Joe Biden lost it even before winning the presidency.
It is the most notable revelation of Original sin,, A new presentation of the length of the Book of the White House of Biden by Alex Thompson of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN.
Thompson and Tapper mainly fulfill the details of a story that we already knew: Biden’s cognition strongly refused in the past two years in power, and its basic advisers Pilomed to disguise this reality of donors, democratic and public leaders.
But the authors also justify Those who believed This Biden was already in good shape before winning the presidency. Their book suggests that the cognitive decline of the former president began after the tragic death of his beautiful son of brain cancer in 2015. In December 2019, Biden had trouble remembering the name of his best adviser Mike Donilon, with whom he had worked for 38 years, and with make coherent conversations With voters on zoom.
Original sin is a sad book, made everything the saddest by This week’s news This Biden has metastatic prostate cancer. It is also an exasperating reading that illuminates selfishness and self-lights that have led an octogenarian to present himself for a second presidential term-and a team of sycophanic advisers to hide his state from the public (and perhaps, even of himself).
This story was first presented in The Rebuild.
Register here For more stories about the lessons that the Liberals should withdraw from their electoral defeat – and a more in -depth examination of the place where they should go afterwards. Of the main correspondent Eric Levitz.
That said, Original sinThe basic argument of the aspect – that Biden’s reluctance to retire THE The main cause of the defeat of the Democrats in 2024 – is not convincing.
Thompson and Tapper argue that Biden had left the 2024 race in a timely manner, “a primary and competitive caucus would have produced a stronger democratic candidate, the one who had more experience with the debates and took questions from journalists, one with an American response more comfortable and more precise as to the reason they were running, one with time to present themselves to the American people.”
But the idea that competitive primaries inevitably raise strong candidates – and / or improve mediocre – is undermined by the own reports of the book.
In truth, if Biden had abandoned earlier, the Democrats could have plausibly worse Last year. Biden has definitely undermined his party. But he made his politically damaging decisions long before the 2024 campaign.
Why a primary in 2024 could have been bad for the Democrats
Thompson’s confidence and tapping that competitive primaries inevitably give solid candidates are bizarre. After all, by their own account, the last contested democrat primary produced a candidate who was unable to campaign vigorously, to speak coherently or to remember the names of close friends. Perhaps Biden was nevertheless the strongest candidate that the Democrats could have gathered in 2024. But if this is the case, that says nothing good on the party process to choose the presidential candidates.
In reality, Biden won the 2020 primary because he was vice-president in 2016. His old post provided him with a certain degree of name and cachet recognition that no other moderate could match. The aura vice-presidential was strong enough to compensate Early funding shortageOratory incompetence and stumbles in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Thanks largely to its curriculum vitae, Biden triumphed in South Carolina, thus established itself as the only viable alternative to Bernie Sanders. The group center-left quickly consolidated behind him.
All this has implications for what a primary resembles in 2024. More specifically, this suggests that Kamala Harris would have been extremely likely to win such a competition. Harris was not just a former vice-president, but in place. She did not reject the enthusiasm of donors (as Biden 2020 had done) but inspired her.
Counterfeiting is impossible to prove. No one can know with certainty how a primary opened in 2024 would have disappeared. Knowing how things have proven to be in our chronology, I hope that such a competition has occurred, if the case has produced a different result.
But I think Harris would probably have won the 2024 primary. And there is a decent chance that she would have emerged for wear.
A primary could have harmed Harris in 2024
Recall that the Harris primary campaign in 2020 gave him a weaker candidate in the general elections four years later by Associate it With unpopular positions on immigration, health care and many other things. Harris would probably have adopted a more cautious approach to positioning in a primary in 2024 (like her made during its general electoral offer). But a contested primary would have forced him to make high -level concessions to democratic interest groups with unpopular requests or to loudly reject these positions. Anyway, she was required to generate bitterness among a part of her coalition or another.
To be clear, this process may have been precious. In my opinion, the Biden administration was accomplice of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. It is theoretically possible that a contested primary could have led Harris (if not Biden) to adopt a more contradictory posture towards the Israeli government. But from a purely electoral point of view, increasing the intra-democratic arguments of division against Gaza, immigration and other questions at the beginning of 2024 would probably not have been for the benefit of the party.
All this to say, it is plausible that Biden abandons so late, in fact, advantage. His late departure allowed Harris to immediately focus on the call to the general electorate. And although Harris advisers argue that the truncated chronology of their campaign injured them, it is not obvious that this is true. In many cases, the presidential candidates have become more unpopular the more they were under national spotlights: the favorable note of Hillary Clinton fell from 64% in 2014 at 38% in 2016According to the Gallup survey.
And Harris seems to have suffered from the same basic trend: his favorable note was 48.8% last September but fell to 46.7 percent of the polling dayIn the average of Reallearpolitics survey. It is therefore possible that Harris benefiting to have a shorter campaign calendar.
Joe Biden still has Trump’s re -election
None of this is supposed to exempt Biden for the re -election of Donald Trump. On the contrary, no democrat is no longer responsible for this result.
It is very difficult for a political party to win another lease in the White House when its president is historically unpopular. And in November 2024, the Biden approval rating Sitting 37%.
We do not live in a political universe. A large part of the unpopularity of Biden was not deserved. Any president who was in power in 2022 was almost certain to preside over inflation, thanks to the consequences of Covid and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Given the circumstances, biden economic file To recommend a lot.
Nevertheless, there remains the case that Biden chaired historically high inflation, which he did practically nothing to fight. And he also supervised a Historical overvoltage in unauthorized immigration politically toxic (Despite being economically beneficial), and failed to approach the majority discontent with record asylum entries until the end of his mandate. Throughout all this, he salted Democrats with a norm holder that could Barely string sentences together off the cuff.
All this meant that in 2024, the Democrats needed a candidate who had either the distance of the White House or the generational political talents (and ideally, both). By choosing a running mate in 2020 which 1) had clearly presidential ambitions and 2) was a Suboptimal standard carrier For national democrats, Biden made it very unlikely that his party has what he needed in last year’s race.
Harris led a respectable campaign. Given the unpopularity of Biden, the fact that it came to only 230,000 votes within a majority of electoral colleges is a success. But she had obvious weaknesses as general electoral candidate: she was a Californian liberal who had taken deeply unpopular positions in the past, had never won elections outside a deep blue zone and had trouble speaking convincingly and with confidence in the interviews.
The fact that Harris was not an ideal democratic candidate is not only my opinion – it was also that of Biden. His advisers said Tapping and Thompson that his real “original sin” “chose Kamala Harris because his heart was with Gretchen Whitmer”.
It is always irresponsible for a presidential candidate to choose a running mate who, according to them, would make a weak national candidate. But it is particularly reckless for a 78 years old presidential to do so. However, this is what Biden knowingly did in 2020, according to his own inner circle.
The most important lessons of 2024 have little to do with the age of Biden
Obviously, a lesson that Democrats should take from the past four years is “it is bad to hide the rapid mental deterioration of an elderly presidential candidate”. But that should not be the main thing to remember – both because it is unlikely to be relevant in the near future and because the age of Biden was not the biggest problem of Democrats last year. The voters did not reject Harris because his boss was old, but rather because they thought that the Democrats would do a Worse work of economics management and immigrationand that Trump was closer to them ideologically that Harris was not.
The most relevant lessons of 2024 are that 1) Democratic candidates for the presidential must prioritize political talents on sycophy or identity when selecting racing companions and 2) Democratic administrations must strive to respond to the main concerns of the electorate when they are in office.
More concretely, the Democrats as a party must put a distance between them and Joe Biden.
The former president has accomplished worthy things. But he also made a lot of badly advised and deeply selfish decisions. His administration voluntarily deceived the public while providing results that voters did not like. Democrats would likely have struggled to appoint a critical stranger to Biden’s White House in 2024, even if they had an open primary. But they will have a better opportunity to raise such a candidate in 2028 – and they should seize it.