The Comforting Choice of Blaming Biden

Former President Joe Biden is right, wrong, and right, respectively:

Former President Joe Biden said in a new interview that the timing of his pullout from the 2024 election wouldn’t have made a difference, suggesting that Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump was inevitable. (Watch the video below.)

“Should you have withdrawn earlier?” the BBC’s Nick Robinson asked in the interview, shared Wednesday.

“I don’t think it would’ve mattered,” Biden replied. “We left at a time when we had a good candidate. She was fully funded.”

Chris Cillizza disagrees with Biden's first claim, that it would have not mattered); presumably agrees with the second that "we had a good candidate", and ignores the third point, that "she was fully funded." He argues (at 4:39 of the video below)

There was no primary. Biden gets out Harris gets in, that's it. She gets zero actual votes from Democrats to be the Democratic nominee for President. It just got handed off to her. I think that rankled a lot of voters, including a lot of Democrats. 

I think- let's imagine Biden gets out a year before. Let's imagine he gets out in June- July 21, 2023. We had a robust primary process at that point. Kamala Harris is in. There probably are other people who run. She might still wind up being the nominee. But it seems to me that that process would have yielded someone who could say "I won this. I campaigned for this and I won the nomination as opposed to it was handed to me by a guy who is not popular and I'm now going to have to own that guy and his record for the entire campaign."

So, all of those things plus the fact that again, an intangible, but it's really hard to set up a presidential campaign on July 21, July 22, whenever Kamala Harris started and try to win an election on November 5, right?  It's just a massive undertaking and to do it that late, you are trying to do everything while sprinting and that's never easy. So to me, it's just Joe Biden in a state of denial.

Yet, in early morning on Tuesday, March 5, 2024, Andrew Feinberg of The Independent appeared to capture the zeitgeist, and did capture the vibe, of the campaign when he wrote

Harris, who just a few weeks ago appeared to have run out of the momentum she’d quickly gathered after President Joe Biden ceded the Democratic ticket to her this past July, is surging thanks to a series of late-game missteps by Trump and his allies. Those missteps include the disastrous decision to include a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage” in the lineup at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late last month.

On Saturday, renowned pollster Ann Selzer released her annual survey of Iowa voters which showed Harris with a three-point lead, 47 per cent to 44 per cent, in the Hawkeye State based on an incredibly strong showing with female voters. Harris, who’d trailed Trump by a four-point margin among Iowans in September, had also inherited a whopping 18-point deficit when she took over the Democratic nomination from Biden.

Another national poll released by NPR and Marist College on Monday showed Harris garnering support from 51 per cent of respondents, compared with Trump’s 47 per cent — a lead greater than the survey’s 3.5-point margin of error. And the final NBC News poll of the election cycle showed Trump hemorrhaging support from Black and Latino voters, while Harris was shown to be garnering support from 87 per cent of Black voters.

The Harris campaign appears to have met the moment and is finishing strongly with what it describes as the largest coordinated get-out-the-vote event in history on Monday.

The campaign is running simultaneous events across all seven battleground states, including rallies featuring Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz, plus programming tying the events in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin together as part of a national livestream program.

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon told reporters on a call on Monday afternoon that the coordinated event is intended to “capture the grassroots enthusiasm that we are seeing everywhere, to focus on mobilizing our voters heading into Election Day tomorrow”.

“Tomorrow, we’ll have elected officials and performers and speakers that really reach such a wide network across all social media platforms, helping to make sure that our message is breaking through in these final hours to voters that maybe are harder to reach or less engaged. These events will serve as a massive mobilization and volunteer engagement opportunity,” she said.

Privately, Democratic sources who spoke to The Independent are projecting confidence, with one swing-state party chair noting what they described as “a serious crossover vote among Republicans” and “explosive” turnout in early voting among key constituencies, including Latinos.

Trump’s response to a Biden gaffe in which the president appeared to call the ex-president’s supporters “garbage” in return seemed to have only prolonged the news cycle stemming from Hinchcliffe’s racist diatribe. His decision to stage a photo op with a garbage truck looks to have failed to shift the focus back to Biden and instead reminded Latino voters of what had touched off the controversy to begin with.

And while the Trump campaign had hoped to make hay out of an Associated Press report revealing that the White House communications team had tried to doctor the official transcript of Biden’s remarks to make it look as if he hadn’t said what he’d said, Trump stepped on his own campaign’s messaging over the weekend with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances. At one rally, he even appeared to fellate a malfunctioning microphone.

One Democratic operative suggested that the stars had aligned to bring about the ex-president’s collapse at the exact time Harris has been surging.

“Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have written it better,” they said.

Meanwhile, Trump and running mate JD Vance closed out their electioneering with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s the same place where Trump closed out his victorious 2016 run against Hillary Clinton, and it’s where Trump ended his re-election race against Biden four years later.

Not only is Michigan a key swing state — and Grand Rapids a historically strong Republican area — but Trump is notoriously superstitious and has insisted on closing out both of his post-2016 campaigns there for no reason but vibes, even as he was forced to open his day in North Carolina, a reliable GOP stronghold that he might well lose to Harris.

At Trump’s appearances this past weekend, the arenas he visited looked noticeably emptier and the candidate himself looked lost at times, vacillating between bewilderment and menace. He suggested that an assassination attempt against him would need to shoot through a packed media contingent to have a chance at hitting him, in one particularly concerning moment.

Harris "quickly gathered" momentum "after Joe Biden ceded the Democratic ticket to her this past July. While Democrats were "projecting confidence," Trump "stepped on his own campaign's messaging.... with a series of bizarre and unhinged appearances." Harris was "surging" and combined with "the largest coordinated get-out-the-vote event in history," one Democratic operative boasted "Aaron Sorkin couldn't have written it better."

Democrats were well-funded, organized, disciplined, and confident while the Trump campaign was well-funded and not much else. Nonetheless, Cillizza would maintain

So, all of those things plus the fact that again, an intangible, but it's really hard to set up a presidential campaign on July 21, July 22, whenever Kamala Harris started and try to win an election on November 5.  Right?  It's just a massive undertaking and to do it that late, you are trying to do everything while sprinting and that's never easy. 

It may have been hard but it was done, and impressively, as everyone recognized at the time.. Perhaps the Democratic Party may have won the presidential election if Joe Biden had dropped out a year earlier. However, that would have given the GOP time than it eventually had to batter whomever the presumptive Democratic nominee would have been. 

It would have been a better situation for the party's nominee only if the process had yielded someone other than Kamala Harris. That is far from certain, though, and for reason(s) unrelated to the quality of the candidate. In September of 2023- over a year before the November, 2024 election- three NBC reporters noted

A quirk of the 2024 presidential cycle is the chasm that’s emerged between the party establishment and rank-and-file voters. For Democrats, more than half don't want to see Biden run again, an April NBC News poll found.

But those rank-and-file voters counted for little compared to party insiders who were intimidated. The reporters added

Biden allies have not been shy about getting the word out that it would be self-defeating for ambitious white male candidates like Newsom to try to snatch the nomination away from Biden and Kamala Harris, who made history as the first woman and person of color to become vice president….

“When you had people who were trying to test the waters” for a presidential bid, “the party rose up and made it clear to those individuals — who were mostly white men — that to disrespect the vice president would not be well received by women and people of color within the party,” said Karen Finney, a longtime Democratic strategist. “They got a little bit of a smack in the face.”

So let's be clear in the manner which can be understood by Cillizza and the other pundits chiming in on the failure to capitalize on the unpopularity of Donald Trump. The Democrats did not lose the White House because Kamala Harris did not have enough time. She came out surging and ran an effective campaign until individuals realized they were being asked to vote for, well, Kamala Harris, an extremely qualified, unlikable person.

The party establishment wanted to anoint her in part in part because she was the sitting vice-president, hence the closest thing to a default candidate. However, the times did not call for nominating someone because it would be easy but for the individual most likely to win. Harris had flamed out in her initial run for the presidency, as a candidate for the nomination in the 2020 cycle, and there was great suspicion that she would not turn out to be a strong candidate.

That turned out to be the case but not for the reason Cillizza claims. Assuming Feinberg of The Independent was  not making things up, Harris ran a nearly flawless campaign, one which most people admired at the time, and which was better than could have been expected.

Nonetheless, she lost the general election and the words of Karen Finney, an admirer of Harris, gives more than  a clue of why. A challenge to the vice-president, were it to have come from a white male (from any white, more likely) would not have been "well received by women and people of color within the party."  Finney wouldn't acknowledge it, but a challenge even from a white female would have been problematic. 

This severely narrowed the range of possible alternatives to Biden, which would make Vice-President Kamala Harris the odds-on favorite were the President not to seek a second term. Top Democrats got their preferred candidate, even though nearly everyone suspected she was nowhere near the individual most likely to defeat Trump.

If it makes Cillizza and others feel better, they can continue to blame the November, 2024 loss on Joe Biden. If it impels them not to challenge the prevailing wisdom of the Democratic Party that an individual's value is to be determined in part by the inherited characteristics of race and gender, even better. Ignoring reality can be satisfying to oneself, though destructive to a political party.

 

Share |