Institutional DC's Inner Voice has cried "uncle" on Joe Biden
Rather than admit how terrible his tenure has been, Democrat insiders insist that his age is what tarnishes Biden's image.
Note to reader: The following article was written prior to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and resultant war. Our prayers go out for the souls of the dead, the lives of the hostages, and our brethren in Israel facing appalling barbarity.
The first hint that there is no joy in Mudville was an article from September 12 by David Ignatius for the Washington Post titled "Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024". In it Ignatius gently advised that Biden's age and VP Kamala Harris were major liabilities going into the next election. The piece caused a stir, because it illustrated that even among the most quintessential establishment circles there are those that no longer can hide their anxiety over Biden's fitness for office. Then on Oct. 1 MSNBC published an opinion piece pleading that President Biden should not be campaigning on "Bidenomics". While it asserted that the economy remains strong, it insisted that Americans are not convinced and also are not feeling it in their pockets. The writer wasn’t just any network contributor, but Michael LaRosa, former press secretary to First Lady Jill Biden, and a former producer for MSNBC host Chris Matthews.
The people that occupy the institutions of power are aware that this is not what good times look like. They may not be going anywhere for now, but at the moment their life is a never ending cascade of bad news and miserable existence. And while they won't say out loud that Joe Biden is doing a terrible job and Americans are suffering as a result, slowly they are acknowledging that the status quo is not sustainable. I am not talking about loudmouth liberal commentators like Bill Maher and Cenk Uygur that have admitted Biden is deficient yet throw up their hands in resignation, but rather those with real access to power who fear losing those privileges.
Many media figures and publications have been called in the past regime "mouthpieces" or "propagandists", but Washington Monthly may distinguish itself as the regime's "inner voice", reflecting how it perceives itself rather than how it wants the public to see it. Its list of writers is a who's who of insiders like the Washington Post’s Ignatius who has the reputation as being the conduit for CIA leaks to the media and Bill Scher of Politico who made the case for NSA mass surveillance "from a liberal perspective" after the Snowden leaks. WM, unlike the other publications that its writers may also contribute to, hardly claims to be a "news" reporting magazine, but rather an opinion rag. Its political orientation is whatever the Democratic Party establishment chooses is expedient for holding power.
On Oct. 3 Jonathan Alter wrote for WM an article called "Could Biden decide not to run?" in which he plans out an meeting for the president with major leaders of the party, past and present: Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, James Clyburn, even former Sen. George Mitchell who is now 90 years old. The purpose of a meeting is an intervention, with the goal being to dissuade him and his closest advisors from mounting a reelection bid. Like Ignatius and Scher, Alter is the ultimate insider, whose mother was a Democratic National Committee member and acolyte of Chicago's 1970s Daley political machine. He joined Newsweek straight out of Harvard in 1981 and worked as a media critic for most of his career there, and wrote a book account of Barack Obama's first year in office using direct inside sources from the White House. He is often cited as the media figure that has covered Obama and his family the longest. I highlight these points in order to emphasize that if these are the public thoughts of people with access to those closest to Biden, the situation is likely even worse.
Make no mistake however, the objective of Alter's piece is not to help America by putting it into competent hands, it is to hedge against any risk that the Democratic Party loses the 2024 presidential election. It also includes a self-serving glass half full image of the state of the country as Biden enters his Year 4 from the perspective of fellow top level Democrats. Here are a few tidbits:
Biden wonders whether he'll be remembered like Lyndon Johnson, "hounded" from office for his role in bringing the country to war. Hillary Clinton interjects saying "there’s no war on, and no one will say you were hounded". This follows the establishment perspective that the War in Ukraine does not count, because there are no "boots on the ground".
In a later statement Biden insists that he needs to stay focused on his job, and staying in it, because he is fighting to defend democracy, and compares himself to Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, who served until the age of 87. This choice of an example by Alter seemed pretty random and absurd. Does anyone really believe Biden would pull out that example on the fly? He's not known as a person who remembers historical events accurately. What I found was that Adenauer was used as an example earlier this year in a Politico EU article that compared Biden's advanced age to other past and present elderly leaders. Unfortunately the rest of them were unflattering examples such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Of course the truth is that the problem isn't Biden's age as much as the cognitive decline that appears to have set in as it's advanced. But over and over again the other attendees invoke age as the problem: Nancy Pelosi, former SCOTUS justice Stephen Breyer, Mitchell, Obama, and Clinton.
Of all the people to mention the importance of standing behind Ukraine, Alter chose Obama to be the one to say it. This was the key issue, besides "staying tough on Bibi (Netanyahu; ironic given current events)" that was deemed most important for the next president. Not the economy, immigration, or crime. Not even climate change was worthy of a mention! It's almost as if the job of the president has nothing to do with the daily lives of his fellow citizens.
The other important tidbit of the simulated dialog was that the insiders have written off Kamala Harris. Alter writes in two mentions of her, one each by George Mitchell and Delaware Senator Chris Coons, who replaced Biden in the Senate. Both assert that she is not a viable candidate. Presumably Alter believes that this is what these people really think, although I am inclined to believe he may have actually heard it from someone on his list of characters. And that's it, she is not mentioned at all afterward, and no one disagrees. Democrats want, or at least they are signaling so, to move on from the Kamala Harris experiment. This is not surprising at all, but it does make one wonder how long ago did it become acknowledged among the top rung of the party that the woman picked as Biden's stand-in should he become truly incapacitated is unqualified to replace him on the ticket.
By attributing the need for Biden's retirement to his age alone, Alter also sweeps under the rug Biden's record as president, which a clear eyed observer would see as a colossal disaster. There was no mention by Alter of state and local Democrat officials like New York Mayor Eric Adams, and governors Kathy Hochul of New York and JB Pritzker of Illinois who have fingered Joe Biden as the person who needs to step in to alleviate the migrant crisis. To broaden that issue, America's largest cities are getting blasted right now by a number of trends: Rising homeless populations and cost of living, soaring crime, and a commercial real estate crash. If Joe Biden was truly the great president that he is, why would almost every major American city be dealing with these crises along with floods of migrants?
But Washingtonians don't see it that way, because they can choose to frame a story to suit their entitled worldview. Case in point: On Sept. 15 the Washington Post's Jason Willick wrote a column where he claimed that Biden Administration defeats in Supreme Court cases like Missouri v. Biden. Willick's premise was that these cases that restricted Biden's Department of Justice's attempts to censor social media posts and search and seize the property of sitting congressman Scott Perry (R-PA) were for the best, because they would prevent Donald Trump from doing the same to Democrats if he ever reached office again. To review, in his mind it is good that Biden abused power unconstitutionally and was reprimanded by the courts, because that means Donald Trump might not be able to do it. . . Not because abuse of office was wrong in the first place regardless of which president is in office.
These examples should serve as a barometer of what’s going in the minds of Biden apologists: They know there is the need for an off ramp, but it is less important than losing their access to power.