“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” former Obama adviser David Plouffe is quoted saying in a New Yorker excerpt from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
The supposition of the piece, headlined “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump,” is that Democrats only failed to hold the White House because of Biden’s prideful obstinacy.
Scapegoating Biden for all the Left’s considerable political problems is an ugly hypocrisy. It is also self-delusional. There is a reason the Democratic Party’s polling is at historic lows right now, and it’s not just Biden’s memory problems.
Let’s recall that every congressional Democrat decided to shoehorn the Inflation Reduction Act into law even after most economists warned it would plunge the nation into price spikes. Biden wasn’t the only one leaning into the hysterics of “semi-fascism.” If anything, Biden had merely adopted the social science quackery on gender that so many Democrats champion.
Did any elected Democrat speak out about the anarchy of illegal immigration? If so, I must have missed it. Yet, according to a preelection Pew poll, 78% of people believed the border was a crisis or major problem.
One of the big criticisms of Biden is that he failed to make room for another candidate earlier. Almost surely, Kamala Harris would have been the nominee regardless of when Biden dropped out. Does anyone really believe a hyper-ambitious politician ensconced in the White House was going to step aside or let some middling governor wrest the nomination from her? The only Democrat who consistently outperformed Harris in most polls after Biden’s debate debacle was Michelle Obama. It was going to be Harris.
What makes anyone think that Harris would have experienced more success had she enjoyed more time? After an initial jolt up, the vice president’s popularity steadily declined. Harris needed less time, not more. The more the public heard from her, the more they disliked her.
Harris, like any other possible Democratic candidate, was compelled to run on the president’s record. And that record, championed by virtually every Democrat, was unpopular long before the media were compelled to acknowledge the president’s declining mental state.
The Democratic Party had blown it. Polls found that only 36% approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, 28% approved of his handling of immigration, 33% approved of his handling of foreign policy, and 30% approved of his handling of the Middle East.
Now, even with those numbers, elections are a contest between two visions. A CBS News poll found that 65% of Americans remember the economy under Trump fondly, while only 38% said the same about Biden.
Does anyone really believe that Govs. Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear or JB Pritzker possess the kind of charismatic personality or compelling message to overcome that record? It’s exceptionally unlikely.
Plouffe might have been one of the few Democrats who publicly questioned the wisdom of running a man whose mental acuity had slipped for years. Until the day of the first 2024 presidential debates, however, virtually the entirety of the party and media had been shielding Biden. If the president had refused to debate Trump, the Left would have almost surely kept on concealing Biden’s condition. It had no choice but to turn on the president once he had been exposed.
We learn in The New Yorker that Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at the infamous Hollywood fundraiser where Barack Obama had to lead the president off stage by hand. Recall that even at this point, the big media were still gaslighting the public about the president’s deteriorating acuity. Three days later, Tapper’s colleague wrote in CNN’s media newsletter that the claim had been a “fabrication.”
Two days before the debate, then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had told reporters the president was sharper than he’d been in years. “He’s fine. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong,” he said.
In the New Yorker piece, we learn that Schumer would speak to Biden on the phone regularly, “and, after some chit chat,” the president would “admit that he’d forgotten why he’d called. Sometimes he rambled. Sometimes he forgot names. Schumer wasn’t concerned about Biden’s acuity, but he was worried about the optics.”
The president is the most powerful man in the world, and the Senate leader was worried about optics. So, indeed, was the rest of his party.
Which is merely to say that Democrats screwed themselves.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “The Rise of Blue Anon,” available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.
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