It is an iron fact of life that the people who do the work of making things right are the ones who get blamed when things go wrong. Trump understands this in his bones, and is correct when he refers to such people -- the blamers, not the doers -- as losers.
Joe Biden fell short, as decent people sometimes do, but he remains an honorable person who diligently pursued decency for his country. He was failed by others more than he failed himself.
He probably goes down in history like RBG: overplaying your career by a hairsbreadth has outsized consequences.
I hope Biden lives to piss on Trump's grave.
I am not as inclined as others to blame RBG, but Biden was in a tougher spot: The world was full of potential replacements for RBG. The belief that Biden was uniquely situated to beat Trump was wrong in the end, but not foolish, not crazy.
Honorable decent people do not enable genocide. That will be the sum total of his legacy. Biden can go fuck himself. He also gave us this mess by not bowing out long before he finally did.
I don't have a lot of interest in blaming him for stuff. Everything big he screwed up could have gone badly if he'd made the other decision.
If you see some of his recent incoherent ramblings it's really amazing and appalling...
The belief that Biden was uniquely situated to beat Trump was wrong in the end
Was it? Biden remains the only person ever to have beaten Trump in an election. It
If you see some of his recent incoherent ramblings it's really amazing and appalling...
I honestly don't recognise that descriptions of interviews like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEBmJ-aAmBo He's talking slowly and pausing, the words are a little indistinct - it's recognisably an old man talking - but it is not incoherent or rambling. There is actually structure there, he answers questions at length, and stays on topic.
Hunter S. Thompson on George McGovern:
The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about "new politics" and "honesty in government," is one of the few men who've run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"
There's the recent one at a brewery I think, impossible to parse what he was trying to say
I still think that the media deliberately fucked over Biden on the "old" because Biden beat Trump once and that Biden would have won again with reasonable equal coverage of both candidates health (which he was not going to get, so Harris probably stood a better chance).
There's the recent one at a brewery I think
The one from January 2024? Yes, googling it, I see that got quite a lot of coverage on Fox News and the Daily Mail, and the 16-second clip they showed is not good. You're probably right to conclude, based on a year-old 16-second clip assiduously spread by Fox News and the Daily Mail, that Joe Biden is indeed dribblingly senile. I missed it at the time, which shows the folly of not relying for your coverage of the Democratic president of the US on Fox News and the Daily Mail. I shall certainly pay more attention to Fox News and the Daily Mail from now on.
I don't watch Fox News or read the Daily Mail; I got it from a much more reliable source, Twitter.
I hope that at least you verified your conclusion by checking it with ChatGPT.
Yeah, there's really no way to use Twitter and not be propagandized. I'm still holding out on Facebook, but maybe not for long.
13: Yeah, complaining about unfair coverage is pointless -- we have to deal with conditions as they exist. But you also have to recognize conditions as they exist, and the fact of the unfair coverage is undeniable.
It's wild how little coverage of Trump's senility there is.
More wishcasting than prediction: this might be the tipping point where new media starts to form and get a little traction. I think the grudging reliance on legacy media (newspapers, MSNBC/CNN), social media (with X in its last stages as a vaguely reliable source), and even platforms like Substack is falling apart more quickly than expected since the election. Who knows what will happen to PBS/NPR and so on? Didn't one of you mention that Trump put someone problematic in charge of VOA?
Yeah, complaining about unfair coverage is pointless -- we have to deal with conditions as they exist.
The gist of my comments here lean in the other direction: You don't get the right result until you deal with the underlying conditions that steered us toward catastrophe.
There is a specific complaint about Biden regarding age that I think, in the end, was both legitimate and understandably misunderstood by the Biden camp. I agree with ajay that Biden was satisfactorily functional as president, but if you can't beat Trump in a debate (as Harris did handily) then you've got a real problem. Trump has won one general election debate, and it was a wipeout.
But as people complain about Democratic messaging, what they're really complaining about is the "underlying conditions." Democrats, we are told, should have conveyed to the public that Trump is a crook; a servant of the oligarchy who lies constantly and is, in general, a vile human being.
The problem with that thinking is that this Trump himself communicated this in a powerful fashion every day. We live in a country -- with a media, a populace and institutions -- that rewards villainy.
I suppose I'm misinterpreting LB's point here -- or maybe just choosing a different emphasis. Certainly "we have to deal with conditions as they exist." But the conditions that exist are the root of the problem, not the behavior of Democratic leaders.
The problem with Biden, like the problem with Amy Quisling -Klobuchar and the rest of the Democratic nomenklatura, is that they are all afflicted with adults-in-the-roomitis. Donald Trump was at the lowest point of any former president since Nixon in 2021, but he picked himself up, dusted himself off and kept on fighting. What's Kamala going to do? Join some white shoe law firm and make a bunch of money and maybe get to be appointed to something if the Democrats ever get the presidency back. Just like Hillary, she will be a political non-entity because it is easier and more remunerative than the actual activism that would be required to ever have a hope of becoming president.
I don't think we can say that about Harris yet. We will know pretty soon if she runs for CA governor.
23: So the answer is to have Hillary or Harris cling to a spot among the "Democratic nomenklatura"?
In fact, the Republican Establishment had an iron grip on the party and candidates in a way that the Democratic Establishment does not -- and yet, Trump brought them to heel. Democrats -- and here I mean Democratic voters -- united behind Biden precisely because he was a known, establishment figure. If someone wants to overturn the nomenklatura, they just have to get a plurality among voters on the Left side of the aisle.
I kinda wish we could have seen Bernie run against Trump, but the Democratic voters weren't interested.
24: Jon King was saying she shouldn't necessarily give up on running for President. 4 is right about RBG.
I thought Biden's final address was good. I just wish the Democrats would give up on calling for bipartisanship and just work on figuring out how they can win as a Party - both the presidency and the Congress. Basically, they should act like a parliamentary opposition. I know the things I care about. I'm not sure what winning formula is, because I don't think that the DLC Third Way is the path forward, but I know I'm not representative.
Somebody, said that a lot of the swing working class voters basically want socialism for themselves. They just want it to come across as manly.
I had a funny moment on the "unfair coverage" front a few days ago listening to the Ezra Klein podcast. (I don't think much of his judgment, but he has a pleasantly soothing voice and the guests are often interesting-ish, so it's good for zoning out while I run.)
He was talking to Chris Hayes about attention: that what makes Trump successful is that he commands attention, doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. And that what Democratic politicians get wrong is that they'd rather get no coverage than negative coverage -- Democrats in government talk about "let's not make news", meaning "don't screw up." Which means that Democrats need to learn to grab the spotlight, positive, negative, doesn't matter, any attention is good.
And anyone with a memory that goes back eight and a half years should know that's stupid. Hillary owned the front pages of the newspapers all summer and fall in 2016: she probably got more attention than Trump did. Negative attention works great if your constituency is nihilists who want to watch the world burn, but if you're trying to appeal to people who aren't like that, it really doesn't do you any good.
It has to be taken into account at the level of candidate selection, though: someone who can thrive under that kind of attention, who visibly delights in pissing people off, and who has natural charisma. Obviously you can't just put a typical no-drama technocrat through the wringer and get positive results.
And as always, people overstate how effective it is for Trump, who lost the popular vote twice and squeaked by this time with a low but decisive margin. Tons of people hate him, and he embraces it, because a margin of two votes would be a landslide in his head. You can't have numbers like Trump's and constantly think "oh shit, our candidate is really unpopular."
biden is responsible for appointing garland, whose prosecutorial decision in the mcveigh trial should have disqualified him in the 2020 circumstances. i'll never forgive biden for this.
Hillary owned the front pages of the newspapers all summer and fall in 2016: she probably got more attention than Trump did. Negative attention works great if your constituency is nihilists who want to watch the world burn, but if you're trying to appeal to people who aren't like that, it really doesn't do you any good.
28 and 29 are correct but . . . Trump's electoral strength is clearly his ability to get low-propensity voters to turn out, and I think Hayes' theory of attention has to be part of the explanation for that. While there was a lot of coverage of Clinton, it didn't really make her seem larger-than-life (or even larger-than-politics; in the sense of being a pop-culture figure. Ironically; the texts from Hillary memes were probably a high-point of her pop culture status).
Somebody, said that a lot of the swing working class voters basically want socialism for themselves. They just want it to come across as manly.
I think this is exactly right. I mean, Fetterman is full of shit, but his vibe is what the democrats need to do.
Yeah, Trump won by a slim margin in an electoral environment where basically every incumbent party won in a landslide. He has real advantages as a candidate (around 2% of the electorate voted for Trump and would have sat out the election with any other candidate, and he's unusually popular for a Republican with a lot of minority voters, especially Latin voters), but he's still not that popular. He won because many people don't like the way 2021-2022 went (both covid policy and inflation), which damaged Democratic turnout and won swing voters to the non-incumbent party.
Lost not won.
30: Remind me what he did wrong there? I'm not recalling anything that would have foreshadowed the dilatoriness that messed up the Trump cases.
I didn't follow the Garland stuff closely so I don't know the answer but I do remember Sarah Kendzior being very opposed to Garland's selection at the time.
Kendzior seemed to know that Garland wasn't an ally at the outset but I don't remember her case against him. She was right.
While there was a lot of coverage of Clinton, it didn't really make her seem larger-than-life (or even larger-than-politics;
Tell that to the Trump voters I knew in 2016 who cheered Hillary's loss because they felt like they'd finally "slayed the wildebeest."
32: Right. Fetterman proposes an answer to the question that us pundit-adjacent commenters are reluctant to confront: What are Democrats to do? The typical answers come down to "do better," and hey, who can argue with that? But there's not any useful information in that exhortation.
"Candidate selection" at the presidential level is a thing that Democratic voters have a lot of influence on. In the last 60 years it's the voters more than the Establishment that picked McGovern, Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama. Mondale, Hillary Clinton and Biden were the quintessential Establishment candidates, and I guess Dukakis and Kerry, too.
So what does the successful Democratic candidate right now look like? One such candidate is the one ajay suggests: Biden, only four years younger.
But there are different paths to success, and I wish there were more Democratic political entrepreneurs -- people just trying shit out to see if it works. Like Fetterman or AOC.
It's just hard for good general election candidates to win primaries, but the obvious answer is to nominate people who have won in reddish areas or run well ahead of presidential candidates in swing states like Jared Golden, Andy Beshear, Ruben Gallego, or Josh Shapiro. Or maybe (either people who have won some and lost some, or only run a moderate amount ahead) Jon Tester, Mary Peltola, Gretchen Whitmer, etc. It probably only gets you a couple percentage points anyway. Mostly elections are won by the incumbents if people are happy and lost by the incumbents if people are sad.
Of course the simplest way to win would have been to have run Joe Manchin.
I didn't follow the Garland stuff closely so I don't know the answer but I do remember Sarah Kendzior being very opposed to Garland's selection at the time.
Kendzior has gone pretty crankish by now unfortunately. But I think that was a common belief then, that Garland seemed to be insisting on normalcy above all other priorities, even just from his statements.
The main reason I'm mad about the Garland pick, and was at the time, is really nothing to do with Garland. It's just that Doug Jones was the other option, and he's a real mensch.
Oh. Didn't know that she'd gone so far. Seems like maybe Bitecofer too? Are we going to have a whole new cast this go-round? I swear I am not going to follow in deep detail this time. Will not.
It is just today sinking in how long four years are going to be (although I also don't think Trump will finish out the term. Mostly for health reasons and also a push from Vance.).
Garland seemed to be insisting on normalcy above all other priorities
Yeah, and many of us predicted that this would end badly. Compare Garland with Pelosi, who also catches a lot of crap for being on the losing side, but who performed brilliantly in organizing the Jan. 6 hearings (which possibly forced Garland's hand and which, in the big picture, were completely ineffectual).
The whole idea of giving up on procedural liberalism -- on normalcy -- is a tough one for people, and for good reason. As the wise man might have said, Biden made "some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things [Donald Trump] does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for."
I just haven't got the heart for pointing fingers at the good guys. Garland misunderstood the moment he was in -- and yeah, that was pretty dumb -- but it's just not in me to get enraged about people who stand roughly in the middle of the Democratic Party.
35: he presented a lone wolf theory, when the facts did not support that mcveigh acted alone. the lone wolf theory allowed the congress & the executive (doj & fbi) to continue their focus on left & non-white extremists & not pursue the multiple threats from the right.
i continue to highly recommend kathleen belew's bring the war home. i"ll add leah sottile's work on ammon bundy & related people - skip ezra klein & listen to bundyville & two minutes past nine.
33
He won because many people don't like the way 2021-2022 went (both covid policy and inflation), which damaged Democratic turnout and won swing voters to the non-incumbent party.
There are a lot of reasons he won, of course, but I'd agree that this is in the top let's say 5, which is one of the most depressing things in this thread. The American public is broken.
Tell that to the Trump voters I knew in 2016 who cheered Hillary's loss because they felt like they'd finally "slayed the wildebeest."
That's a good point. On some level I don't understand that reaction, but it was real and is a good counter-example to the argument about attention (or the older version of that conventional wisdom that "name recognition" was crucial).
But I do keep seeing things like this and feel like it is describing something:
On the morning of the US presidential election, my twelve-year-old son told me that Trump was going to win: 'All the influencers back him, and he's all over social media' (this although my son has no social media accounts and is not supposed to go on YouTube). 'Harris is all over social media too,' I said. 'Not the same,' he said. He was right. I should have known better.
The American public is broken.
As always, the problem with America is Americans.
The key thing to remember is a that a generic Republican might have dropped WI or MI, but almost certainly would have held PA and won the election.
30: I didn't know Garland was a prosecutor then. What was his decision in the McVeigh trial?
And DQ already answered my question. I guess Garland would have been mediocre-good Supreme Court justice. Obviously he would have been wonderful in not being Gorsuch.
47: This gets back to whining about how the playing field isn't fair, and again, that's not an excuse for losing, but we have to recognize it to deal with it. The inflation upset was at least partially due to really slanted coverage of the economy. Inflation has been down in a basically normal range for over a year? Two years? And wages went up faster than inflation, and more at the bottom than at the top, so for the majority of people.
I don't know what do about it, but the media killed Biden on the economy.
40: I'm so tired of hearing people say good things about Shapiro. The others seem fine. The allegations that he covered up a murder (the Ellen Greenberg case) give me pause. He also settled a sexual harassment claim against a former aid. I know that Pennsylvania leans red, but he reminds me too much of the worst aspects of big city machine politics.
Media coverage is largely US-specific, but unhappiness about inflation is not just the US. Incumbent parties are losing everywhere, regardless of ideology. Look at the UK, the Tories didn't lose because the media coverage was slanted against them! Now inflation wasn't quite as bad in the US as elsewhere, but also our election was much closer than in most countries!
25: I'm not sure you are taking my point. Clinton and Harris will always be part of the nomenklatura, and to some degree, part of the actual political apparat in this country. That's the problem. Virtually nobody in the Democratic party above the level of city council or state representative has the stomach to actually fight for anything these days. Not without pulling their punches so much that the Republicans can dance rings around them. And the reason they pull their punches comes down to 'better dead than Red' -- they are loathe to jeopardize their power, prestige and profits by going against the grain in any but the most token ways. Meanwhile, back at the Turning Point conference, the Republicans can and do go all out, since there's no equivalent 'better dead than brownshirt' principle on the right. Capitalism will always side with fascism over socialism.
It's incredible to me that close elections are now talked about and treated like landslides, though I guess that's just when Republicans win. It does make me wish the first Obama administration had a media machine to drive the idea that that win was a landslide with a clear mandate, instead it marked the smooth transition into a new era where it's normal to require 60 votes for Democratic priorities.
55: Inflation wasn't as bad; wage growth was better; employment was higher. The economic recovery in the US was much stronger than in the rest of the world, but it didn't help.
56; Yeah, there's another asymmetry. Outsiders on the right support Republican candidates in a way outsiders on the left don't support Democrats. That's all their grassroots social media juice: demented frothing-at-the-mouth weirdos who, while they may criticize individual Republicans, are all in for them when it comes down to a choice between a Democrat or a Republican. Leftists don't owe Democrats support where they disagree with them, but it makes a big difference not having that kind of support.
57: And there's another asymmetry. Big Democratic wins call for bipartisanship; Republican squeakers are treated as landslides.
I don't know at all what to do about any of this except crawl in a hole. And keep doing my day job, I guess.
58.1: I mean it did help a lot, the election was unusually close!
For example, Scholz is going to get turfed out in February, and the German election is not going to be nearly as close as the US election was. Harris nearly pulled out the win! But it was a really strong tide to be swimming against.
45: "it's just not in me to get enraged about people who stand roughly in the middle of the Democratic Party"
Very much this. Because if we do get enraged at the middle of the Democratic party and let that blind us, it's a ticket to permanent Republican rule.
For the record, here is Isabel Kershner in the NYT on Israeli operations in the West Bank. (I won't swear by anyone's lack of bias, but I think she's a serious reporter.)
On Monday, President Trump rescinded sanctions imposed by the Biden administration last year on dozens of far-right Israeli individuals and settler groups accused of violence against Palestinians and the seizure or destruction of Palestinian property.
The move came shortly after Mr. Trump took office, even as Jewish extremists raided several Palestinian villages, setting fire to vehicles and properties, according to Palestinian officials and the Israeli military.
The Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited control over parts of the West Bank and is a rival of Hamas, has been carrying out its own operation against armed militants in Jenin in recent weeks after largely leaving security in the area to Israel. Deadly Israeli raids and drone strikes in the northern West Bank over the past year have chewed up streets and left many Palestinian civilians in fear.
Residents and witnesses in Jenin said on Tuesday that a local private hospital, Al-Amal, was surrounded by Israeli forces and had come under fire. "It's as if they came to us straight from Gaza with large vehicles, aggressive gunfire and drones," said Kamila Mahmoud, 22, a resident of Jenin, in a telephone interview.
Residents said that Palestinian Authority security officers and medics were among the injured. Brig. Gen. Anwar Rajab, the spokesman for the Authority's security forces, said one Palestinian officer was killed.
There's more about the revocation of sanctions later in the article, but it's in this omnibus EO, most likely reversing "Executive Order 14115 of February 1, 2024 (Imposing Certain Sanctions on Persons Undermining Peace, Security, and Stability in the West Bank)."
I stand by my position that if you are *only* focused on Gaza, there was no meaningful difference between Biden and Trump and you might as well vote for Trump to send a message about how bad Biden's policies were. Broaden the scope at all, even to the West Bank, and Trump is obviously way worse.