Next Tuesday is the publication date for the
new book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson. The book tells us that the Democratic loss in 2024 was
all President Biden's fault.
Joe Biden “totally fucked us” by leaving it too late to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election, a former top campaign aide to Kamala Harris has told the authors of a new book.
David Plouffe, who was manager of Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign and a senior adviser in his White House, was drafted in to help Harris’s bid for president after the declining Biden withdrew from the race last summer.
Harris’s 107-day sprint against Donald Trump was “a fucking nightmare”, Plouffe is quoted as saying by authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. A copy was obtained by the Guardian.
“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe adds, reflecting on the former US president’s decisions to run for re-election and then to cling on for more than three weeks after a catastrophic debate performance against Trump raised questions about his mental acuity and age. “He totally fucked us.”
... In the wake of Harris’s loss [Plouffe] posted a message on X – formerly known as Twitter – that the Harris campaign had begun in a “deep hole”.
Plouffe's argument is that the lateness of Biden's departure from the race left him and other campaign professionals with inadequate time to work their magic. But the substitution of Kamala Harris for Biden in July 2024 led to a
surge in the polls for the Democratic ticket and a
massive wave of donations. Although the wave of enthusiasm was widely dismissed as a
"sugar high," Harris seemed to have a decent chance of winning
before the consultant bros came on board. Maybe they were the problem.
In an
excerpt from the book published in
The New Yorker, Tapper and Thompson quote George Clooney:
Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, “that’s how Trump won.”
But was the country really deceived? Clips of Biden "senior moments," both real and manufactured, were all over the internet throughout Biden's term. This wasn't like the cover-up of Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's in his second term. Voters knew that Biden was past his prime.
Would an earlier Biden withdrawal have saved America from a second Trump term? We have no way of knowing. I'll remind you that every contested Democratic primary since 2004 has been a battle between the Establishment and insurgents that left a significant number of voters bitter. In 2008, everything worked out, despite the lingering anger of Hillary Clinton supporters; in 2020, when Establishment candidates banded together to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination, everything worked out again, but barely. (Biden received a record number of votes and won the popular vote decisively, but the swing states were extremely close.) On the other hand, in 2004, the Howard Dean insurgency was seen as a problem to be solved, and the Establishment's consensus candidate -- an uncharismatic John Kerry -- couldn't bring home a win. And in 2016, many voters were furious when Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and some of those voters have continued to blow off the Democratic Party.
When Tapper and Thompson
tell us that “The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” and when the subtitle of their book calls Biden's decision to run in 2024 "disastrous," what they're saying is that an earlier withdrawal would have
guaranteed a Democratic victory. I'm not sure what else they could be saying, because the actual election couldn't have been much closer without tipping to Harris: Trump won the three states that gave him a victory, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania,
by less than 1.75% each. Tapper and Thompson don't challenge this anonymous quote that appears in the
New Yorker excerpt:
“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.”
But we don't know that.
If there's an "original sin" here, it's not Biden's choices with regard to the 2024 election and it's not the way Biden's team managed his diminished state, which wasn't a particularly effective cover-up. The "original sin" is how Biden managed his presidency. He did many good things, but he was a godawful public communicator, and he didn't delegate public communication to Harris or any other subordinates. He wasn't able to offer his side of the story every day in an effective way, which meant that the Republican smear machine operated without genuine opposition for four years.
In addition, I think age left Biden -- as it's left other old people I've known -- wanting to focus on what
he wanted to focus on, which meant he was less capable of pivoting to other subjects. He wanted to manage the global coalition against Russia, and he did that effectively. He took pride in the Inflation Reduction Act, which included many provisions that would have improved Americans' lives and would have helped the planet deal with climate change. But he wasn't nimble enough to pivot to inflation, which damaged a lot of voters and continued to have a significant impact even after it cooled, probably because of record-high interest rates on credit cards. He also never found an effective strategy or message as Trump and the rest of the GOP noise machine ginned up a panic about immigration.
Excepts and reviews of the Tapper/Thompson book have persuaded me that Biden
at his worst was somewhat more impaired than I realized. The
New Yorker excerpt focuses on a fund-raiser at which -- after a grueling amount of travel -- Biden doesn't recognize George Clooney, and other observers see Biden struggling.
Clooney was certainly not the only one concerned. Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with [Barack] Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.
Obama didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. At one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking—barely audibly—and trailed off incoherently. Obama had to jump in and preside. At other moments, during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.
It's obviously a problem that, as the
New York Times review
notes, Biden staffers had to develop a habit of "restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m." The
Times review tells us that "By late 2023, [Biden's] staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday."
But midday Biden appears to have been a knowledgeable, thoughtful president with good judgment -- and his replacement is none of these things at any hour of the day. Biden and his smart, capable, decent aides ran the country better -- and, I believe,
would have continued to run the country better -- than the current motley crew of know-nothings, flatterers, bigots, scoundrels, and psychopaths.
For the good of the country, we deserved to have a third option. Eventually we got one, and it's probably the one we would have had if there'd been a full slate of contested primaries. (The source material is gone, but in 2023 and the first half of 2024,
as I noted last summer, Kamala Harris won every national Democratic primary poll listed at FiveThirtyEight that didn't include Biden.) Regrettably, America rejected the capable alternative the Democrats offered -- and that might very well have happened even if Biden had announced he wasn't running a couple of years earlier.
