JV Last at the Bulwark takes a look today at the way the Republicans now see institutions since they realized that they have lost the educated, financially successful American cohorts. Their first order of business was to create alternative institutions which they’ve done successfully with the media which has made it very easy to control politicians by propagandizing their constituents. A case in point:
As a result of losing the popular culture, they now believe that they can only control it by using the power of the state, thus authoritarianism.
-Republicans can no longer create popular majorities, but they can take control of the apparatus of government.
-The institutions of civil society have historically been a mediating layer between citizens and government. But Republicans have also lost the argument with educated and financially successful voters, leading to their loss of support within many American institutions.
-In response, Republicans have decided that the existing institutions of civil society are illegitimate and that all power should be centrally located with the state.
-But if Republicans are also a persistent minority who can only take control of the state intermittently, then they must seek electoral advantage wherever they can: Voting laws to shape the electorate. Post-election lawsuits to change outcomes. Insurrections. Coups.
-Because their only hope of holding off both the popular majorities they see as evil and the institutions they see as illegitimate is to win some final victory in which state power is concentrated within the party and then used to overcome the party’s small-d democratic weakness.
-This is either authoritarianism or, if you prefer, illiberal democracy.
As he says, if you think this is an exaggeration, think again:
He writes that we are in the process of finding out if they will prevail:
The party’s current weaknesses in popularity and institutional footholds mean that it will shift away from the traditional field of political conflicts—elections and institution-building—toward asymmetric conflicts where it has advantages.
Instead of trying to regain a place in mainstream media, it has propaganda outlets. Instead of civil society institutions, it has the Proud Boys. Instead of lobbying efforts, it has direct action. Instead of electoral victories, it has post-election maneuvering. Instead of constitutional governing, it has a . . . more expansive view of executive power.
Meanwhile, there are the “Christians.” I’m sure you’ve been reading about the GOP’s Christian nationalist agenda the last couple of days. It’s been all over the internet although we’ve been talking about it here for quite some time. Alabama this week pretty much voided the ability of people to obtain fertility treatments and IVF because their high court declared that frozen embryos have full human rights. (Pregnant women do not, however.) So, it’s happening.
Here’s just a taste of what the cultists backing their twice divorced, porn star bedding, adjudicated rapist Dear Leader have in mind:
If Democrats can't defeat a party that wants to end recreational sex then I give up https://t.co/X8xfuDzbje
The vast majority of Americans are not on board with any of that. But by the time they figure out that Donald Trump is a liar and a tool (or that yes you should vote for the lesser of two evils) it may be too late.
News came last week of the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny last week. He had survived an attempted assassination by poison in 2020 but eventually returned to Russia, where he was immediately detained and sentenced first to two and a half years, then nine years and ultimately 19 years in prison on charges of “extremism.” In December he was sent to a distant prison in the Russian Arctic. And now he is gone.
Navalny was the most famous political dissident in the world, probably since Nelson Mandela. Those who care about such things held out hope that he would survive incarceration, as Mandela did, and prevail one day in a new Russia. In this era of rising authoritarianism, the death of this man — and his bravery in embodying a dream of freedom and liberty, now for the moment crushed — adds more fuel to fears of the creeping fascism now gaining traction around the world.
For those of us in the U.S., this is particularly distressing because the timing of Navalny’s death feels as though it may be directly connected to the unhinged rhetoric of Donald Trump, the putative presidential nominee of the Republican Party. It’s true that an “election” is scheduled soon in Russia in which it is certain that President Vladimir Putin will be triumphant. There has been some speculation that Navalny’s death was related to that, although it’s hard to understand how that would help Putin domestically. More likely the killing of Navalny is a show of strength following the comments Trump has been making on the campaign trail that if he becomes president again he will give the green light to Russia to invade any NATO country he deems not to have “paid its bills.” (This is based upon his unshakably ignorant insistence that NATO is like one of his golf clubs that require members to pay dues — to him — and there’s no disabusing him of it.) His exact words were, “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want,” which were heard all over the world as a sign that America was on the verge of abandoning Europe on a fatuous pretext in favor of Russia.
This fear is not unreasonable, considering that the Republicans in Congress have successfully blocked funding for aid to Ukraine on the explicit orders of Donald Trump. That impasse came after Republicans demanded that Democrats and the White House agree to a draconian immigration bill in exchange. They eventually did, but in the end the GOP refused to back the bill anyway because Trump apparently believes it would help Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
You have to wonder whether that’s the real reason he nixed the deal. After all, Biden signing that immigration bill would have further inflamed the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is already upset about the president’s policy on Israel. It’s a perfect wedge issue. Instead, the Democrats are now able to say they tried, and get to blame the Republicans for refusing to take yes for an answer.
And consider this: a Gallup poll from last year shows that siding with Russia remains extremely unpopular among Americans at large, despite Tucker Carlson’s paeans to Moscow’s subways and grocery stores and Trump’s admiration for Putin.
A Pew survey released just last week shows that 74% of Americans view the war in Ukraine as “important to U.S. interests,” and that includes 69% of Republicans. The pro-Putin faction in the GOP is not as big as liberal political observers often believe it is, and it certainly isn’t big enough to explain the way Congress is handling the issue in an election year — beyond, that is, their need to show fealty to Trump.
Trump is once again favoring Putin’s goals, even at the apparent expense of his own. He’s been doing that ever since he came on the political scene, for reasons no one can quite explain.
It’s certainly possible that Trump’s political judgment is not all it’s cracked up to be. He lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes, after all, no matter how loudly he denies it. So it’s curious that Trump is once again favoring Putin’s goals, even at the apparent expense of his own. He’s been doing that ever since he came on the political scene, for reasons no one has ever been able to adequately explain.
When the news broke about Navalny’s death, everyone waited with bated breath to see what Trump would say about it. Would he, for the first time, condemn Vladimir Putin? Would he side with America’s allies? And what would the Republican Party do?
It wasn’t long before we got our answers and they were predictably grotesque:
I think Gingrich was one of the first to compare Trump to Navalny but he wasn’t the last. It took Trump himself three days before he could bring himself to say anything. When he did, it was to echo what Gingrich said:
Trump has embraced this ludicrous idea that he’s the American Navalny, being persecuted by the tyrant Joe Biden. But by doing that he’s implicitly admitting that Putin is a tyrant too, which is unusual. If you wanted to give him credit for being clever, you might think Trump was trying to appease the vast number of Republicans who don’t admire Putin as much as he does while maintaining his martyr status among his cultish flock. But in reality it was just another excuse for him to whine about how badly he is being persecuted, which is his one and only 2024 campaign message.
On Tuesday night, Trump appeared on Fox News. When asked about Navalny’s death, he said it was “sad” but implied that Navalny should have known better than to come back to Russia because he knew what was likely to happen. He never said a word about his pal Putin, perhaps hoping the world wouldn’t notice that he was suggesting Putin was as bad as the monstrous Joe Biden.
When asked about the fines he’s been ordered to pay in his New York fraud case he replied:
That’s gibberish but the point was clear enough. Ordering him to pay up is somehow or other equivalent to being killed in an arctic gulag. In fact, he’d gone further than that in a rally earlier in the day:
Trump: "They say the president that was treated the worst was Abraham Lincoln…Lincoln And Jackson was treated badly,…And I haven't seen the new list (of presidents treated badly), but if I'm not number one, over Lincoln, I will be very disappointed."pic.twitter.com/GVraG8l2oi
Trump insists that he is being treated worse than Navalny — and worse than Abraham Lincoln — because he is a spoiled rich boy who has never been held to account for anything he’s done in his life. On some level, I imagine he believes it. But those two men were murdered. He is being held to account through judicial due process, even as he’s running for president, flying around the country in his private jet, hawking gold sneakers and being feted nightly at his gaudy mansion in Palm Beach by his wealthy paying customers.
No one has ever pitied himself more than Donald J. Trump — certainly not Lincoln or Navalny, who were brave leaders trying to change the world for future generations, not whiners who believed everything in the world revolved around them. As former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer observed, Trump is no “strongman.” He is a very weak man, desperately trying to outrun accountability for a lifetime of failure. The reason he cozies up to the likes of Vladimir Putin is because he’s a coward who would rather “preemptively surrender to protect himself than fight to protect others.”
He’s exactly the opposite of someone like Alexei Navalny. So, by the way, are the pathetic Republicans politicians who follow Trump like a horde of lemmings as he tries to lead the nation and the world over the cliff.
I have always assumed Trump would have more than enough money to finance his campaign. There’s a lot of cash floating around and the MAGA cult loves to give him money. Still, this doesn’t seem like good news:
As Donald Trump’s legal troubles consume more and more of his time, they’re also consuming more of his donors’ money—and there’s a huge hole in the bucket.
On Tuesday, Trump’s “Save America” leadership political action committee reported raising just $8,508 from donors in the entire month of January, while spending about $3.9 million, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission.
Nearly $3 million of that overall spending total was used for one purpose: to pay lawyers.
At the same time, the Trump campaign itself reported a net loss of more than $2.6 million for the month of January. It raised about $8.8 million while spending around $11.5 million, according to a separate filing made public on Tuesday.
The filings reveal that Trump is continuing to burn through his donors’ funds as he struggles to feed two massive cash drains—astronomical legal bills stemming from numerous civil cases and four criminal indictments, plus the costs of a national presidential campaign.
After the Trump filings were released on Tuesday evening, his sole primary challenger, Nikki Haley, flashed a sign of strength, with her campaign reporting $11.5 million in receipts last month. It is the first-ever fundraising period where Haley’s campaign outraised Trump.
Despite reporting almost no donations in January, the Save America PAC—a group Trump launched days after the 2020 election, ostensibly to fund legal challenges—actually increased its bottom line by more than $1 million, ending the month with nearly $6.3 million on hand.
However, that increase can’t be chalked up to new donations. It’s entirely due to a $5 million transfer from a different pro-Trump super PAC, which is still in the process of refunding $60 million that the former president demanded back last year, as his legal bills threatened to put Save America, his legal slush fund, into bankruptcy.
The super PAC has been kicking that refund back in $5 million installments beginning late last spring, but that emergency bailout won’t last, either—the full refund is set to be completed by June.
There’s another metric for the depth of Trump’s financial strain: Save America itself had to bail out yet another one of Trump’s PACs, transferring $500,000 to his old campaign committee in the middle of January. That group, called “Make America Great Again PAC,” started the year with only about $570,000 in the bank, so the mid-month injection from the sputtering Save America suggests that MAGA PAC might very well be in danger of bottoming out too.
A Trump spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a comment request.
As he heads into his third consecutive presidential campaign, it’s safe to say Trump’s cash apparatus is complicated.
I know we’re supposed to believe that he’s a juggernaut and we should all be petrified of him. But he lost the last presidential election and he was an incumbent in the middle of a once in century crisis. That isn’t supposed to happen. Historically, the country rallies around the president at times like that. But he lost.
Sure he could cheat again or incite another insurrection. But there are a lot of facts out there that indicate that he’s not the force that everyone seems to think he is. This money madness is yet another sign of it. Where are all the big donors? Where is the cult?
If you missed Tuesday’s reporting by Politico’s Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybla on plans to enact a Christian nationalist agenda in a second Trump term, do have a look. Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, now “president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.” If you thought overturning Roe would turn the U.S. into the Republic of Gilead, that assessment was perhaps not alarming enough:
CRA’s work fits into a broader effort by conservative, MAGA-leaning organizations to influence a future Trump White House. Two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, said that Vought hopes his proximity and regular contact with the former president — he and Trump speak at least once a month, according to one of the people — will elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a second Trump term.
The documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”
Vought has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.
Vought, who declined to comment, is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second term. Among other principles, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” states that “freedom is defined by God, not man.”
Dan Pfeiffer warns that based on statements from Trump advisers, such an agenda might include:
A national abortion ban;
Using FDA authority to ban or greatly restrict access to abortion medication (a defacto abortion ban);
Undermining marriage equality;
Attacking the rights and freedoms of trans people;
This is not theoretical. All across the country, Republican extremists are implementing policies to further involve the government in people’s private decisions. Republicans want to regulate what you read, who you marry, how you procreate, and your medical decisions. In Alabama, the State Supreme Court just ruled that frozen embryos are people which could end access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). There is no doubt that a Trump Administration would argue against IVF in this case.
There are two things we know about Trump. One, he is not a details guy. He pays little attention to what his government does. The Christian Nationalist hacks that he places in these government jobs will have the freedom to run amok. Two, given a choice between appealing to his MAGA base or the broader electorate, Trump will choose the base every day and twice on Sunday.
We’ve warned here for years about the New Apostolic Reformation and Seven Mountains Domionionism that are apparently too in the weeds for Politico to mention. These tales of Christian nationalism are scary and meant to be. They are written to alert non-believers, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and non-conforming others that Christian nationalists mean to render them more marginalized than they are now. In Jesus’ name, of course.
What Pfeiffer and others miss is that Christians are no more a monolithic block than any other subset on the American demographic landscape. Christianity may represent the predominant faith in the U.S., but the whacked-out brand Christian nationalists advocate, noisy as it is, hardly represents the Christian mainstream. So it’s not just non-Christians who need worry that Christian nationalists might gain control of the levers of power. Christian non-nationalists should worry.
MAGA Republicans may be tribal, but the American Taliban is even less willing to tolerate deviations from the decidedly un-Jesusy views that the god whispering inside their heads finds acceptable. God help you, ordinary Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, etc. You are not exempt. Your freedom of religion is not guaranteed.
Puritans executed other Christians in colonial Salem. Christian nationalists in a second Trump term may say, Hold my beer.
“Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.” It’s something I’ve repeated since taking the Hullabaloo morning shift ten years ago. “Working people know in their guts they work for the economy, not the other way around.”
Joe Biden gets it. In July 2021, he spoke of ensuring “that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.” Unfair competition and monopolies the Roosevelts once worked to rein in have landed us in a second Gilded Age.
“Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view,” Biden said, “following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition.”
People still know in their guts they are getting screwed, write Katherine J. Cramer and Jonathan D. Cohen in a New York Times guest opinion:
When asked what drives the economy, many Americans have a simple, single answer that comes to mind immediately: “greed.” They believe the rich and powerful have designed the economy to benefit themselves and have left others with too little or with nothing at all.
We know Americans feel this way because we asked them. Over the past two years, as part of a project with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we and a team of people conducted over 30 small-group conversations with Americans from almost every corner of the country. While national indicators may suggest that the economy is strong, the Americans we listened to are mostly not thriving. They do not see the economy as nourishing or supporting them. Instead, they tend to see it as an obstacle, a set of external forces out of their control that nonetheless seems to hold sway over their lives.
“Greed” is an oversimplification, like reducing the MAGA cult to racism. But it’s handy shorthand for people feeling “the economy is rigged against them.” While income inequality has shrunk somewhat over the last few years, people surveyed still feel their lives are as shaky as a fiddler on the roof, to borrow a famous phrase.
An absence of economic resilience prevents people from spending time with family, from getting involved in their community and from finding ways to build a safety net. “The way the economy is going right now, you don’t know where it’s going to be tomorrow, next week,” a human resources employee in Indiana said. Well-being “is about being financially stable. It’s not about being rich, but it’s about being able to take care of your everyday needs without stressing.”
Stress is a rampant part of American life, much of it caused by financial insecurity. Some people aspire for the mansion on the hill. Many others are looking just to get their feet on solid ground.
Auto loan and credit card deliquencies are up, along with child poverty after the pandemic child tax credit expired. The fiddlers still feel shaky. And our political system is not addressing that sense by meeting their needs:
“In my democracy, I’d like to see us get rid of Republicans, Democrats,” one Kentucky participant told us. “Just stand up there, tell me what you can do. If you can do it, I don’t have to care what you are.” Many Americans seem to see Washington as awash in partisan squabbles over things that have little effect on their lives. Many believe that politicians are looking out for their political party, not the American people.
It should not be surprising, then, that so many are so pessimistic about a seemingly strong economy. A rising gross domestic product lifts lots of boats, but many Americans feel as if they are drowning.
What would make the people we talked to less stressed? The ability to accumulate savings. Low-wage workers have seen their incomes rise only for many of these gains to be wiped out by inflation. And the costs of housing, health care and child care can quickly absorb even a very robust rainy-day fund. Without a safety net that can propel people into security, the threat of these costs will continue to make many Americans feel unstable, uncertain and decidedly unhappy about the economy.
Cramer and Cohen recommend eliminating the benefit cliffs that knock people out of eligibility for financial supports. That would include safety net programs Republicans seem determined to shred for all Americans, their voters included.
Fundamentally, however, what people feel is disempowered, not so much by others’ greed as corrupt elites’ need to stand above and dominate their peers. Accumulated wealth is a means, not the end.
Whatever promises America makes it fails to fully deliver. Over a half century ago, Martin Luther King spoke of broken promises made to its citizens of color. Those remain unfulfilled, but today citizens of color have company. The American economy has defaulted on its promise that anyone who worked hard and played by the rules could get ahead, live a good life, and leave a legacy to their children. Is it any wonder people feel the political system has failed them, not just the economy? Is it as broken as it seems. Biden, ever the optimist. thinks not.
But look at the desperate measures made today, financed by the wealthiest among us, to disenfranchise and marginalize anyone who might ask for a fair share of the tattered American Dream in exchange for their labors. That working people feel their lives as shaky as a fiddler on the roof is no accident. It is intentional.
I’ve been to some wonderful places in my life, but this weekend I found myself somewhere I never expected to be — living rent-free in comedian Jon Stewart’s head.
Stewart was back for his second show on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and apparently felt the need to respond to my very real concerns over his dangerous both-sides-ism last week, when he equated President Biden and Donald.
I criticized him for erroneously elevating my uncle by claiming, “We’re not suggesting neither man is vibrant, productive, or even capable.” Any honest, objective person knows this is completely false — Donald is neither productive nor capable, while, President Biden is both of those to an impressive degree. According to Merriam-Webster, vibrant means “pulsating with life, vigor, or activity.” I’ll leave it to you to decide whom that more accurately describes.
This is the kind of false both-sides-isms I was calling out. I find it dangerous, coming from an incredibly influential public figure, because it leads to voter apathy, which is unacceptable in an election year when the candidate leading one side threatens to eliminate our democracy and the candidate leading the other seeks to strengthen it. My take was overwhelmingly supported by you, The Good in Us community, which is apparently how Stewart heard about it in the first place!
Instead of directly responding to the criticisms from me and others, Stewart did something else entirely:
What Jon Stewart said last night
In his response, Stewart joked about the backlash he received from Democrats:
“I just think it’s better to deal head on with what’s an apparent issue to people. I mean, we’re just talking here.”
That’s when Stewart referred to my statement that “not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”
“It was one fucking show!” Stewart exclaimed. “It was 20 minutes. But I guess, as the famous saying goes, ‘democracy dies in discussion.’”
“But look,” Stewart added with a Southern accent, “I have sinned against you. I’m sorry,” before he insinuated the pushback was propaganda.
In other words, instead of engaging with my actual critique, he set up a straw man. He didn’t defend his false equivalency — he pretended my objection to his comment was that he had made a comment at all.
Besides, Jon Stewart is not just a comedian trying to nail his tight ten at the Comedy Cellar on open mic night. By his own design, he puts himself out to be a serious player and influencer in American politics.
What Jon Stewart got wrong… and right
I never said Stewart shouldn’t be free to express his opinions. But while I believe that all artists, including comedians, should be able to say whatever they want, that doesn’t mean that they’re exempt from criticism.
Here’s what he got wrong:
1. Mischaracterization
I, and many people, who reacted to his comments, were not saying we should avoid mentioning President Biden’s advanced age. I’m not even saying we need to withhold criticism of President Biden in general.
I had an issue with his false premise Biden and Donald can be equated in any way —beyond the fact that they’re both old. The truth is critical right now, when so much is at stake.
We saw what happened when Donald was normalized by the media and people like Jimmy Fallon in 2016. It creates a false narrative that normalizes Donald, the people who support him, and the decision to vote for him.
Yes, President Biden is 81, but he is kind, he is compassionate, he is intelligent, he has a remarkable team, he believes in basic human decency and human rights, and he has been a remarkably effective president. He’s also not a threat to our democracy.
And here’s something President Biden did:
He supported taking care of veterans who were exposed to burn pits by signing the legislation championed by Jon Stewart — the same legislation Republicans were determined to block.
Donald, on the other hand, is a rapist, a fraud, and currently indicted for many extremely serious crimes against our nation. The two sides are NOT the same – and implying they are is never funny.
I stand by what I said: it’s dangerous to democracy.
2. Timing
Stewart said his original segment was only “20 minutes,” as if that somehow mitigates the fact that his message, dressed up as a joke or not, reached millions of viewers.
But it’s not just 20 minutes. He’s been doing some version of this for at least 14 years. (Check out the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” a DC event that gathered hundreds of thousands of Americans to demand more both-sides-ism.)
3. Criticism-free Comedy
Another implication was that I couldn’t take a joke, which is just lazy, because my criticism engaged with the part of his monologue that was, according to Stewart, a statement of fact.
I believe as much as anybody that we need comedy; we need free speech; we need trenchant, funny criticism. I thought Stewart’s roasting of Tucker Carlson over his fawning interview with Putin was spot on.
The role of comedy, the line between comedy and political advocacy influence are incredibly important topics, and I’ll be holding a round-table with comedians in the next week or two to discuss all of it.
We don’t live in an era where pretending both sides are the same is good for America. We need more thoughtful criticism and comedy from people with the kind of platform Jon Stewart has, that takes into account what’s really at stake —democracy in the United States, democracy abroad, and the fate of the planet.
The “Rally To Restore Sanity” was an abomination and I was pretty shocked to see him go back to that well. It wasn’t necessary. There is no one in American except the No Labels grifters and Joe Manchin who see the world that way anymore.
I just hope that Stewart got a bit of a wake up call from that first segment and realizes that this view is no longer relevant. There are fascists in our midst.
I think we all suspect that Haley will end up endorsing Trump. But this doesn’t seem like a very smart way to make that happen. If it’s a close election, Haley’s endorsement might just be helpful. I guess they don’t think they need it.
Biden is fine there and it’s nice to see him mingling with an average family and chatting about their lives. But what’s most interesting is the family itself — a dad raising two boys on his own, living a middle class life trying to build a future for his kids. He’s a school principal and the boys are average all-American teenagers. It just seems so … normal. I guess I need to be reminded of that sometimes.
Trump is not winning the election, or favored, and analysts simply must stop claiming he is – They way our post-Dobbs electoral success and increasingly powerful grassroots is being overly discounted and Trump’s strength as a candidate is being exaggerated has begun to feel a lot like the false red wave media narrative of 2022.
Take a look at these four independent polls of registered voters (not adults) released in the past week. What they find is a close, competitive election:
Emerson 44-45
Economist/YouGov 44-44
Morning Consult 42-43
Lord Ashcroft 40-40
And for some reason, that the last NYT poll released in December has Biden actually ahead of Trump, 47-45 (+2), seems to be continually ignored by everyone.
What all of this tells you is that the race is close and competitive, and we have to do to out and win this thing the way we’ve been winning elections all across the country. Suozzi’s polls had the race very close and he won by 8, in part supercharged by our enormously powerful grassroots. Here’s something I got from the campaign:
In the space of five weeks people knocked on over 150,000 doors, made over 2 million phone calls, and wrote hundreds of thousands of postcards. Our campaign estimates that every Democrat household in the NY-03 received, on average, five handwritten postcards.
We have work to do, no doubt, but let’s look at this chart from Morning Consult, below. Do the math on what happens when the Biden campaign really engages, and gets Democrats to where Trump’s vote is with Republicans – we go ahead by a few points. That is the likely scenario in the next few months. They have had a primary and we haven’t. Their coalition is more engaged, ours is still wandering. This is normal, folks. The work we have to do is doable work. I have no idea how you make Trump look like a serious candidate for President again.
No poll, no election, no commentator can predict the future. But you can make reasonable assumptions with the data that’s in front of you. That’s what I try to do here every day. And to me the likely scenario – not the only scenario – is Biden-Harris keeping our winning streak alive this November and MAGA loses yet another election.
I agree with Josh Marshall on this. The brouhaha over Ezra Klein’s article agitating for Biden to drop out at this late date has been overwhelming and it’s not helpful. The idea of choosing a new candidate at the conventions is downright fanciful. Not gonna happen.
I like Ezra. We are friendly acquaintances and he’s done a ton of good work so I’m not inclined to slag him. But he’s wrong about this and Josh Marshall has the best essay explaining why:
A number of you have written in to ask about Ezra Klein’s audio essay “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden: It’s requires them to embrace an old-fashioned approach to winning a campaign.” Is it a good argument? Does it change the equation? What do I make of it? Just for the purposes of cutting to the chase: my answers are “not really,” “no” and “not much.” But Klein is a smart, articulate guy and sitting at the top of the Times op-ed page he has vast influence. So I wanted to break the argument down into its moving parts.
Klein begins his essay by assuring us that he likes Joe Biden and actually thinks he’s done a good job as President. This is to soften the reader up and dispel any notion that he’s got some anti-Biden axe to grind. I don’t think Klein is disingenuous or cynical about this. I think he believes it. He not only doesn’t think age has hindered Biden in doing the job as President so far; he doesn’t think it would in a second term either. The issue for him, Klein says, isn’t about being President but running for President: Biden has slowed down considerably, even from his last run in 2019–2020, and Biden simply is not up to running a vigorous campaign in which the candidate is an asset, not a liability.
The middle part of the essay basically has Klein knocking down a series of straw man arguments, many of which I’ve never heard before. People say this is age-ism! I haven’t heard this stupid argument. But Trump’s also old! People do say this and it’s true. It’s not really an argument though. He knocks down a few other straw man arguments before getting to one of the real and strongest ones: Biden is, for all intents and purposes, already the nominee. It’s over.
It’s not too late at all, says Klein. How can it be too late when it’s February? (Which isn’t a bad point.) Biden may get all the delegates, which he certainly will. But if he steps aside and releases his delegates then you have an open convention in which party activists and delegates pick the nominee with a free choice. He then outlines a scenario in which a strong bench of possible alternative nominees vie for nomination, generating positive press and party enthusiasm which leads to a vigorous campaign and, hopefully, a general election victory.
This is the gist of Klein’s argument, his “old-fashioned approach” to winning a campaign which is essentially, in his accounting, not to drift into the general election unprepared but have the convention come up with a specific plan for victory. There’s a huge amount of wishful thinking and razzmatazz in this concluding third of the essay. But let’s zero in on two key pivot points.
First, will convention-chosen candidate X do better than Biden? As I noted on Friday, polling evidence makes that assumption at least highly questionable. That’s not the only question. Is early 21st century America really ready for a party nominee literally chosen by a few thousand party insiders and activists? I have real doubts about that. Will the convention not become a forum for litigating highly divisive issues like Gaza, Medicare for All and the broader contest between progressives and establishment-oriented liberals? The last half century of American politics has been based on the idea that the convention is a highly scripted unity launch event. This alternative would mean a free for all, in which the choice between a number of quite promising candidates will be made by a group whose legitimacy will likely be highly suspect. Not good!
Then there’s another issue. Okay, say you’ve convinced us. The thunderdome convention scenario is the better bet. How do we get there? Klein is refreshingly candid about this while somehow not being remotely realistic about how wildly improbable it is. You do it by mounting a public campaign to convince the people in Biden’s inner circle — Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti, maybe Barack Obama and whoever else — to convince Biden to step aside. That’s almost word for word the plan. Let’s drill down on what that means. Your plan is to convince the people who are pretty much by definition the most loyal to and invested in Biden — more than anyone in the entire political world — to abandon the plan they’re already two-thirds of their way through and convince Biden to step aside. We can add the more cynical point that this also means ending their own political careers at the top of the political game. As of today, the right-leaning RCP Average shows Biden 1.1 points behind Donald Trump. Are you really going to point to that and convince them that it’s hopeless? That to me is not remotely a serious plan. It’s not a serious anything.
And what exactly is the plan while you’re executing that plan? Unless I’m missing something, this plan means spending the spring perhaps not campaigning but in the midst of a public intervention trying to make the case that the party’s nominee is too old and frail to be President. On the off chance this plan doesn’t work, that seems pretty damaging to the nominee.
Many people I have this conversation with end the conversation here with a simple “the best thing is for Biden to step aside.” This, I confess, is where my brain generally freezes up. There is clearly a big sense of psychic release from arguing this. I share all the anxieties expressed by those anonymous Democratic insiders and campaign strategists who apparently can’t stop calling reporters and telling them how worried they are. I just don’t see the point of going down this path or, more accurately, waving vaguely toward that path, if there is no plan or likely scenario in which anything like it happens. Maybe I lack imagination.
Which brings me to my final point. Klein’s essay has been the top conversation of the political set since it was published three days ago. It’s garnered many responses like the one from Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe who wrote on Twitter that while he didn’t agree with Klein, “we ignore this problem at our peril. Pretending that enough voters will be motivated by the catastrophic results of a second Trump presidency just won’t suffice. This is a crisis.” This is like others who’ve said that even though Biden is the nominee, “we have to address” the issue, or “can’t ignore” the issue, or have to “discuss” the issue.
(I should be clear: I’m not picking on Tribe. It’s just the last example I saw. It’s relevant because it’s like so many others.)
Given where we are in the calendar, we’re way past the time for general statements of concern. As far as I can see we are talking about it. A lot. Are we ignoring it? We seem to be giving it quite a lot of attention. The only way to “address” or do something about Biden’s age is to replace him with someone else. Of course there are course corrections you can make within the campaign. Jon Alter says the campaign should stop trying to insulate Biden from press availabilities because he might flub some words and put him out more. Accept the flubs, even embrace them. He’s right. But I don’t think that’s what any of these people are talking about.
The right answer to anyone making these kinds of open-ended statements of concern is to say, tell me specifically what course of action you’re advocating and, if it’s switching to a new candidate, how you get there in the next few weeks? Could I end up looking silly if Biden stumbles through the campaign with growing evidence of declining acuity and loses in November? I guess. But I don’t see how that changes the validity of any of the analysis above.
In life we constantly need to make choices on the basis of available options. Often they are imperfect or even bad options. The real options are the ones that have some shot at success. That’s life. Klein’s argument really amounts to a highly pessimistic but not unreasonable analysis of the present situation which he resolves with what amounts to a deus ex machina plot twist. That’s not a plan. It’s a recipe for paralysis.
I think the Democratic Party has thought — or is in the process of thinking — about this, is addressing it, not ignoring it, pick your vague verb. In addition to many strengths, including incumbency, Biden has a big campaign liability: his age. Democrats have decided that even with this liability he’s probably the best shot to defeat Donald Trump. And even if he’s not, there’s no viable path to switching to anyone else. Accentuate the positive, back burner the negatives, and run the campaign.
Exactly.
Oh, and by the way, Democrats have been winning every election since 2018 and Biden just made the biggest fundraising haul in history for the month of January. He’s also been one of the most successful presidents in history, which ought to count for something,
Democrats are perpetual hand wringers. Every election cycle we get this overwrought wailing about how they’re going to lose because of one thing or another. Why just two months ago, the economy was going to sink them because even though the economy was improving, the vibes weren’t. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the vibes are improving substantially on that front, mainly because it takes time for public opinion to catch up with good economic news. Last month it was the border that was going to sink them because the Republicans have the upper hand on that issue and it’s all anyone in this country supposedly cares about. Then the Democrats called the Republicans’ bluff and the issue looks like it might be a wash.
It’s always something. The “age issue” isn’t going away. It’s the one the right wingers have been flogging since the 2020 election and they’ve never let up. Biden is old and he looks old. It’s going to be the thing that Republicans and the press will be hammering until next November. (Recall they did a similar thing with Clinton’s health. It was an undercurrent of that race the whole time too, even though nobody seems to remember that.) There’s no escaping it.
But the one thing people don’t seem to remember in all this hand wringing is that Biden’s opponent isn’t just old, he’s corrupt and he’s crazy on top of it. And that is the biggest problem America faces.
Nobody ever thought this election wouldn’t be close. How could it not be? Tens of millions of people in this country are members of the Trump cult and the Republican Party has become a wholly owned subsidiary of MAGA Inc whose leaders are either terrified of their voters or are craven opportunists who see the upside in a Christian Nationalist autocracy. We’re damned lucky that we even have a chance to defeat that at this point. And we do. But the tool we have for that purpose is the Democratic party and as much as everyone hates them and desires inspiring, wonderfully exciting leadership like they had with Barack Obama, we’re in a different time now. It’s not about feeling good, it’s about defeating fascism. Period. Biden and the Democrats are the instrument at hand to fulfill that mission and there is no choice but to keep ourselves together long enough to get that done.
And, by the way, when you think about Joe Biden being old and decrepit and a poor choice, also consider what his administration accomplished under the most difficult of circumstances.I guess there wasn’t enough drama to keep the press engaged, but it happened nonetheless and he deserves a lot more credit than he’s getting from the people who supposedly care about those things.
As those of you who read my blog regularly know, I have long been critical of the rather self-righteous decision of the networks not to show Donald Trump in all his unhinged glory out of a misplaced sense that it somehow “costs” them to do it. No. It has resulted in way too many people forgetting just what a total nutcase he is. I know they don’t want to think about it but it’s a reality and they need to see it.
This has obviously concerned the Biden campaign which has found through their own polling that people have forgotten what they hated about him and over time have come to see him as rather benign. After all, the Republicans are all still with him,how bad could he be? But they are wrong. He’s worse than he was before and they need to see that. So, that’s why the campaign has decided to highlight the crazy stuff and push it out there hard. It’s the only way to counter this insufferable obsession with Biden’s age and it’s entirely relevant.
You choose: the decent, accomplished old guy or the crazy, corrupt old guy. That’s what’s on the menu.
