The biggest story this weekend is that one presidential candidate’s ear got grazed by a bullet from a shooter who also killed a bystander before he was shot down himself. But the biggest story for the past two weeks has been the thousands of stories taking metaphorical shots at the other presidential candidate. These stories long ago left reporting behind, surged past opining, into attempts to reshape the campaign and maybe topple a sitting president (since not a few of the pundits decided Biden should resign now, making Harris president).
Their logic seemed lacking, to say the least. Let’s say that you have a car that you think is old and unreliable and maybe won’t get you where you want to go. What should you do about it? Getting rid of the car you have does not cause a new car to appear. As regards the Democratic ticket, I have not been convinced that there is a newer, better car available that is more likely to get us where we want to go. Stress on available; better is open to debate, but the best car to get you somewhere is the one you actually have or have confirmed you can get.
It is not encouraging to see an elite-media stampede eager to trash the car we have and treat, as they did in week one, unrealistic daydreams as if they were practical facts, notably that at this stage of the campaign you can start all over again with a new candidate picked by someone other than voters, no big deal. The most-often-mentioned choices, Governors Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer—who’s co-chair of Biden’s campaign—made it clear they were not interested; obstacles in getting a new candidate funded and on the ballot are also huge and maybe insurmountable, as ABC reported on June 27.
Many people who had proposed something so farfetched would’ve been abashed and sat down, but for these beacons of confidence no such thing transpired. Realizing, if not admitting, the fecklessness of Plan B, many of them in week two switched to Plan C: push out Biden for Vice-President Harris, who they initially preferred to sidestep. Kamala Harris is already on the ticket, doing what VP’s have always done: be the spare tire you swap out for a flat tire, if something goes wrong. The argument that the racism and misogyny a Black woman faces no longer matters because the white man is old is not a strong argument.
The renewed attacks on her, including Birtherism 2.0, have already begun. As longtime Democratic Party activist and attorney Kaivan Shroff notes,
Before reality set in that the only realistic replacement for Biden would in fact be his Vice President, those envisioning a substitute for Biden made clear their intentions to skip over her. Ironically, while we get criticized as “out of touch” for refusing calls for Biden to step aside, in many ways we are the only ones being realistic about the racism and sexism a candidate like Vice President Harris would be up against were she our nominee. The reluctance to endorse the idea of Harris replacing Biden is not a sign of delusion but a reflection of hard-earned political wisdom. We have a keen understanding that racism and sexism are alive and well in America today.
But in the overwrought effort to push Biden out, most seem nonchalant at best about this next step of securing a replacement. To go back to the car analogy, if you think your car is not running great, taking a sledgehammer to it is neither what mechanics recommend nor what gets you the car you want.
Strength or weakness are not attributes isolated in the candidate, and success or failure do not depend on the candidate alone. The voters do actually decide, and how they decide is shaped by the stories. The campaign plays a role in them; the media play a far larger role. For two weeks we have been buried in an avalanche of stories portraying the president as incompetent, as a lever to get him out, but if the get-him-out part doesn’t succeed—and it doesn’t look like it will—you’re left with the portraying him as incompetent part.
It is an editorial choice to speculate on what Biden’s health will be like in four years rather than what the health of the country will be if he and Harris do not win.
Obviously real incompetence should be reported, but much of this was not reporting—it was proposing and predicting and opining and amateur diagnosing. It is an editorial choice to center the stories about Biden almost entirely on the (agreed: abysmal) 90-minute debate rather than the record of an exceptionally effective administration with solid accomplishments from foreign policy to the economy to climate and the environment.
It is an editorial choice to speculate on what Biden’s health will be like in four years rather than what the health of the country will be if he and Harris do not win four months from now. To state the obvious, insisting over and over and over that a candidate is weak and cannot win weakens them and makes it less likely they will win.
A number of polls and studies show that the debate itself had very little impact on the race. But the two weeks of pundit panic have. “Dem Dam Breaks on Biden” the Daily Beast announced on July 2; the “dam will break” said CNN’s Pamela Brown July 7; on July 10 the “dam has broken” said Bill Kristol and Pod Save America headlined an episode “Is the Biden Dam breaking?; “the dam has broken” thundered George Clooney on the 11th, the same day the Daily Beast again announced the dam was breaking and the Washington Post speculated “Is the Biden Dam About to Break?” The dam was supposed to be a torrent of opposition from Democrats in office against Biden, but it seems to have remained a modest creek, while the flood was of these stories.
In other words, it was not the party itself but the punditocracy that had turned on Biden. Many of them insisted Biden had to prove his competence and energy after the debate, but have had little to say about his many campaign appearances, commanding NATO address Tuesday, praise from world leaders at the NATO summit, long press conference on foreign policy Thursday and energetic campaign rally in Detroit on Friday. It’s worth noting that the calls for Biden to go are coming in particular from powerful, high-status white men.
The New York Times‘s latest gambit, as part of their onslaught of hundreds of pieces on the theme dating back at least to February, was to get a Biden-must-go piece from George Clooney, the actor who co-hosted a Hollywood fundraiser for Biden less than a month ago. The piece was most striking for its nonchalant confidence about what happens after Biden gets dumped: “In all likelihood” the campaign cash could be transferred; “we can easily foresee” wonderful candidates appearing out of the mists; “Then we could go into the Democratic convention next month and figure it out: and this would enliven our party,” because nothing enlivens a party like uncertainty, conflict, chaos, and starting over from scratch in an as-yet-to-be-invented process at the last minute. As my friend Jaime Cortez once remarked, “Confidence does not correlate with competence.”
This nation is in a civil war of sorts, against the Trump-led attempt to end democracy in America and establish autocracy.
The great majority of elected Democrats have remained out of the controversy or spoken in support of the president, but the press has been on a frenzied hunt to find Democrats who want Biden to go and to amplify those they’ve found as though they represent far more than themselves. This has contributed to the misrepresentation of the situation as driven by members of the party, when it’s largely driven by members of the press and high-profile figures such as Clooney.
When Senator Richard Blumenthal said, “I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November, because it is an existential threat to the country if Donald Trump wins. Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee has my support,” MSNBC tweeted that Blumenthal said, “I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden.”
Harassed in a hallway by ABC’s Rachel Scott, Nancy Pelosi said she thinks Biden can win and complained elsewhere that, “I think the President is great. And there are some misrepresentations of what I have said. I never said he should reconsider his decision. The decision is the president’s. I don’t know what’s happened in New York Times that they make up news.”
Aaron Fritschner, Representative Don Beyer’s communications director, noted earlier this month that:
Shifts in editorial standards and a series of biases in reporting and especially amplification are herding the news in one direction. There are reasons why pretty much everything you see now describes panic, chaos, and backbiting. Reporters are looking for those things, they are getting print and headlines, and the other stuff is getting twisted, downplayed or cut. … Most of the leading journalists in the United States are *competing* with each other right now to break the Next Big Story in the Dems Panic/Bad For Biden genre. Their editors are hounding them for juicy bits, and their standards are being weakened to get them.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (who endorsed Biden in a personal appearance with him), Ayanna Pressley, Jim Clyburn, Stacey Abrams, and Maxine Waters are among the Democrats standing by him, and reports say Black voter support for Biden remains strong. Senator Bernie Sanders is also strongly supportive, saying “the president can win and I think he will win” and that Biden has “done more for the working class in the last four years than any president in modern history.” The AFL-CIO and other unions pledged their support Thursday.
This nation is in a civil war of sorts, against the Trump-led attempt to end democracy in America and establish autocracy. Biden is, for better or worse, the general of the army trying to prevent this fate. The obsession with removing this general has largely ignored the outrages of the MAGA army, the importance of defeating it, and the most realistic strategies to do so.
Also swept away is the reality that it’s what we do or fail to do between now and November that decides the outcome, which is still up in the air. As Congressman Ted Lieu joked, “To paraphrase my friend Rep Eric Sorensen, who’s an awesome meteorologist, polls in July for a November election are accurate in the sense that a 100-day weather forecast is accurate. Also, Project 2025, written by Trump advisors, seeks to eliminate the National Weather Service.”
