Goldberg: How did so many chosen democrats miss the weakness of Biden?

In 2022, after I wrote a column with the argument that Joe Biden was too old to run for re -election, I had a number of conversations and at least one cable TV debate with Democrats who thought I was wrong. I cannot remember that there was a lot of difference between what these Democrats said publicly and private; I certainly did not hear off-the-record whisper about the decline of Biden. Instead, civil servants and experts with whom I spoke was convinced that it would be crazy for the party to state the benefits of the Incumbency, that a primary risked creating nasty gorges between different democratic factions, and, the most relevant, that the legislative successes of Biden were still working.

Some of them seemed so sure that I was mistaken that I was wondering if they might have been right; These doubts are the reason why I did not write another column to my shame that called him to go aside until the following year.

Smoke and mirrors

Especially for many people, especially the Republicans, the constant insistence of the Democratic party that Biden was in fact fine as a fraud committed against voters. In ‘Original Sin’, Jake Tapper and the explosive new book by Alex Thompson about the decline of Biden, they call the widespread refusal to admit how bad he had become a ‘cover-up’.

There was certainly a number of it covered, especially under the inner circle of Biden. But more than lying to the audience about the increasing weakness of Biden, I think that too many Democrats lied to themselves. The ‘original sin’ with which party leaders now have to struggle is their tendency to group thinking, slowness and an extreme and wild counterproductive risk aversion.

Many Democrats are irritated that ‘original sin’ has catapulted the issue of Biden’s Enfebeelt in the news and threatens to deduce voters from Donald Trump’s Rococo corruption. However, I think that Tapper and Thompson did the party a pleasure. There is a kind of settlement due to the disastrous missteps that released the way for the return of Trump. It is better for Democrats to drop the patch now than to have the issue festivated until the next elections and to try to give some bitter lessons from their collective failure.

Party officials burned a lot of credibility that defended the cognitive fitness of Biden. While they try to earn it back, they must be honest about what they got wrong.

Politically, the easiest step for Democrats is to dump all guilt for Biden, his family and the clique of old assistants Tapper and Thompson call “The Politburo”: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed. This group certainly deserves to be excited; Tapper and Thompson Marshal A lot of evidence that Biden behind the scenes was even worse than in public, and those closest to the president limited access to him tightly to cover the problem. They quote a senior assistant from the White House who left because he or she did not want to see Biden run again: “We tried to protect him from his own staff, so many people did not know the size of the decline.”

But although his close employees may have hidden the worst erosion, it was clear enough for everyone who wanted to see it. Time and again the voters told pollsters that the president was too old to start re -election. If ordinary people would recognize the problem, why wouldn’t the insiders be able to?

A reason may be that gerontocracy is increasingly the norm in American politics. More than a dozen senators are 75 years or older; One, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, is in his 90s. “About a aging politician is common in modern Washington,” Write Tapper and Thompson, who quote Nikki Haley who calls the Senate “the most privileged nursing home in the country”. It is therefore not surprising that Washington Democrats did not consider Biden as someone who had to retire.

Even more important, the White House usually didn’t seem so dysfunctional from close by. Tapper and Thompson, it is important to note, do not report that the addicted state of Biden has led to a bad judgment, at least apart from the catastrophic choice to be re -election. Indeed, they wrote, Biden critics with whom they spoke “went on until the end to testify to his ability to make decent decisions, if according to his own schedule.”

If Biden had been younger, Tapper and Thompson were perhaps more powerful on the border. I suspect that his anachronistic view of Israel, dating from the heyday of Laborzionism, is partly responsible for his refusal to get through Benjamin Netanyahu. But on a daily basis, the administration often looked at those who shared her priorities to do a decent work.

Learned lessons?

One of the least equipped to acknowledge the brewing crisis about the competence of Biden, it is then possible that have been close enough for the White House to be deeply involved in the policy, but not so close that they regularly saw the president personally. In Washington they have a lot of insight into making legislative sausage, but the caught also in a bubble, unable to recognize how weak Biden appeared to the public, and how untenable his continuous leadership had become.

A similar type of bubble still exists.

According to ‘original sin’, Biden was convinced that Trump would destroy himself at the debate stage, and the only thing he had to do was come back and let him. When I read that, I thought of the strategists who argued that after the re -election of Trump should ‘turn around and play’, in the words of James Carville, while Republicans discredit themselves.