None Dare Call It A Conspiracy, Because It Wasn’t
![None Dare Call It A Conspiracy](https://i0.wp.com/ordinary-times.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2048px-Kamala_Harris_2024_-_16-e1722172357306-1024x512.jpg?resize=720%2C360&ssl=1)
Vice President Kamala Harris shares a statement to reporters before Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews, Wednesday, February 14, 2024, in Maryland. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
Right now, the Republican Party is a dog sitting in the middle of the road with a muffler dangling from its mouth wondering what to do next. After months — really, years — of insisting that Joe Biden was mentally incapable of being President, he stepped down from the race. And instead of throwing the Democratic Party into the hoped-for chaos, the party quickly rallied behind Kamala Harris, who now seems a lock to be the 2024 nominee.1
As a result, the Trumpists seem a bit discombobulated. Early attacks on Harris have veered into sexism and racism: calling her a “DEI Vice President”; insisting she can’t be President because she never gave birth; implying, falsely, that she owes her entire career into a brief relationship with Willie Brown 30 years ago. They also seem to be trying to merge the “Copmala” criticisms from the Left with “soft on crime” criticisms from the Right, which is an odd and unstable mix. I suspect they will settle down into standard “all Democrat are Communists” mode eventually.
But two of the opposition criticisms of what just happened have been shared by some on the Left: that Biden was “deposed” in a “coup” and/or that the Democrats and the media were concealing his mental decline. That these narratives are a bit in tension doesn’t seem to bother anyone. But neither criticism is quite valid, I think.
First, there is the process by which Harris was chosen. The most extensive and thoughtful criticism comes from Freddie Deboer:
Some people really had opinions about my brief flash of unhappiness over the process through which Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president – a coronation which did not require her to receive a single vote from an actual, normal Democratic voter. (It remains the case that she has never received a single vote from any voters outside of California, ever, in her political career, which some might suggest represents a wee bit of risk.) I remain disgusted but not surprised by the Democratic party and its machinations, where not even the smallest fig leaf of democratic process survived Harris’s blitzkrieg approach to the nomination. (That is, having it handed to her by her friends in elite Democratic circles.) And I think Democrats are essentially rerunning 2016, where their loyalty to the Clintonite center-right political machine compelled them to nominate an incredibly flawed candidate in a race in which any generic Democratic governor or senator almost certainly would have won. The party never learns. And so we have the confluence of strategic idiocy and rank elitist control. Well: I decline to obediently get onboard the way that (for example) the entire New York Times Opinion section has.
Freddie’s criticisms are several: that Harris is a flawed candidate and an actual primary might have picked a better one; that the country may not be ready to elect a woman of color; and that the primary was a primary in name only since Biden was basically guaranteed the nomination.
All the criticisms are reasonable. I agree with all three. But I still think that the party coalescing behind Harris was the least bad of the options presented once it became clear that Biden could not both run for President and be President at the same time.
First, the idea that the Democrats could run some kind of blitz primary between now and the convention seems less a political possibility than a fantasy from The West Wing. Organizing such a thing would be a massive undertaking. And it’s not clear at all that the winner of such a rushed primary would have any kind of legitimacy as far as the Democratic base is concerned. It’s not clear that participation would be any higher in a blitz primary than it was in the actual primary.
A quick primary would also fail to address the biggest concern: that Harris may not be able to run a successful campaign down the stretch. Such a primary is not going to favor a candidate who can organize for the long haul; it will favor a candidate who can grab the spotlight for a week.
Consider the 2020 primary. While Biden started out with a lead and eventually maintained it, there were brief periods where Warren and Sanders were leading. There were brief surges by Buttigieg, Klobuchar and, God help us, Michael Bloomberg. But none of those candidates were able to maintain their momentum. All of them might have lost to Trump because none of them could consolidate their support. Now imagine doing a blitz primary at any point in that process. You probably would not have chosen Biden but some candidate who had a temporary moment in the Sun before fading badly.
And, because this is politics, it can always be worse. Check out the 2012 Republican primary. At various points, Cain, Gingrich and even Santorum led. Michelle Bachmann had a brief surge. But Romney outlasted them. The primary system has innumerable problems but one of its strengths is it values building an organization over a brief flash of enthusiasm. A quick primary destroys that strength.
Moreover, even that supposed “strength” of the primary is very limited. Freddie describes the primary system as the immune system of the parties, getting rid of bad candidates. Maybe that was true once but that immunological function has long faded. Trump won primaries three times. Clinton won the primary in 2016 and then bungled the general. The extreme partisanship of US politics means that primaries, frequently voted in only by hefty partisans, often produce candidates that can’t win the general election. Our gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania produced a Republican candidate so extreme that I knew people who left hospital beds to vote against him.
A true primary, taking place over months, might have fulfilled the function of producing the best candidate. Or it might have torn the party apart along sectional lines. But it’s academic. Once Biden stepped down, there was a critical need to settle on a candidate ASAP. And not just for party unity or whatever. The GOP has been threatening lawsuits to keep Biden on the ballot. The Democrats already had to jump through hoops to maintain access to Ohio’s ballot. Had this process drawn out even a little bit, the GOP would have been guaranteed to bring a lawsuit before a sympathetic court trying to strike the nominee from ballots in a swing state. Indeed, they are already filing lawsuits over the election with the openly stated hope of overturning the vote in a critical state or muddying the waters enough to throw the election to the House.
The one thing to come out of this mess was the realization among Democrats that it needed to be settled fast, not drawn out in a lengthy, bruising and electorally ruinous convention fight.
Is that un-small-d-democratic? Maybe. But I’ve long been dubious of primaries. And, in the end, the strength of democracy isn’t that the people get what they want; it’s that politicians are held accountable. If Harris loses, her political career will be finished.
And frankly, I do think there is a point in those who argue that Democratic voters did have a voice in this. They voted not for Biden but for his delegates. And if the candidate steps down, that frees the delegates to vote for whomever they feel best represents the interests of the party. And they have decided, very quickly, that the best course is Kamala Harris. The Democratic voters and the nation elected Harris Vice President in 2020. And while it’s been 60 years since a VP had to step into the big pants, that is part of the job description. It’s not all smiling at state dinners and hanging out with cool astronomers at the Naval Observatory.2
The Right Wing, as usual, is more disordered in their thinking but the talking point emerging from MAGA is that this was a coup staged against a failing old man. Nonsense. Joe Biden isn’t that far gone.3 He’s a grown-ass man who has been in politics longer than most voters have been alive. The smooth transition to Harris and the way prominent Democrats fell in line instantly smacks of his hand on the rudder. This is exactly the way you would expect it to have gone had he been persuaded it was time to step down. And again, this is not unprecedented. Johnson declined to run for a third term because it was clear he wouldn’t have the support of the party. In the 19th century, numerous incumbents failed to win their party’s nomination because of internal politics or administrative failure. To be blunt, this talking point seems less about what just happened to the Democrats and more of the endless unceasing attempts by MAGA to whaddabout the events of January 6. The two events are not remotely comparable.
Now it may turn out the Democrats are screwed anyway. Harris’s 2020 campaign famously ended before a vote was cast and the turnover among her staff has approached Trumpian levels of chaos. And while she’s been making the rounds and pulling in donations, this will come down to grassroots organizing and getting the vote out, two things she has not shown the chops for…yet.
In the end, I partially agree with critics: the best course would have been for Biden to have announced two years ago that he wasn’t going to run again. But coulda woulda shoulda. Of the options the Democrats faced, this was the least bad one. And also the one that most reflects what their own party wants.
——————————————————-
The second criticism to emerge is that the Democrat and the media knew that Biden was effectively a vegetable for the last few years. The flavors of this range from a simple cover-up to Harris having secretly been running the government for the past year or two. But while this a tempting narrative, I also find it wanting. The reason is my father’s Oldsmobile.
When I was a teenager, my first car was literally my father’s Oldsmobile. The car was … not in the best shape. It would occasionally refuse to start. It would occasionally stall in traffic. The less said about the air conditioning, the better. But it was perfectly serviceable. It got me to school and back. Occasionally, we’d have to replace a part that had mysteriously failed but it was OK. I was fine with it. I thought it would certainly last me through college.
And then one day, it completely died in the middle of the road.
It turned out that, among other problems, the car had a faulty computer chip that would occasionally short out and/or destroy components of the engine. The day it died for good, it did this to so much of the engine, the only solution was replacing it. So we sold it “as is” and got a Ford.4
I feel like this entire Biden “cognitive decline” narrative is a lot like the slow collapse of my Oldsmobile. Biden would occasionally appear a bit lost or garble his words. But, for the most part, he was fine. He got some legislation passed. He gave a State of the Union that went as smoothly as my Oldsmobile down the Stone Mountain Freeway. It was easy for people to write off any problems as isolated lapses or media exaggerations. And, to be fair, the GOP did have a tendency to exaggerate anything he did into some supposed sign of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s combined, often by snipping out the context of 7-second video clips.
There was also just a stark refusal to admit that the Republicans might have a point. The politics of our age is defined by Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Whatever the other party says must be wrong. If Democrats say grass is green, the Republicans will hold a press conference saying grass is blue and only Communists think it is green. A big reason the Democrats were in denial was because Republicans kept insisting that Biden was a dozen eggs short of a dozen. And, to be completely fair to the Democrats, Republicans have been known for this kind of garbage narrative. They were proclaiming that Biden was brain-dead before the 2020 election and famously said that Clinton wasn’t going to live through the 2016 election.
In 1992, Ronald Reagan gave a fantastic rousing speech at the 1992 RNC convention. The crowd chanted “four more years” and some people joked we should repeal the 22nd Amendment. What we didn’t know at the time was that he was showing the first signs of the Alzheimer’s disease that would eventually contribute to his death. Aging is not a straight line. Even people in the depths of dementia — which Biden was and is not in — can have good days.
But the debate was my car dying on the road. It was a point at which his struggles could no longer be denied, eventually not even by himself.
Look, maybe I’m giving too much grace to the party and the media, but this looks less like a coverup and more of bias, a refusal to believe what was in front of them. A refusal to admit that maybe the Republicans had a point.
Moreover, while I am willing to hear criticism on the “cover-up” front from Democrats and Independents, I’m not going to listen to it from Trump supporters. The MAGA base has been in denial about who Donald Trump is since he came down the escalator. They have waved away his admitted crimes, justified his attempted coup, laughed at his lies, blinded themselves to his awful behavior and are currently ignoring his obvious signs of cognitive decline. Over the last few months, Trump speeches have frequently featured bizarre stories, odd segues and forgotten names. His claims — such as that he created Veterans Choice — suggests either a pathological liar or dementia. And yet they claim that he’s fit as a fiddle.
Neither candidate is suited for the next four years. The difference now is that the Democrats have done something about their candidate, with his assent. The Republicans won’t because no one would dare stand up to Trump.
The gripping hand is that it may not matter come November. 45% of the country would vote for Trump even if he were running against a God-Moses ticket and 45% of the country would vote against him even if he were running against Satan-Mussolini. Trump only needs a couple more percentage points to take the Electoral College, so he has the inside track.
In that sense, I think the Democrats made the right strategic decision. There was no way Biden was going to not only close the gap with Trump but build up the popular vote lead of 3-5 points necessary to take the Electoral College. Harris might not either but at least that possibility exists.
But I also think it was the right decision morally. Biden is an 81-year-old man showing signs of mental decline. He was not suited to four more years in a job that demands unceasing attention. He may — and I hope he does — live another twenty years, happy and functional, enjoying the sunset of his long political career. But it was clear that he would not be able to keep up with the Presidency, let alone the Presidency and a tight electoral fight.
Given the options the Democrats had — a sham blitz primary or a floor fight, with Republican legal challenges to follow — they made the best of a bad situation. They should have made the best of it a year ago. But they couldn’t see the potholes ahead. And if I were a Democrat, I’d be far more concerned about their lack of foresight than about whether the process of selecting Harris was democratic enough.
- Obama, who famously doesn’t like to put his thumb on the scale, finally endorsed her on Friday.
- Also, historically, the Vice Presidency has almost always been the easiest stepping stone to the Presidency. Of our 49 Vice Presidents, 15 have become President and another four were major party nominees, not counting Nixon twice and not counting Harris herself. Basically, if you’re VP, there’s about a 40% chance you’ll be nominated for President at some point.
- And if he were, maybe a palace coup is preferable.
- The Ford, we would find out in a few months, had a bad transmission. Take that as a extended metaphor for Harris if you like.
There was also just a stark refusal to admit that the Republicans might have a point. The politics of our age is defined by Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
Yeah. Well put.
My issue isn’t some variant of “My Party, Right or Wrong!” on the part of the partisans. It’s the whole “Criticism sub 1 is unfounded! It’s a conspiracy theory! Only bad people believe it and even worse people spread it!”
Criticism sub 1 turns out to have been true. True to the point where Biden stepped down, kinda.
Republicans, naturally, turn to Criticism sub 2. “Criticism sub 2 is unfounded! It’s a conspiracy theory! Only bad people believe it and even worse people spread it!”
Jane Coaston had a banger of a line the other day where she compared politicians to Offensive Coordinators. Yell at them until they do what you want and nitpick every single mistake.
I laughed and then realized that that’s an even better point than I thought it was in the first few seconds I spent admiring it. People keep thinking that politicians are the team. They’re not the team. They’re just the offensive coordinator.
Responding to “Joe Lombardi is screwing up” with “YOU’RE JUST A SECRET RAIDERS FAN!” is nuts. It’s nuts! But people do it!Report
A refusal evidenced by Dems breathlessly freaking out about Biden’s age, debate performance, etc.Report
“Republicans, naturally, turn to Criticism sub 2. “Criticism sub 2 is unfounded! It’s a conspiracy theory! Only bad people believe it and even worse people spread it!”
Ok so because Biden really was too old to campaign effectively, we should be more receptive to the claim that Harris is a crazy cat lady who has no investment in the future because she has no biological children?
Makes sense to me.
Also lest I be accused of nutpicking, I hasten to point out that I didn’t select that particular nut. Trump did, when he chose him as a running mate.Report
The problem with the debate was *NOT* that it led people to suspect that Biden might not be a good campaigner.
But you misapprehend exactly what the criticism is.
The complaint isn’t about people ought to listen to the Republicans and their criticisms more, now that at least one of their criticisms has proven to be somewhat accurate (“Biden is too old to campaign effectively!”, some say their criticism was).
The complaint is about the people whose job it is to tell you how you don’t need to listen to criticisms.
The “Seriously, the Emperor’s Outfit is Amazeballs and Don’t Let Them Gaslight You into Thinking Otherwise!” people.
The “Oh, so you’re saying that I have to take everything that Republicans say seriously now?” people.Report
The “Oh, so you’re saying that I have to take everything that Republicans say seriously now?” people
It’s extremely unclear how else you think we could address your complaint.Report
Well, for one thing, my complaint was not about what the Republicans were saying.
It was about the Wardrobe Defenders. I’ll point to this again because it makes my point much more eloquently than I can.
After the debate, the New York Times asked its opinion peeps who they thought won the debate.
Which of these guys do you think would be the most worth listening to if they told you “Kamala has nothing to worry about”?
Which of these guys do you think would be the most worth listening to if they said that they have a handful of concerns?
I’m not saying that you have to believe *ANYTHING* that *ANY* Republican says ever again. Hell, ignore all of them.
But look at the wardrobe defenders… and make an assessment over which you can treat like Republicans if a criticism of Harris happens to surface.
You never know. A reasonable criticism of Harris might show up in an essay somewhere. You shouldn’t immediately jump to “a Republican might say that therefore a Republican did and since Republicans lie, I don’t have to take that statement seriously.”
You don’t want to get blindsided. Again.Report
You shouldn’t immediately jump to “a Republican might say that therefore a Republican did and since Republicans lie, I don’t have to take that statement seriously.”
Ok. I don’t disagree with this argument.Report
Who in that chart was a “wardrobe defender”?Report
At the very least, the two people who argued that the debate was a tie.Report
So… from your vantage point… there was an objectively correct answer to the question of “Who won the debate?”, that answer was “Trump”, and anyone who felt otherwise was denying reality?
Interesting.Report
Not that interesting, really. Have you seen Jon Stewart’s breakdown of the debate?
It’s linked below.
To be honest, I think that the fact that Biden did so very poorly at the debate that they worked behind the scenes to get him to not run for a second term is a *HUGE* indicator that the answer was “Trump”.
Any other answer requires stuff like emphasis on the importance of skepticism in the absence of 100% certainty to the point where you are forced to argue against such things as polling theory.Report
Or it requires not declaring an overt liar the winner of anything. Ya know as a matter of integrity.Report
With that definition, Biden could not have lost the debate before the debate ever took place.
Without seeing the debate, you could say that Trump could *NOT* have won it.
The only two possible outcomes were:
1. Biden
2. A Tie
Does that sum it up without making a strawman of your position?Report
Trump told multiple lie through the debate. On purpose. I am not in the habit of awarding trophies to serial liars. You really shouldn’t be either.Report
That’s something that we knew he’d do *BEFORE* the debate, though.
The only two possible outcomes were:
1. Biden
2. A Tie
Does that sum it up without making a strawman of your position?Report
Well since we knew BEFORE the debate that Trump lies chronically, I guess we KNEW BEFORE the debate who the winner was.
Which makes all the assertions AFTER the debate by a good many folks somewhat comical don’t ya think?Report
The soft bigotry of low expectations.Report
Well, to be frank, I kinda see the position as absurd.
Like, you went into the debate knowing that Trump could not, in any way, win.
This strikes me as a reductio against the argument.
Assuming I didn’t strawman it, that is.Report
Methinks you need to revisit the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”Report
“Methinks you need to revisit the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.””
(the moral of the story is that the kid was wrong)Report
Which version…?
Both of you fundamentally misunderstand and/or misapply the message.
The Emperor was objectively observed to be naked, but everyone pretended they could see the glamorous clothes because they didn’t want to be a lone dissenter.
Applying it to a situation where subjective analysis is being applied is just not getting it.
Biden was not objectively and provably the loser of the debate. Full stop.Report
Would being forced out of the re-election campaign qualify as a “losing” indicator?
If not, why not?Report
I’m sorry you misunderstood and/or misapplied the moral of that story.Report
Has anybody *EVER* won a debate?
I mean, I’ve always heard that Biden beat Paul Ryan back in 2012.
Is that just so much hogwash because it’s impossible to say whether someone beat someone else in a debate?
Never? Even once?Report
Interestingly I think what happened to Biden may have reinforced the importance of debates. It doesn’t matter that they can’t be objectively scored like a sporting event or board game. America needed to see exactly what went down. As unfortunate as the outcome was for Biden (and as less than perfectly ideal as the move to Harris may be) it was a very valuable exercise.Report
I would agree.
I submit: If we hadn’t had a debate, we’d still be debating Biden.Report
Obviously, indisputably Biden lost the debate. But I think most people have been using the analogy for the bigger issue, that Biden has been obviously and indisputably impaired for a while now.Report
You can’t “loose” anything to a serial liar.Report
I didn’t say “loose”, I said “lose”, and Biden is also a serial liar, and who says you can’t lose to one?Report
Biden is not a serial liar, not even close. Sure, he promotes policies you don’t like, but that doesn’t mean he’s lying.
Serial liars like TFG are, inherently, losers. They are fragile snowflakes who can’t handle truth. They can not in any ethical sense of the word, “win.” In any circumstance. Never mind all the big, actual, documented court losses he and his entities have racked up which he continues to lie about. He was a loser before he set foot on that stage. He remains a loser.Report
Do you think Biden believes that he inherited 9% inflation? That Trump refused to denounce fringe groups? That no soldiers died on his watch? That there are fewer border crossings under him than under Trump? That the Border Patrol endorsed him? That Trump told people to inject bleach?
Oh, oh, also the whole plagiarism thing.
And let me know if you want more, because other than the plagiarism, I think most of these were just in the past several weeks. I could dig if you want.Report
How about you do the same thing for TFG, add it all up, and then tell me who “wins” numerically.
TFG is still a loser. Was so before the debate. remains so today.Report
BOTHSIDESDOIT
I get it. That doesn’t mean Biden’s not a serial liar. He’s famous for it. Even the mainstream press covers his “embellishments”. Also, I raised six specific lies and the plagiarism.Report
I see four stages in our recent history in terms of presidential liars. Nixon was the shamed liar, Clinton was the unashamed liar, Obama realized that no one cared if he lied, and Trump based his campaign on lying. I don’t think that Biden’s cleared a new threshold when it comes to presidential lying; he’s more of a call-back to the pre-internet days when a local politician wouldn’t get caught lying.Report
Congress put out a report detailing many of Joe Biden’s lies.
Politifact has details of many of Biden’s mistruths.
Perhaps a tie was the only option available…Report
TFG is a liar. He and his organizations stand adjudicated of lying and fraud in civil court. His felony conviction rests on him being a liar who decided to lie about where he was paying Stormy Daniels hush money from.
That report isn’t from Congress – it’s from the House Oversight Committee who managed to gather so much evidence that Biden had committed crimes it could … do nothing. No impeachment. No criminal referrals. Nothing. It, in and of itself, is a lie.
TFG is a liar and therefore a loser. Was before the debate. Remains so now.Report
He wasn’t impeached, therefore it wasn’t a lie?
Phil, you might be under the influence of some motivated reasoning here.Report
Jaybird, keep in mind that over the past few years a surprising number of people took the attitude that innocent people don’t get accused of crimes. And it’s at least consistent for them to say also that anyone not accused of a crime is innocent.Report
We mentioned the term once, “Praising by faint damns.”
This is a good example.
If this is your “A” game, your fastball pitch against Biden I think it just proves beyond a shadow of a doubt he is perhaps the most honest and truthful president’s on American history.
Well done.Report
Append it with something like “in our lifetimes” and you might be able to drop the “perhaps”.Report
“The Emperor was objectively observed to be naked, but everyone pretended they could see the glamorous clothes because they didn’t want to be a lone dissenter.”
Or maybe everyone recognized the need for institutional continuity and was aware that normalizing critique of minor missteps would lead to a loss of confidence in the administration and an inability to achieve policy goals. On the other hand, this kid thinks that The Truth (as he sees it) is more important than having an actual functional society. So yeah, maybe the Emperor was standing there naked, but if we don’t stand behind him then what comes next will be worse…Report
The courtiers who argued “We don’t know whether the Emperor was naked” had a point? The courtiers who wanted to discuss nudity theory?Report
I’d like some evidence that ‘Biden is too old to campaign effectively!’ was the Republican’s criticism. Because that’s not actually what I was hearing.
In fact, I remember a lot of discussion about problems that Biden doesn’t actually have, or at least were not symptoms of things. Like the claim he was hiding Parkinson, a disease he does not have. Or that he had dementia, a thing that, as far as we know, he is not showing signs of.
He is old, and he has slowed more than people thought until the debate.
But Republicans have spent years making up health problems for basically every candidate, and they don’t get any credit for ‘Looks like the really old guy is feeling his age a bit more than he was letting on’ when it’s interwoven with conspiracy theories.
Now, there _were_ people who pointed out that running for president while being president is incredibly grueling, and it was unclear if Biden could handle it due to age and he probably shouldn’t try. And, sure, if that’s what they limited themselves to saying, they had a point. But that’s not ‘Republicans’, or at least not their media machine which spent a hell of a lot of time inventing medical conditions for Biden. (And Hillary, least people forget.)Report
I’d like some evidence that ‘Biden is too old to campaign effectively!’ was the Republican’s criticism. Because that’s not actually what I was hearing.
Oh, it wasn’t. The Republican criticism was much closer to Jon Stewart’s. Have you seen the video that he made literally minutes after the debate?
As for Hillary collapsing at the 9/11 event, we covered that in real time!
Opinions differed on the event from “holy cow, that was *BAD*!” to “it’s inconsequential”.
Same here. Opinions on how Biden did at the debate differed. Opinions ranged from “holy cow, that was *BAD*!” to “it’s inconsequential”.Report
Regarding Hillary collapsing at the 9/11 event would you concede, now 8 years roughly on from that event with Hillary alive and well, that your various alluded criticisms of people saying her collapsing was not indicative of any serious health problem, were wrong?Report
This is a really good point. I was much more on social media for 2016 and remember seeing a lot of Hilary videos suggesting something really serious was up with her health that turned out to have no merit to them. I know memories are worse than that of a gnat these days but that’s some pretty important context.Report
It’s obvious now that she had no problems that couldn’t have been fixed by a quiet retiree’s schedule.
See also: Trump in 2024.Report
So, No.Report
Oh, yeah. The people who said that Clinton would be dead within a couple of months were dead wrong. Hell, the people who said that if she were elected president that she’d be dead within her first term were arguing a counterfactual and I can easily imagine someone who argues that counterfactuals aren’t worth arguing against.Report
Can you imagine answering North’s actual question?Report
If a serious health problem is one that would not be fixed by retirement, it’s been demonstrated that Clinton had no serious health problems.Report
Can you imagine answering North’s actual question?Report
Do you feel that “it’s been demonstrated that Clinton had no serious health problems” is not an answer to North’s actual question?Report
If you’re going to quote yourself, quote yourself accurately.Report
I am quoting myself accurately.
But I am working up to the question of whether you feel that “a serious health problem is one that would not be fixed by retirement” is a true statement.
p -> q
It seems to me that p is true and that q is true (and, importantly, that p -> q is true).
Do you feel that any of those premises are false, CJ?
Because, tautologically, if q is true, then q is true.Report
Re-read your 10:15 post. The re-read North’s question. And in case you want to duck again, let me lay out the question making explicit the context in which North asked it. In 2016, did Hillary Clinton have a health problem that would have interfered with her ability to serve as President. Not something that she could survive by retirement, but something that would interfere with her ability to serve as President. That’s the question. Answer it or say you won’t.Report
Without you providing the definition of a “serious” health problem, I’m stuck coming up with one of my own.
I’m happy to say that a health problem that can be mitigated by a relaxed schedule is *NOT* a serious health problem.
And, using that definition, it’s been demonstrated that Hillary did not having a serious health problem. That’s *OBVIOUSLY* true.
If you dislike that definition of “serious health problem”, that’s cool.
Give me a different one. If you don’t want to give me a different one, that’s cool… I’ll keep using mine.
Cool?Report
You’re not “stuck” with coming up with a definition of your own. You chose a definition that would allow you to duck North’s question. The issue in 2016 was not whether Hillary had a health condition that would not be mitigated by quiet retirement, but whether she had a health problem that required a quiet retirement. That she was, in 2016, unfit for reasons of health to assume the office of the Presidency and carry out its duties.
But you know all this. By this point, the dodge is obvious.Report
Let’s hammer this definition down.
Your definition of a “serious health problem” is “a problem that REQUIRES a quiet retirement” (presumably “lest she get obviously sicker or die or something”)?
I have to say that the honest answer to that question is “I don’t know”, given that, following the election, her schedule was lightened considerably.
I think using the definition you’re giving us, nobody could possibly know the answer outside of a very small group of people… like Clinton’s doctors, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton herself.
Which makes North’s question unanswerable.
I think it’s better to assume that North’s question has an answer and my definition allows for the question to be answered.
But if you want to push for “I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody except for a small group of 3-5 people knows!”, I won’t stop you.Report
North’s question is not “unanswerable.” People had and expressed views about HRC’s health back in 2016. What was the evidence for those views, how good was it at the time, and does it look better or worse in hindsight? Those questions are “answerable” even if the Truth about her health is “known” only to a small group of people whose views on the matter are easy enough to figure out. Ask Hillary.Report
If your definition of “serious health problem” is one that requires retirement, there’s no way to say that Clinton had one given that her schedule lightened *CONSIDERABLY* starting around December of 2016.
You’re stuck arguing whether or not she’d have gotten more and worse cases of pneumonia had she been president for four years.
And there’s no way to know.Report
(he did answer it)Report
Read it again.Report
Huh. You and Kazzy argued and no conservatives swooped in. Nearly identical to a year and a half of visible decline from our Commander-in-Chief with the press actively denying the problem.Report
I saw the entire debate condensed in an exchange between me and Saul. In a thread about Clinton collapsing at an event, he points to a poll released the day before.
He asks if I still think that Trump is doing well.
And I point out that I never thought that Trump was doing well, merely that Clinton was doing poorly.Report
Huh? What’re you talking about?Report
An eight-year-old conversation. See Jaybird’s link.Report
Do I need to provide links to Parkinson conspiracy theories?
Jon Stewart’s reaction was entirely reasonable, in fact, it was so reasonable it was what basically _everyone_ who watched understood, and the reason pressure was put on him to resign.
That’s not what Republicans were saying. It probably was what _some_ of the Republicans were saying, sure, but that doesn’t actually work as a partisan complaint because Trump is _also_ noticeably slowing and has been doing so pretty clearly since he was elected almost 8 years ago. So almost none of them restricted their complaints to just ‘He is old and slowed’, and instead invented things.
There were, indeed, people before this who pointed out that both candidates were slowing, that neither of them should have been running at their age as a mere practical matter, and that the media and the Democrats were ignoring this. (As were the Republicans, but the Republicans are already ignoring every other reason Trump should not be running for president so it’s not weird they ignore yet another.)
And they get props, sure, and I guess criticize both the Democrats who denied this about Biden and Biden’s staff for hiding this.
But that doesn’t make the _right_ correct here. The right’s media cannot help but parrot absurd conspiracy theories, they have absurdly low levels of signal to noise, and they do not get to claim that what they said and was pushed back on was them being ‘right’, because a huge chunk of it was just outright conspiracy theories that are identical to previous conspiracy theories.
It’s actually possible for Democrats to be wrong about something and the Republicans to still be batsh*t looney-tunes on it.Report
I wouldn’t argue otherwise.
But there are a number of criticisms against Kamala that get brushed aside because Republicans and “the right” make worse criticisms based on old news, nothingburgers, and stuff that is clearly taken out of context.
And treating the criticism that Kamala has never received a single vote outside of California as if it’s the same thing as Reactionaries linking to her tweet supporting bail funds for mostly peaceful protestors is *NOT* to the benefit of “the left”… any more than arguing that Biden just had a bad night was to the left’s benefit.Report
Ah yes, because people voting for a combined presidential vice presidential ticket aren’t REALLY voting for the VP.Report
Touché.
But I wouldn’t reach any conclusions about Pence’s popularity based on the number of votes Trump got in 2020 (Second greatest number of votes in history!).Report
I’m not sure what to make of these admissions of failure which include pledges to not improve.
You had: center-right-wing coverage, lunatic-right-wing coverage, and the Emperor’s flapping dong. You don’t trust the extreme right, and that’s fine. But you looked at Biden’s dong, read the NYT, and said “that’s not Biden’s dong”. And now, you’re declaring that you were mistaken, but correct in not trusting the extreme right.
And I want to make it clear, I’m not saying “I told you so” as a brag; I’m saying as a complaint. A lot of people here have opinions I don’t agree with, and use sources that wouldn’t be my first choice, and I look at them. What are the lefties on this site even doing? Of all sites, why would you hang out on one where you can get multiple takes on an issue? If you say, as pillsy does above, that the only people who said that Biden was too old also say that Harris is unqualified because she’s childless, then you’re not reading the other side. And that (plus denial) left you surprised during the debate.Report
If you say, as pillsy does above, that the only people who said that Biden was too old also say that Harris is unqualified because she’s childless, then you’re not reading the other side
I’m pretty sure that’s not what I said.
I am certain it’s not what I meant.
What I said was a direct response to JB’s suggestion that this means we should trust Republican criticisms more. That’s actually dumb, and following his advice would lead you exactly where I said it would.
It also doesn’t have much to do with your criticism which is actually right. The issue isn’t that I couldn’t see the metaphorical dong, it’s that I was pretty sure I could but didn’t want to say anything about it because it was politically and socially inconvenient to do.
Exactly like the people in the story.Report
You said exactly what I said. The problem is you’re treating all right-wing sources the same, from the slightly right to the extremes.Report
Well yeah I said exactly what you said because I agree with what you said!
But I don’t agree at all with what I thought JB said—he has since rephrased his argument into something I don’t disagree with.Report
JB’s suggestion that this means we should trust Republican criticisms more
My suggestion was not about Republican criticisms at all. Republican criticisms were given a token representing them because they weren’t the focus.
My complaint was about the knee-jerk *RESPONSE* to the criticisms.Report
I feel you’re sorta doing the same thing here you’re accusing people here of doing, but you’re doing it to voters instead of the media.
The voters were not, actually, enthused about Biden. And I’m not talking about the left, and I’m not talking about the discontent at his handling of Israel and Palestine. This is despite him doing some objectively good things the party wanted, but the electorate has completely ignored. And a huge chunk of that is how old he is. Not just physically, but politically. He feels like someone who, occassionally, slowly, is willing to do something progressive. And that is not what Democrats want.
So how did he end up president? Well, because he was Not Trump, but how how did he end up the nominee? Because it was His Turn in politics, and it was His Turn because the Democratic leadership basically operates like that. Over a bunch of younger people. But he has waited patiently.
Like Hillary had. And lost.
Like Obama hadn’t waited, and _won_.
The Democratic party is controlled by people who have been waiting patiently for years, and demand their turns. The new and exciting Kamala Harris is 60, and she ended up VP because it was her turn eight years later, or maybe the next cycle. She just is getting in early.
The Democratic voters don’t really have a say in that. I guess they had a say in that four years ago, but this time around, everyone just stepped aside for Biden, and that wasn’t the Democratic voter’s doing, it was the people who were perfectly willing to play within the system so that when they were 70 and their turn rolled around they would be supported.Report
I’m not talking about the voters, except to the extent that they mirrored the kind of thinking I’ve seen here for the last year or so. Whether you like Biden or not, whether you like his ideology and administration or not, that’s beside the point. How he got the 2020 nomination is beside the point. Even whether he could win in his current condition is beside the point. He’s in no condition to be president, and it’s been obvious for a while, and anyone who denied it has either been inattentive or lying to himself or others. The polls indicated that the voters felt the same way, but they don’t post every day on a political site. We do. Everyone here knew and pretended they didn’t.Report
That’s a great set of points and analogies, Michael–thank you for writing it.Report
I’ll repeat what I said back on July 2nd:
What’s in the box is Kamala.
On one level, that’s good. Kamala has a chance to win the election. That is infinitely better than Biden’s chances.
On another level… well, I’d rather someone even more likely to win the election.
That said, I don’t want to play the old “bring me a rock” game.
“Here’s a rock.”
“I wanted a smaller rock.”
“Here’s a smaller rock.”
“I wanted one that was a little more red.”
I think that, ideally, I’d have wanted a convention where the delegates fought it out for their various candidates and it strikes me as likely that the candidate most likely to win the floor vote would be the strongest candidate.
Granted, others have said that there are good politicians who could win an election (but not a primary) and other good politicians who could win a primary (but not an election) and so we’d be going into a situation rife with uncertainty and there is a non-zero chance that a floor fight would result in enough damage being done to enough politicians that *NOBODY* could win against Trump in November. That is: The convention would do active harm instead of active good and could blow up the November election.
My thoughts on that is that if the Party is in such a state where that could happen, I’d rather know that for certain than merely suspect it enough to use it as a reason to not do it.
But much of the job of politicking is stuff like calling up delegates and getting them to say “okay, fine, I’ll pledge to Harris” and Harris and her team did the work on that and that’s an indicator that she’s capable of doing something that isn’t trivially easy with a hard deadline.
But I still think that she’s got a good chance of not beating Trump either. (That said, she’s got a chance to win, and that puts her ahead of Biden. She is what’s in the box and what’s in the box is what I asked for.)Report
“They say he’s strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in a single bounds. We don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side,” Buttigieg said of Trump. “On the contrary, the president confronted that reality in what must have been one of the most difficult decisions for an American president to make ever.”
“And he did something that I don’t think Donald Trump could even conceive of doing, which is putting his own interests aside for the country,” he added.
In a statement, Trump campaign Communications Director Steven Cheung defended the former president as having “more energy and more stamina than anyone in politics.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/28/buttigieg-voters-trump-age-00171533
Steven Cheung went on to marvel at Trump’s wardrobe, saying his robes were the most amazing and beautiful robes anyone has ever seen in fact, several big husky men with tears in their eyes said so.Report
The person Freddie de Boer ought to be blaming for this whole thing is Joe Biden, not Kamala Harris or The DNC or whoever. Biden’s the one who insisted that he was Just Fine Thank You and definitely capable of running for President, for long enough that nobody bothered seriously campaigning against him this year.Report
Yes. This is the sort of situation that I’m not sure any party in our system could avoid, were it to happen to one of their politicians, because the incentives for the politician and his people to hold onto power are just too strong.
More than Biden, I blame Biden’s people, who clearly knew how it would look if he had a lot of exposure, and spent the last couple years seriously limiting how much we saw of him, and limiting his message when in public (limiting that made it seriously difficult for him to actually sell himself as a candidate).
The closest I come to an actual conspiracy theory is the idea that there may have been a faction within Biden’s camp that believed he shouldn’t run for reelection, and it was this faction that pushed for a debate before the convention, knowing his performance would be a disaster.Report
Honestly, if it proved that the Democratic leadership had somehow forced Biden out that would actually really increase my respect for the party. A US political party that could get over its addle-pated President worship to remove a weak candidate? That would be far more than I would expect.
Also, the people complaining about how quickly Harris sewed up party support remind of the people who cried foul when Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out of the 2020 primary and endorsed Biden on the same day. Politics is about organising a coalition to achieve your objectives. Complaining you’ve been out-organised in an election is like complaining that the other sprinters in the race can run faster than you.Report
Those folks, Freddie assuredly among them, remain bitter about Sanders not winning the nomination in 2016 and 2020 regardless of the fact that he got outvoted both times (and outvoted worse in 2020 than in 2016).
I think it was Jared Bernstein who said that a political parties core priorities are, in order of importance:
#1 assembling coalitions of voters and agreeing on a platform of policies that addresses the various coalition members principles while not directly violating the other members principles.
#2 selecting nominees who will adhere to the parties platform.
#3 selecting nominees who will win elections .
A lot of people tend to forget that #3 is mostly useless if you don’t achieve #1 and #2.Report
To be clear, Freddie is about as representative of any segment of the left as I am of professional basketball players, having played the sport (mediocrely) in high school.Report
He was one of the organizers of the largest anti-war protests in Connecticut back when Dumbya was president.
That’s at least college-level.Report
I know Freddie himself isn’t representative of the left but when he waxes at length on this subject he’s singing from a pretty standard berniesta-leftist songbook. A rare moment of venn overlap with the leftists whom he often criticizes.Report
The two narratives are not at all in tension. They did not exist concurrently.
Once the jig was up, there was a pivot, and as widely reported, the democratic leadership applied a coordinated campaign to have Biden not accept his party’s nomination. Yes, they conspired to do that. So we can dare call it what it was.Report
Can it be called a conspiracy when it’s done in the open? I would posit that it cannot.Report
You really think it was poll numbers that convinced Biden & Co to stand down?
I’m looking forward to the books that will be written in the years to come.Report
I guess technically you could have a conspiracy of weaker people manipulating a stronger, but typically the word isn’t used that way. I’d call it “behind the scenes”.Report
Nietzsche totally has a theory about this!Report
This seems about as out in the open as it could’ve been. Plenty of people went on record and even those that didn’t officially let it be known that they were having discussions about the issue.Report
A conspiracy theory I saw was that right after the fundraiser that Clooney mentioned in his op ed, a bunch of scheming was initiated (including Obama) to nudge Joe out, including pushing for the early debate.Report
Maybe I’m wrong on this, but I don’t think I’m drifting into conspiratorial thinking to believe that some of the conversations with Biden, or among donors, weren’t made public. I guess technically I’m assuming that powerful people were pulling strings behind the scenes? But they were pulling the public ones in public and had access to private ones as well, so how much conjecture is that really?
Then you get into a tricky question: if “A took place behind the scenes” shows up in the NYT, does that indicate that conspiratorial act A took place, and/or is the act of releasing that information to the NYT the conspiratorial act?Report
I just don’t think, “A variety of Democratic Party stakeholders applied a mix of public and private pressure to get a desired political outcome,” rises to the level of “conspiracy” on its own.
I can envision details that about the private campaign that would make me think it’s a conspiracy (if it involved certain corrupt forms of pressure like bribery or blackmail). I haven’t seen anyone even suggest that’s what happened here, though.Report
The word “conspiracy” has a negative connotation because the essential ingredients are:
1. Secrecy; The action needs to be hidden from public view and usually for reasons that are:
2. Malign intent- Conspiracies are malign in their intent- they intend to work against the public interest or public benefit.
Without those two criteria, a conspiracy is no different than “a group of people working together to create something”.
But if someone wants to make Nancy Pelosi once again sound like a badass, I won’t stand in their way.Report
I wouldn’t pretend to know which camp were the weaker people in this scenario.
We don’t know what was actually done to persuade Biden & Co to relinquish their pursuit of maintaining power, but I suspect it was both a carrot and stick approach. I’m quite sure we don’t know the half of it, or what “the hard way” was in actuality. There is an iceberg analogy to be made here to the extent some of it is out in the open, but most of it was not..
As I said, looking forward to the books to be written.Report
I agree with this, but I don’t trust the sources of those books. Although in this case, the sources are more likely to be the kind of get-ahead-and-play-the-game people who were probably involved.Report
I would think at minimum the ‘hard way’ was something like ‘we will green light anyone down ballot who feels like they have to run against you to do so and you will be persona non grata rather than elder statesman emeritus as far as the party is concerned.’ Probably worse stuff than that too. But I still struggle to call something that happened so out in the open a conspiracy just because we don’t know exactly who said what.Report
I think that the logic is something like:
1. Conspiracies are false
2. This thing is true
3. Therefore this thing is not a conspiracyReport
Conspiracies are false? What does that mean?Report
Excellent question. Every working day there are hundreds, if not thousands, of conspiracy cases on the dockets of our state and federal courts, so conspiracies are a real thing. Most are small-time stuff; some are quite big. Most of them advance private interests; but sometimes not. There are alleged conspiracies, some pretty well-founded, to overturn election results, for example. There have been conspiracies to overthrow governments, some successful, most not.
Most people who use “conspiracy theory” in a derogatory way mean something like the tendency of some people to attribute outcomes they don’t like to the directing hand of a small, secretive group corruptly acting for some malign purpose. Sometimes such things happen, but there is a mentality that sees it as pervasive, ignoring how often there is no directing hand, or identifying as a “conspiracy” any insufficiently publicized collective decision arrived at by ordinary, legitimate processes of give-and-take. A broken clock may be right twice a day, but it is usually easy enough to see when a clock is broken rather than, say five minutes fast or ten minutes slow.Report
Yeah, if you hear the word conspiracy and immediately think of “Pizza-gate” – I can understand a reluctance to apply the term to anything that doesn’t sound ridiculous.Report
Well we could compare it to Watergate where there was intent to hide who did what and when and why . . . or to January 6th where there was intent to achieve a certain outcome by force but where the actors were unknown at the time … or to Enron … or to any number of other things more serious then Pizza gate. Excpet the motive was known, the players largely operated in the open with the support of the press, and they haven’t actually broken any laws . . .
So, much like the ACA, I have to wonder why conservatives refuse to just take the victory and move on.Report
I think we fundamentally disagree about the level of transparency and how much who and what matter. Yes, the intent was known, but I’d argue the public pressure was an integral part of the conspiracy to get him off the ticket.Report
Most things that are actually conspiracies don’t rely on public pressure. Kind of defeats the purpose.Report
McCarthyism, the Dreyfus Affair?
Not conspiracies either?Report
I wouldn’t classify McCarthyism as a conspiracy. McCarthy was also quite open about what he was doing, what his objectives were and how he intended to do it. Heck he even held public congressional hearings to achieve his objectives.Report
McCarthyism wasn’t a conspiracy; it was largely the claim that there was a conspiracy. “A conspiracy so immense,” if memory serves, of always fluctuating numbers and no reliably identified conspirators. Unlike Nixon, who actually found a spy, McCarthy never could.
Certainly there was a conspiracy to serve up Dreyfus as a scapegoat for treachery committed by others. A pretty standard conspiracy. To the extent public pressure was involved, it was public pressure to expose the conspiracy. To be sure, a large part of the public was suckered by the conspirators, but the conspirators did standard conspiracy stuff to achieve their ends. bamboozling the public was part of the cover-up.Report
I am always saddened when I think about how the Venona project was cancelled.
Everything yet untranslated is old news, I guess. Nothingburgers.Report
Maybe he just did the right thing. Who knows, and, more importantly, does it really matter?Report
A sitting U.S. President just went through his party’s primary process and earned an overwhelming majority of delegates to earn said party’s nomination. That President had every intention of accepting the nomination and competing in the general election. Then his party revolted against him and pressured him to stand down.
Justified or not, I think it matters that we find out as much as we can. An incredible precedent has just been set.
And no, he didn’t just do “the right thing”. C’mon now.Report
To be honest, I was kind of surprised primaries were even held. Why bother with an incumbent?
What is it you’d like to learn? A private organization decided to change course. Whether there was chicanery involved or not isn’t going to change the American polity for the better one iota.Report
To be honest, I was kind of surprised primaries were even held. Why bother with an incumbent?
Many/most state Democratic parties include an “uncommitted” choice even when there’s an incumbent.Report
Calling Harris a DEI pick is neither racist nor incorrect, but it is beside the point. Biden explicitly promised to choose a female running mate, and given how batsh*t crazy Democrats went over race in 2020, it’s hard to believe that her ancestry wasn’t a major factor in the choice. It is, at the very least, a well-grounded suspicion.
But politics isn’t like STEM. It doesn’t select for the best and brightest, because voters don’t want the best and brightest. Joe Biden is a mediocre white man, and if he had chosen a white male running mate, he would have been a mediocre white man, too. Constraining his choice to the 7-8% of the population who are women with substantial black ancestry didn’t prevent him from choosing the best person for the job, because no one who was even close to being the best person for the job was ever on the table at all.Report
I’d go further than this. Most of the time, there is simply no such thing as the “best person for the job.” This comes up all the time in judicial appointments. The number of lawyers and lower court judges who would be at least as good as the current crop of Supreme Court Justices is probably in the low- to mid-four figures. (I believe I could do the job competently, though I would not pick me.) There are far more than enough to allow a relatively deep pool even if you sub-divide it for political or ethnic or geographic or other considerations. Nobody says anything when Republicans fish in Republican waters and Democrats fish in Democratic waters. Joe Biden was widely criticized for pledging to appoint a black woman, and eventually picking one. But the pool of highly-qualified black women is deep enough for one to do that. To be sure, the partisans of one candidate or another tried to make the case that the proposed candidate was in some way “better.” Some people threw up Sri Srinvasin, a judge of south Asian origin, of the D.C. Circuit. He is certainly a highly-qualified candidate and entirely unobjectionable, even though no Republican President will appoint him, and no one should expect that. But the case that, by some objective measure, Srinivasin, whom I very much like, is clearly better than Ketanji Brown Jackson is pretty much made up. (I went so far as to predict that if Biden got another slot, he would appoint Srinivasin precisely because he was south Asian, and would be right to do so.)
Picking from a small pool, however, can create problems. If, for example, you were looking for a black conservative Republican in the 1980s, the pool was rather shallow. If Clarence Thomas wasn’t a DEI pick, I don’t know who was. A white Republican with his resume wouldn’t have gotten within sniffing distance of an appointment.Report
He limited himself to about 3 people, between the color, sex, and reasonable resume.Report
For VP? Remember the words of John Nance Garner.Report
And yet no one’s run with an actual bucket on their ticket.Report
It’s what’s in the bucket.Report
I get that. My point is that every VP pick has had a credible resume, and that quote doesn’t change that fact. The VP pick is one of the most important things a campaign does.Report