Dems in Disarray! No, For Reals This Time

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden touring Valley Forge. Photo by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

If nothing else, the current online commentariat freakout folks are having post-presidential debate is giving us some masterpiece metaphors, mixed and otherwise, and some deliciously over-the-top media hyperbole:

Washington Post:

But during the four-state swing after the debate — during which he inaugurated a visitor center at the Stonewall National Monument and attended three fundraisers — Biden’s traveling entourage operated with a breezy, nothing-to-see-here attitude, as if pantomiming a thriving campaign not in the midst of an existential crisis.

A top aide to the first lady danced as Diana Ross blared on the tarmac in Raleigh in the wee hours of Friday. Mike Donilon, a longtime confidant to the president and chief strategist of his campaign, eschewed a suit for casual summer wear: a seersucker short-sleeve, button-down shirt and suede horsebit loafers. And aides scoffed at reporters when they asked the president whether he planned to drop out.

Two of Biden’s granddaughters joined him for the final day of the swing, before they reunited with the rest of the Biden clan ahead of a scheduled family photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz at Camp David — a tableau that, as party leaders privately fretted about a second Trump term ushering in the end of American democracy, had echoes of Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

NY Times:

By necessity, it is an incomplete picture. As Mr. Biden has aged, the White House has limited his encounters with reporters. While he frequently stops for a couple minutes to answer a question or two, as of Sunday, Mr. Biden had granted fewer interviews than any president of the modern era and fewer news conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan, according to statistics compiled by Martha Kumar, a longtime scholar of presidential communication.

On the occasions that Mr. Biden has chosen to speak with reporters on short notice, it has not always gone well. In February, he angrily hit back against a special counsel’s report on his handling of classified documents, in which the special counsel, Robert K. Hur, characterized the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The furious president defended himself and his memory to reporters but referred to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt as the “president of Mexico” in the process. On Monday, House Republicans sued the Biden administration in an attempt to procure audio of Mr. Biden’s interviews with Mr. Hur.

But those 23 days before Mr. Biden met Mr. Trump on the television stage in Atlanta may be viewed by historians as the most critical three weeks in a consequential presidency, as the president faced an opponent he not only loathed, but viewed as an existential threat to American democracy. Were the wandering, inconclusive thoughts broadcast live to more than 50 million viewers just a bad night, a product of the exhausting month, or something larger? Had he not been crisscrossing the globe so frequently — including leaving Italy for a trip spanning nine time zones to a fund-raiser in Los Angeles — would it have made a difference?

Or, as Alex Thompson quipped on Twitter in reporting on an “all-staff” White House call being set up:

“Dems in Disarray!” in the Trump era has become a subgenre of news media and commentary. It is a running joke and the pejorative phrase of choice in the commentary sections and talking head transcripts across the fruited plain. “Disarray” is subjective. What the Democratic Party is going through right now is the result of choices they themselves have made leading up to it. Joe Biden was the alternative to Bernie Sanders in 2020 that Democratic primary voters ran, not walked, to the polls to support starting in South Carolina and quickly wrapping up the nomination. The battle cry of the also-rans in that primary as they dropped out and supported Joe Biden was variations on the theme of “we must beat Trump no matter what.”

And Joe Biden did beat Donald Trump. The “no matter what” part that was the clarion call through the campaign didn’t make it into the acceptance speeches.

The age that a potential President Biden would be heading into 2024 was known then. It didn’t change. The Biden of 2020’s campaign was clearly not the Biden who handled Paul Ryan in a tv debate in 2012 where Joe constantly interrupted, used mocking laugher to great effect, and wielded his deep quiver of cliches to great effect against policy nerd supreme Paul Ryan. 2020 Biden, even diminished from than that classic performance, was good enough against a flailing, undisciplined Trump to drive home Biden’s best argument for the presidency of “I’m not Trump.”

Which is the core problem Joe Biden 2024 has post-debate: “I’m not Trump” doesn’t work if the Trump alternative is giving folks visceral reactions of “I can’t watch this” on tv.

What Team Biden is fighting right now against an avalanche of coverage is two-fold.

First, the Biden reelection effort is fighting a pent-up need for a compelling story in the 2024 presidential campaign. News media has been bored to tears and suffering with Trump v Biden round 2 not having much juice to it, so Dems in Disarray! to the level of calling for the sitting President of the United States to step down is just what the ratings, clicks, and ad revenue was needing. The smoldering embers of the political news business that have been yearning for the full blaze they have mostly enjoyed during the Trump era now has enough fuel to fire up the rest of the 2024 campaign with Biden speculation and Trump reaction. News media gets by on the news cycle diehards, but the medium’s business model really thrives when the average, non-political viewers start turning in.

Secondly, the President and his team now have the worst possible perception problem. Joe Biden has decades of gaffes, mistakes, and errors already in the books, and transitioning from slightly off Uncle Joe to frightening shell-of-himself Joe brings it all back up. Years of commentary and reporting on “he’s too old” – which gets worse every year as the man does indeed get older – now go from an accusation to a video reinforced fact for many folks. Joe Biden’s long history and well-known issues as a candidate, politician, and a man are all now under further review. A review by the merciless replay officials of an American press and media that mostly excused and ignored Biden’s decline until they could make content off not excusing and ignoring it, and an American electorate that doesn’t pay attention. Or, at least, didn’t pay attention until President Joe Biden declared “we finally beat Medicare” to 40 million viewers while attempting to answer a question about the national debt.

Neither of those two core problems have a strictly political answer to them. But political answers are all the Democratic Party has right now since they can’t do a thing about age and not much more about perception. Like a sports team whose fate at getting into the playoffs is no longer in their own hands and needs other teams to lose, the Biden 2024 campaigns best hope now is Trump self-destructs and allows the president to make what would be a historic comeback. Which is possible. But possible isn’t a plan. Thus, the scheming machinations of how to replace Joe Biden to stop an increasingly likely Trump second term is going to be all over our news feeds for the foreseeable future.

To whatever extent Dems in Disarray! is true, it is because there are always tradeoffs in politics. The Democratic Party decided beating Trump “no matter what” was worth nominating an historically old and legendarily gaffe-prone Joe Biden for president in 2020. The American electorate agreed and made Joe Biden President of the United States and rejected Donald Trump.

Now four years later, the bill looks to be coming due on the “no matter what” portion of that political equation. Some of the Dems in Disarray! caterwauling might well be a slow realization that, instead of removing Donald Trump from the White House forever, running Biden might have just delayed the second term of Donald Trump by four years. The public struggle session over “was it worth it” if that turns out to be the case will be a whole new level of Dems in Disarray! lore.

That’s the beauty of the Dems in Disarray! narrative; the natural ups and downs of a political party’s cycle in a two-party system means you can bust out Dems in Disarray! at least half of the time regardless of context. Meanwhile, there is a convention to have, decisions to be made, and an election to contest, if they can. The Democratic Party better get to work and do something about their Dems in Disarray! perception no matter how much validity it has. Besides the drama surrounding President Biden there is a US Senate majority in almost certain danger of going down, and a real possibility of taking the House of Representatives back.

No amount of “But Trump” is fixing the self-made situation the Democratic Party finds itself in. If Trump is to lose in November, Team Blue will need a lot of electoral help from the public who currently see the race as a “we don’t want either guy” contest between morally unfit for office and physically unfit for office.

But maybe the Democratic Party can overcome that. Just got to get in array, or something.