensus such as often marks the end of monarchies and dictatorships, with his own party and the media — collectively, “The Party,” in the same sense that communist governments are backed by a state media — openly declaring his reelection unacceptable on grounds of incompetence. A week later, the de jure members of the Democratic Party are back on Biden’s side, while the press remains somewhat hostile, so that America’s “The Party” is in schism. Meanwhile, a few large donors are still agitating for regime change from the outside.

cnbc.com

Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who co-founded The Walt Disney Co., told CNBC on Thursday that she plans to withhold donations to the party she has funded for years until Biden drops out. The president has said he has no plans to withdraw from the race, despite calls for him to do so.

“I intend to stop any contributions to the party unless and until they replace Biden at the top of the ticket.  This is realism, not disrespect. Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high,” Abigail Disney said in a lengthy statement to CNBC. “If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”

The hostility of the press predates Biden’s debate; it was previewed in the attacks which followed special counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents report in February. The current crisis is really a continuation of the former; which I would offer should encourage skepticism that the controversy will not blow over on its own after a few more weeks. At the same time, this clash between donors, the press, and Democratic administrators may all be the symptom of a broader dysfunction in “The Party” that governs America. Abigail Disney’s problem with Biden is that He Isn’t Defeating Trump; which is another way of saying that the problem with Biden is that he isn’t selling “Not Trump” to the American public. And “Not Trump” is simply the status quo in which the government exists to reflect the preferences and indulge the moral luxuries of elites, and “democracy” is merely the rubber-stamp ritual which upholds this order. Except not merely this — because “The Party” understands that it can not take up any more overt organizational infrastructure to affirm its leadership; if “democracy” does not result in the rule of Abigail Disney and the staff of CNN, no other means are available, and they will not rule.

Biden is being attacked because he is the ultimate figurehead of the American ruling class — the same people attacking him — and the ruling class is insecure of its survival. I do not think it is reading too much into events to say that the left’s anxiety has deeper roots than Biden’s mental limits.

Biden’s bad week at a close

Today’s speech in Wisconsin follows an address in honor of the holiday yesterday at the White House (PBS News at youtube.com). In both cases, Biden has offered vehement but narrow-focused performances which help interpret the abysmal debate. They have shown that Biden can be energetic and coherent when guided by the teleprompter, when confined to easy-to-express concepts, when the sun is out, and in a short burst. Meanwhile, four-syllable words are impossible for him, and he will sometimes trip on three-syllable words as well; but this isn’t strange given his age.

This is not to say that he is “fit for office,” at least in the normal concept of the term, which would hold that POTUS is a competent and decisive individual, one who makes his own decisions and usually does so for the better rather than the worse. But it is not exactly the world’s biggest secret that Biden has converted the White House into an informal senate of advisors and assistants who guide the office; I think most people who have spent any time watching him speak in the last three years must intuitively sense this is the case. Today and yesterday demonstrate that he can still fulfill this role for now; though it wouldn’t seem likely that he has four more years in him.

Could he rehabilitate himself at another prime-time debate? This seems unlikely, though there are some missteps which the Biden court could avoid to improve his chances.

The most daunting problem is that Biden’s mind is probably only functional in the earlier hours of the day. Alex Berenson has published the musings of a neurosurgeon who is convinced that the President was exhibiting the symptoms of Parkinson’s dementia during the debate, which includes the alternation between “ON and OFF periods.” Biden has shied away from the camera at nighttime since his campaign in 2020; it seems plausible that his mind goes before the day is up.

Easier problems to solve are his “waiting face” and messaging. Biden’s drooping, confused expressions when it was Trump’s turn to speak were an unforeseen liability raised by CNN’s split-screen format; this has been remarked upon extensively since the debate.

I have seen it less frequently mentioned that throughout the debate, it seemed like Biden was trying to give the hosts and home audience a stupidly complicated explanation of his administration’s accomplishments. He stumbled and lost his way throughout his answers, yes — but it was rarely clear why he would even try to say whatever it was he was trying to say.

Why be so ambitious, in other words? When asked what he would say to hypothetical disappointed Black voters, he laid claim to four accomplishments, and proceeded to finer analysis of the relevance of the fourth, reduced “child care costs” (never mind that groceries are nine million times more expensive). After host Dana Bash pointed out that he still had 49 seconds, with a restatement of the original question about disappointed Blacks, he took the invitation to bring up inflation; he could simply have asked the hosts to keep the debate moving (“I would tell them I’m going to get back to work when this debate is over to make things better, so let’s move on.”). Biden was mocked after the debate for failing to fill his allotted time, but to my eyes the more clear problem was that he seemed to be trying to do so at all.

Biden’s answers suffered at all times from “TMI.” He seemed to have been prepared by his handlers to give the pep talk at a company dinner (while simultaneously apologizing for the demographic realities that kept him as CEO over them). His answers should have been kept short, simple, and free of substance and racial resentment; he should have been all platitudes and vague boasts. In short, he should have been more like Trump in his approach.

Regardless of whoever one would prefer to win, it would probably be unwise to base expectations on last week’s debate performance.

In September if the second debate goes forward, Biden could certainly offer an impressive performance if he is coherent enough to keep to a simpler and more fact-free message. On the other hand, of course, the fates of human decline could fail him, and he could do even worse, all but handing Trump the office.

The comeback: a new, lying Biden

Yesterday’s and today’s speeches offer a preview of how Biden may offer an improved debate performance. Today, after attacking Trump on grounds of character and honesty, Biden offered a completely distorted interpretation of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Siding with Sotomayor’s (reportedly¹) illiterate dissent, Biden claimed that SCOTUS had pre-authorized a tyrant regime for Trump which would take effect the day he re-assumed office (in fact, the decision merely said that the President could fire his own appointees including in the Justice Department, but would be liable for most any other criminal act as long as a very simple standard is demonstrated in court).

Biden further echoed platitudes he emphasized in yesterday’s speech (the latter including the biggest lie of all — that America was “founded on an idea”) and cast the election as a contest for the continuation of the civic project inaugurated in 1776, or its termination.

It would of course be more accurate to interpret the upcoming mandate as either preserving or rejecting the version of America that has existed since the New Deal and the end of WWII, and restoring what was before — though it is unlikely that the stakes are actually so high.

Nonetheless, such deceptive and hyperbolic messaging would serve as a much better counterweight to Trump’s own brand of the same than another series of attempts to tout the meager accomplishments of Biden’s first term.

Again acknowledging the caveat that Biden could actually perform even worse in September, his last two speeches still offer a glimpse of a possible comeback at the end of summer.

The future of the revolt

Of course, Biden first has to survive until then within the left.

Writing this article, I at first thought the media had taken the cues offered by Biden and the Democratic party and backed off in their attacks. I had missed the publication by The Economist of a call for Biden’s withdrawal yesterday, featuring the cover image of a “presidential walker.”

Media angst over Biden’s possible impending failure seems alive and well. But still, where can it lead to?

Should the big donors and media critics get what they want, and have a different candidate on the ticket, I think it would only benefit Trump in the election anyway. In terms of signaling disorder and untrustworthiness, there is no upside to “coming clean” with the public so late in the game.

At this point it is better to maintain the open fiction of Biden’s competence indefinitely — the point of no return was probably somewhere in 2021. In fact I think the media was perfectly capable of effectively turning on Biden at any point his first year, had it wanted to; no one forced them to support him through the nadir of Trump’s power, and before the Ukraine War distraction. If the media can’t see that leadership-at-all-costs is what is called for this late before the battle, it behoves the Democratic party to stand with Biden as firmly as possible “on their behalf.”

There is also of course too much logistical difficulty both within the party and without. As one example of the latter, the Democrat Party relies on all times on the votes of large numbers of low-intelligence, low-information, low-English-fluency voters who can’t actually be relied upon to cast a vote for someone new: They would simply not succeed to do so. An insufficient number of pamphlets and signs with the correct name would do the job that pamphlets and signs do in farming votes out of people who have no business deciding anything related to government. And of course this same problem likely would obtain for however many millions of fake votes are already lined up for Biden.

Biden’s withdrawal this late in the election would seemingly be a gift to Trump no matter what; and for this reason I find it hard to entertain the idea that it will ever happen.

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1. I’m not actually going to read a Sotomayor opinion.