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Well, following my own sage advice, I counted to 10 — in every language I could find on Google Translate. I gave the polls a chance to come in, the commentariat a chance to exhaust itself, and Joe Biden a chance to pull a Houdini.
I waited for one overriding reason: In politics, perception is reality. Until the perceptions take shape and sort themselves out, there is, in a sense, no political reality.
It is a cardinal journalistic sin to be “late,” but never have I seen such a tornado of “early” — so many astute and respected observers blowing in such different directions with such force. As if everyone knew what was what and what to do — but just happened to be in violent disagreement.
It ranges from the “Biden is toast and, by the way, I told you that a year ago” pole to the “it’s your typical unfair media pile-on” pole, and everything between. Also from the “an open convention could bring energy and excitement” to the “an open convention would be a flaming disaster” pole. And “Kamala Harris would rally the [insert multiple intersectional identity groups here]” to “Kamala who?” and everything between.
I can’t get past the resemblance to the Hollywood where — according to the great screenwriter William Goldman, who certainly knew — “Nobody knows anything.” Goldman added, “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” I submit the current tarantella of knowing opinion is worse, way worse.
Neither a rational nor an impassioned comparison of the relative merits and deserts of Biden and Trump has much of anything to do with an objective assessment of whether Biden can win in November … and that is the only thing anyone who cares about the survival of the republic should be focusing on right now.
I’ve taken it all in — if I bound together every column, substack, and newsletter I’ve read on this, it could replace my War and Peace on doorstop duty. In fact, I’ve read so much that, with just a few exceptions, I’ve lost track of who wrote what when, who’s dug in, who’s changed their tune once, or twice. Perhaps my cognitive capacities are slipping with age, as has been known to happen. It’s a mosh pit in my mind. Including my own holding forth a little over a week ago.
Nevertheless — and with full ironic self-awareness — I persist. I have a point to make and, if you’ll bear with me for a bit, I’m sure I’ll find it sooner or later.
The Reality
I can begin with what, very simply, I feel. Joe Biden has been a heroic president. Not only did he save us from Donald Trump unleashed by winning in 2020, he then went on to do at least as much to right the wrongs of our Gilded Age and reverse Trump’s global embrace of dictators as anyone, including Bernie Sanders, could have done under the circumstances — which included the intransigence of a captured party/cult hellbent on his failure, a biased media, the residue of a pandemic, and whatever his own limitations may have been.
It is absolutely theater-of-the-absurd galling that Biden is on political life support while Trump — that flaming bastard whom one objective commentator generously described as “ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag” — with his escalating spew of lies and threats, is less questioned than ever, by either press or party, and gets to go around crowing in advance about his “thundering landslides” this November, immune, charmed, not a care in the world.
I spared you all a translation into decorous journalese because: a) That’s how I feel about it; and b) If that’s how I feel about it, you can imagine how Joe and Jill and anyone halfway close to them feel about it. Imagining it might help shed some light on their “No! Fucking!! Way!!!” stance. It feels so nauseatingly unfair, unjust, unright, uneverything to wind up routed, without a vote having been cast, by that criminal and his army of thugs. It feels the way you would feel if you were a batter, the pitcher beaned you, and the umpire ejected you from the game.
The problem is that neither a rational nor an impassioned comparison of the relative merits and deserts of Biden and Trump has much of anything to do with an objective assessment of whether Biden can win in November — or is more or less likely to win than Kamala Harris or another Democrat — and that is the only thing anyone who cares about the survival of the republic should be focusing on right now.
When a star athlete ruptures an Achilles, six MVP awards can’t answer the only questions on every GM’s mind: Can they play, can they compete, can they win? Those questions translate, in the matter at hand, to something personally crueler than an evaluation of Biden’s record or even fitness to serve. They translate to an evaluation of the electorate’s perception of Biden’s fitness to serve, in the unforgiving context in which the next four months will unfold.
The Perception
There has long been something of a consensus that for Biden to win this election, the focus had to be on Trump, his cyclone of lies and threats, and his manifest unfitness to return to the White House. Biden’s accomplishments, however unfairly, were not big selling points — the campaign, at least, had never been able to frame and present them effectively enough to sway the persuadable voters — and his age was a major and enduring pre-debate concern.
It was going to have to be about Trump and it had already become clear that a little thing like a 34-count felony conviction was not a torpedo amidships, was not in fact even going to be much help. And, of course, the rest of the trials are in limbo.
Biden needed Trump to be anxious, aggressive, unhinged — what one observer referred to as “crazed-rally Trump,” as opposed to “reasonable Trump.” Some thought the debate would bring that out and Trump — on the back foot, in danger of losing (and therefore facing convictions and imprisonment) — would spiral into increasingly desperate displays of unhinged word-salad rhetoric.
But, as we have agonizingly observed, the opposite happened. Trump got, in quick succession, the gifts of Biden’s implosion and his own legal immunity. On the front foot, smelling victory, Trump has — outside of rallies, at least — transitioned into “reasonable Trump,” lovingly embracing the role of the candidate more fit to serve, a veritable safe haven, a rock.
Of course this is absurd — Trump is none of those things. He’s a terrible danger, all the more so in light of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott-class presidential immunity decision. But… perception.
You can just about feel the change in the weather, the turn of things. The focus is squarely and intensely on Biden — all Trump has to do to win is not show his crazed-rally face in public. Indeed, as a sickening sense of inevitability settles in, it may truly be said that more than half the battle for Trump is just not showing up.
The Voters
The polls are telling us — in an odd, but understandable, way. The “horse race” — which had been dead-heat stable for months — opened up a couple of points in Trump’s favor, which the Biden camp has pointed to as less than catastrophic, and reparable. That is because the electorate is now, thanks in large part to Trump, so polarized and tribal that, to some extent, Trump’s “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, not lose any votes” now applies across the board.
Joe Biden’s cooperation at this stage might make it possible for either Harris or another Democrat to make this election about Trump again, to turn the “double-haters” back into “Trump-haters” and give them somewhere to go. To give the Democrats back some spring in their step.
But beneath the horse race, the concerns about Biden’s age and fitness have spread such that, in the latest ABC/Ipsos poll, 56 percent of Democratic voters think that Biden should withdraw from the race. That, if you’re Team Biden, should be a terrifying number (along with the 85 percent of all voters who think he’s too old to serve). Voters are not forgetting, and not going to forget, the debate, in which Biden was, to borrow an NBA term, posterized — not by Trump or the moderators, but by himself.
One can lambast the media for not knowing how to cover Trump, for giving him a virtual free pass for his lies, threats, and word salads. One can howl at the moon about double standards, both political and journalistic. One can exhort them, beg them to start doing their job, start casting the same cold, jaundiced eye on Trump’s “Hannibal Lecter” inanities and crying-mothers-to-dirty-airports nonsequiturs as they have on Biden’s frailties. Biden himself, and his surrogates, can call out instance after instance of Trumpian mendacity, criminality, and depravity — can ask, with the rest of us, “What the hell is going on here?!”
To what avail? The reality is the media won’t and Biden can’t land those blows. Not effectively enough to win this election; not when the tribal inertias are such even the most modest movement in the electorate requires herculean effort; and, most importantly, not while Biden himself is the prime, if not exclusive, focus of the fitness question.
That is the “unforgiving context” of the next four months I referred to above.
What Might Yet Be
It is a brutal dynamic for those of us squinting from the back row of the bleachers, all the more brutal for the players on the field, and most brutal of all for Joe Biden himself. Because this is a decision that can not be finessed, revised, or reversed. It’s all-in, whatever’s going through your mind, until the very moment you’re all-out — and it’s for keeps.
Biden’s cooperation at this stage might make it possible for either Harris or another Democrat to make this election about Trump again, to turn the “double-haters” back into “Trump-haters” and give them somewhere to go. To give the Democrats back some spring in their step.
As I pointed out in my “Count to 10” column, there’s certainly no guarantee that the Democrats can find their way through the minefield to some semblance of unity. Early-on I wondered whether Biden might be playing for time, while the Democrats got their ducks in a row. But beyond a certain point, which we are likely approaching, Biden must know that the longer he holds out — giving it his all, the old college try, clinging to what feels right and just but is likely doomed — the worse his party’s prospects become.
Trump, shrewd cage-fighter that he is, shows every sign that he knows this. He knows that a Trump-Biden campaign will not cease to be about Biden; he knows that, however indignant, the Democrats will lack genuine energy and enthusiasm; he knows that a different opponent is a new and dangerous calculus, much to be feared. He is behaving accordingly. Why else would he interrupt his newfound Zen affect to go on a rant against George Clooney’s Biden takedown?
What It Is and Is Not About
I watched the late, great Willie Mays hang on too long. I was a teenage Met fan when Willie came back to New York to finish his long career, and I saw him, perhaps the best and most graceful athlete ever to play the game, the maker of perhaps the most memorable World Series catch (and throw) in history, fall on his face chasing a fly ball. It was a sad way to go out.
But Willie did not take a whole country (and, we suspect, much of the world) with him when he fell. He dusted himself off and headed back to the dugout to, if I remember correctly, a standing ovation.
Now it’s a different ballgame. Now we all have a stake and the stakes are immense. Joe Biden — for whom I retain such admiration and gratitude — lost me, as I believe he lost many others, with his response when, near the end of his interview, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked how he would feel, looking back, if he stayed in the race and Trump became president, “and everything you’re warning about comes to pass.”
Biden responded: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did [as good a] job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
But that is decidedly not what this is about — not for us, not for the country, not for the world.
It is about whatever course gives the best chance of keeping Donald Trump out of power and our nation a democratic republic in earnest — however unfair, absurd, distressing, or defeating it feels to any individual, including our president.
Yes, we’ve heard it since we were little kids, in camp or scouts or Little League: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” Then again, Knute Rockne never said “Go out there and lose one for the Gipper!”
So, I’ve had my say, for the moment, and made my point. But remember, please, nobody knows anything — and that includes me.
