Courtiers we will always have with us. Biden's were just incompetent and he needed smarter ones. There is a long history of people closest to power successfully hiding the infirmities of the figurehead from the public. That was their main job and they failed badly, and there are a number of distressing implications to that fact.
Several commentators on the right who anticipated a bad performance like this were already coming up with quite clever and plausible ideas on the ways those close courtiers could successfully spin the decision to not have any debates at all.
For example, they could have said something like, "The President refuses to sully the dignity of his office and lower himself to the level of a treasonous insurrectionist by allowing a convicted felon with no sense of decency and with a long track record of total disrespect for our institutions to harm our democracy and create a divisive spectacle solely for his own corrupt purposes. Instead, President Biden is happy to embrace an alternative way to share his ideas for the nation's future and how he plans to continue Building Back Better by giving in-depth interviews to this country's most trusted news anchors."
Thus, no debates, a lot of heavily edited interviews, and a whole left-media ecosystem which would have repeated these lines over and over as if no reasonable person could possibly disagree with the validity of this 'explanation' and that, yes, while it was historically extraordinary to not have Presidential debates in the run-up to an election, Trump is so extraordinarily bad, that extreme times force good people into extreme positions. Biden wanted to have good, fair debates, he really did, after all, beating Trump would be a cake walk. But alas he was compelled by public spirit to refrain from doing them just this one time, because Trump just can't be trusted to behave himself in the manner befitting a candidate for our nation's highest office.
The anti-Biden commentators who wrote this script for the Biden people to follow all but confessed to the fact that it would probably have worked like a charm. And yet, the courtiers didn't do it! Instead, they thought it would be clever to bluff and insist on debate rules so lopsided in favor of Biden that they could position the Trump campaign into rejecting them as 'unfair' thus both being able to avoid debates while also being able to say, "See, WE wanted to have a debate, and it's TRUMP that refuses to!"
Then Trump called the bluff, and they had painted themselves into a corner and could no longer back out.
I think Scott Alexanders explanation that Biden has good and bad days and is "passable" from 10am-4pm made them "roll the dice" and figure they could silence the critics if he could just keep it together for 90 minutes if he got a Dr Feelgood shot right before the debate.
After all, Biden wasn't doing great in the polls before this. It was a toss up. If this gambit worked it might have put him over the edge. But it backfired.
From a cost/benefit perspective I can see how the costs would mostly be born by Biden himself the the benefits would flow to the courtiers.
I didn't follow the debate-rules saga, and didn't realize they particularly favored one or the other. To me the striking thing was the instant unanimity among the post-debate TV talkers (I saw this later, on the internet - a Joy Reid was talking, and I think Rachel Maddow was there? I don't know which network this is). It made me think the whole thing was a put-up. Not to deceive, but by Dem VIPs looking to unseat Biden (I don't know what else would be in their minds). That coordination always seems like a tell, but I grant I may feel some outsider paranoia.*
But this is not a theory, merely a first impression. I can only offer in support that people who are agents of chaos, which these media people very much are - and perhaps some influential Dems as well - don't fear a Trump presidency - they welcome it.
*Perhaps disliking the status quo in my country, I too long for chaos.
OTOH apart from Freddie Deboer the most-left substack I read is that of Josh Barro, because he gets off a good line sometimes, and he seems likeable and like someone Freddie Deboer would despise - so with AK a neat triptych of East Coast thought. (I don't expect to find my views represented on the internet.) But I also read him because I imagined him to be something of an insider. And he seems to have been genuinely blindsided by this affair.
So on that view, the presidential advisers have done a bang-up job heretofore but they either messed up or there grew up some dissension among them.
> Journalists do a better job when they maintain a more adversarial stance toward public officials.
This has become an underestimated reason for voting Republican. Since ~2008, whenever the Democrats have held power, the press has gone from providing some oversight to acting as a de-facto arm of the party.
If you believe oversight of government is important, the only way to get it is to vote Republican. Then you may get too much of it, but too much is better than none at all.
I think it's more accurate to say that the press needs to remain skeptical of the president -- when you know they'd be critical no matter what it doesn't help (hence why the fact that fox news has been screaming about Biden being senile didn't help -- people knew they'd probably say that no matter what). For the same reason putting in a republican wouldn't help because as long as the media is split into conservative and liberal factions everyone expects the liberal media will say awful things no matter what. Putting a republican in the WH just flips the problem in the other direction -- fox news etc doesn't say bad things about the president while liberal leaning media does but since everyone knows they'd say bad things either way no one is informed and no guardrails are created.
What's needed is broadly unaligned media but that runs into two big problems.
1) Media consumers can now pick and choose what sources they listen to for different subjects -- you can read one source for local news or for theater and another for politics -- meaning that the incentive for political reporting is to appeal to politics enthusiasts who are usually the most partisan and don't want balance.
2) Donald Trump very effectively increased polarization by engaging in wide spread norm breaking which caused news outlets which were trying not to take a traditional left-right side to report on that fact in a way that then caused them to be perceived as taking a side and shifted incentives for them so they effectively had to. They could no longer draw right leaning viewers by continuing to be nuetral on the substance and only report on the means/norms.
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I agree that lots of good would be accomplished by voting in a republican president who respected traditional norms. Despite being a democrat generally I'd vote for Romney in a heartbeat for that reason. But Trump's unique skill is to polarize issues and that exacerbates the problem you raise.
To me Romney rather neatly represents the traditional norm (or rather, dating back to the 70s or so?) of the GOP ensuring that the well-off of both "right" and "left" continue being well-off, because mammon is all that matters, the country itself be damned.
His response to the border crisis would probably be, in his great and magnanimous decency, personally to adopt a bunch of kids. Boom, done.
Fine it doesn't need to be Romney in terms of policy, I'm just saying that for the press to have a way to tell when to call attention to something besides pure policy driven disagreement there needs to be a background agreement about the procedures by which things should be accomplished. All the republican speakers recently (dunno enough yet about Johnson to be sure) or Mitch McConnell would do fine on those grounds or Ted Cruz.
Take all of Trump's policies and put it in someone who is going to go through the normal process of how to change policy. Works via the foreign policy establishment, obeys traditional norms regarding the DOJ etc etc.
But if one thinks that the system is broken and it needs to be upended then there really isn't any nuetral ground on which a non-aligned press can stand.
And sometimes that's just how it works. If you don't have even basic agreement on what are acceptable ways for policy to be made then it just boils down to power and it doesn't really make sense to ask for a nuetral press because even the question of what kinds of things are a big deal (is the president being senile big...what about the president admitting he's taking a foreign policy position based on whether the people involved were willing to help his campaign etc) is no longer a nuetral question.
I don't expect you to feel this way - but if you're a conservative, you regard rule by Supreme Court - which being uniquely impervious, renders potentially all of us into de facto lunatics, since what is crazier than trying to move an immoveable object, by other than the lawfare means that are the only ones available, which ensure that howevermuch you win, you lost by conceding the legitimacy of the whole business - as a massive "upending". This phenomenon managed to happen without the media ever worrying in the slightest about where they could stand.
I’m not a conservative and if the court had said it's perfectly legal for the president to steal the election or engage in a coup I’d feel differently.
But saying you can't be prosecuted is very different than saying it's legal. I care about what happens to the country not whether we can take revenge on Trump and I don't believe it's the threat of prosecution that stops coups — indeed fear of prosecution is just as likely to cause someone to try a coup hence why many countries do give explicit presidential immunity.
As I said, I don't like the decision (not because of coup risk but because of how it might affect boring old favors for money) but it's within the range of bad but legitimate rulings. If you want the right to accept rulings they see as morally bad like Roe we need to be willing to do the same.
Indeed, it's exactly because I fear president Trump in his second term might appoint justices like judge Cannon who really will go beyond bad to genuinely illegitimate rulings that I care. Basically, I think the left is making the same mistake it made when it called Bush a fascist and tyrant (or didn't call out those who did) so when Trump came along who really does threaten the republic much of the non-crazy right just dismissed it as more crying wolf.
They seemed pretty eager to steer the narrative about Desantis straight into the ground, so I'm not sure we've yet seen them see the need to confront this danger of having nowhere unaligned to stand.
Now, I know that Desantis was a poor candidate.
How do I know? The media told me so from the first day of his candidacy.
And what happened from 2000-2008?? Bush and GOPe and Limbaugh and Fox News and right wing blogosphere, perfected the right wing echo chamber that allowed them to steal the 2000 election and inexplicably get an 80% approval rating for failing to prevent 9/11 that allowed them to invade a country and make tax cuts extremely irresponsible all designed to juice approval ratings and headline economic numbers to win in 2002 and 2004. The history books now show Bush/Cheney to be an unmitigated disaster!! And that is the context in which, as you whine like a lil’ bitch, that the press started acting as a “de-facto arm of the (Democratic) party”.
Who said it was a conspiracy? I am simply describing what happened. A negotiated arrangement-very common in political parties, as you noted. Similar negotiations (with “incentives”) happening between various camps now. Too bad they didn’t start that process two years ago.
A biting a probably deserved critique of staff that surrounds the president.
But life is about choices and we are lucky to be left with a promising alternative.
A team of upstanding, patriotic, truth telling, competent, model public servants.
Paul Manafort, so what if he was sentenced to 7.5 years for bank fraud and tax fraud. A trifling matter, and he was justly pardoned.
Roger Stone, so what if he was sentenced to 3 years for witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and lying under oath. Also justly pardoned.
Michael Cohen, sentenced to 3 years in prison, for campaign finance violations and lying under oath. So what if he was not pardoned.
Rick Gates, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, sentences so short they do not belong in the same league as Manafort and Cohen, but we should still be thankful for their services.
And of course the head of government, who brought such talent to the campaign and to the administration. A master of public policy, deeply and widely well read, respected by his peers, a long and distinguished track record of service to his country.
Maybe we are wrong. Maybe it's not just the Team of Rivals that matters.* Maybe the voters matter more than thought.
*Give the executive things to decide and, as crucially, things to ignore. Curate. The people around him should bring him things he ought to decide, when events do not bring those things forward. This has been my assumption about how presidential governing (mostly) works with the aid of advisers. But Trump clearly doesn't listen to anyone. Truly sui generis.
Leaders show good judgement when they hire good talent. The previous administration was unusually poor in that regard. At least at the federal level administrations attract top-tier talent. And the appointment of close family members to key positions is straight out of the worst third-world practices.
And they would like to bring the same hiring practices to the professional civil service.
As one of many examples see how scrupulously fairly monies from the infrastructure bill are being allocated. Without regard to how a district voted, or how some senator or congressman feels about the administration. A lot of countries do not operate this way. A professional civil service is key. Without it we are looking at dangerous levels of backsliding.
I can only say what commenters always say, when this sort of objection is raised: this sort of emphasis on a professional, permanent governing class, on classiness and Ivy League and yes, decency and collegiality, both parties served by and serving them - has brought the nation to the brink of ruin.
I doubt there is anything unique about this field, that makes it the opposite of all other fields. I would like to have an "elite" doctor operate on my child (should the need arise), would like the aircraft I'm flying in to be designed and manufactured by elite aerospace engineers, like to listen to elite classical musicians, and so on. The answer surely cannot be "find cronies, loyalists, blood relatives, people who have no experience at all" in public service, because if they went to selective schools or scored highly on standardized tests there is something suspect about them.
I do think it is unique. It is not a science, it is not an art. Good people can do and have done much good in government service; but government service as such, or training for it as a class in a uniform way at a five-finger list of schools, was not the thing that made them good.
I have to speak out against the Rasputin comparison. Say anything about the Mad Monk (and there is plenty to say), at least occasionally he did give sensible advice to Nicholas II, like when he argued against entering WWI.
"The President of the United States listens to a man with greater influence than Rasputin, but who gives worse advice," has got to be the saddest and most alarming plausible statement of the year.
Cheer up, it's also the year that brought us "Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, which owns DVD kiosk operator Redbox, filed for chapter 11 protection after accumulating nearly $1 billion in debt".
There's some sort of law of conservation of funny and sad, or serious and absurd.
I just want to say that I think you have Biden Derangement Syndrome but I'm not unsubscribing because your other takes are fantastic. Keep up the great work!
Arnold writes: A President "is better off setting a tone in which aides are focused on getting to the best decisions, not on obtaining a seat closer to the king." While that seems sensible, it's inconsistent with getting elected in the first place. The election process requires a large team of people who are good at the courtier game, i.e., political partisans who are focused on winning the election, not necessarily on making good decisions as policy makers.
The job of a courtier is to keep his or her monarch on the throne, and thus prevent the violence and upheaval that come with regime changes. The courtiers described in Valentine Low’s book are admirable. Problem is, we don’t have monarchs in the US and we do have a system in place for non-violent regime changes. A competent president should keep the courtiers at arms length, not draw them into his or her inner circle.
Also, either the role of First Spouse needs to be drastically circumscribed, or he/she needs to be subjected to the same scrutiny as the presidential candidates. “Dr. Jill” is a disgrace.
There is substantial overlap between those who want to play the Courtier Game and those who want to play the Great Game (espionage). This makes certain forms of corruption/nepotism very hard to root out. Not only are the perpetrators adept at 'hiding in plain sight' but they know where the political bodies are buried, and may even have a hand in making them.
While I know it's fashionable in some circles to call the last almost-four years Obama's third term it does appear that he has relatively narrow influence. I think he was able to talk Biden out of running in 2016 because his influence in the Democrat Party was at its peak. Once Biden won an election without Obama's direct support much evidence points to Biden's considerable ego taking over decision making
One way that the Courtier Game can be neutralized to a degree is for the press to force the administration to deal with unflattering (BUT ACCURATE) information. The opposition party also plays a part in this. When you have a situation where the bulk of the press is in the tank for the administration party, and the opposition party shares numerous goals with it as well, courtiers are going to win.
Do you think Obama devised Obamacare in some room by himself in 2006?? Obama and Biden and Hillary all promoted some type of universal health care reform. All supported raising tax on higher incomes. All support renewable energy. The differences actually come in foreign policy in which Bide would have withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2009. Hillary supported what Obama ended up doing in Afghanistan. Fast forward to 2020 and Trump made the right call surrendering to the Taliban and Biden implemented Trump’s withdrawal.
If the Democrats want Biden out, and it does appear that the press and social media fellatrices that have been servicing Biden for 4 years want him off the ticket now, then they are going about it the wrong way. Better to sweet talk him out of running again than suddenly stabbing him in the back this way when it was obvious all along that he wasn't capable of actually doing the job. Biden's back is up now and might have to be removed forcibly from the ticket (I don' expect any attempt to remove him from office).
As a doomer, I can't think of anyone who better personifies American decline than Biden -- a mediocre, corrupt and predatory politician in his best days who is now cognitively impaired due to his age. If continued decline is what the American people want, then they should be able to vote for it transparently in the person of Joe Biden. The only purpose of switching to a ticket combining Harris with a 'moderate Republican' like Portman (or Youngkin, or Pompeo) would be twofold: 1) to provide plausible deniability to what is bound to be such massive electoral fraud that it would be patently obvious even to naysayers like Kling; and 2) to fool people into believing they will get something different and better when the reality is they would get more of the same -- unsustainable spending, corruption, endless unwinnable wars, crime and lawlessness, incompetence (exacerbated by DEI), indoctrination instead of education, censorship, and so forth. Anyway, Drum undermines his credibility when he claims that Biden's debate performance was 'genuinely puzzling' and that it was only that debate performance that convinced him that Biden is mentally unfit to be President. C'mon man!
As for Trump being a 'nightmare for democracy,' as 'the Bull' argues, the thing about Trump is that he is a one-man wrecking ball, beginning with the Bush and Clinton dynasties, then the Obama legacy, the other GOP candidates, and now Biden. If any of the alternatives had anything better to offer, they should have been able to beat Trump at his game.
Courtiers? Regardless of Biden’s advisors, hasn’t it been clear since before 2021 that Biden has diminished capacity? Maybe it has not clear to voters who focus on their personal lives (and TVs), but it has been clear to the DC media. I’m with Kling in that I find it disturbing and reprehensible that so many people in positions of responsibility have denied or stayed silent about the incapacity of our president for so long.
This is a very plausible explanation. But there is another one: Biden himself genuinely thinks he is the best for the job, the best to beat Trump, and no amount of discouraging would change his mind, short perhaps of a mass court resignation. People in proximity to power and privilege, with the added bonus of an excellent salary and significant status are not eager to lose all that. Moreover, they may perceive that Harris is not up to the job. Even now, with all the calls for replacement from the liberal press and donors, he is not budging. Courtiers can never defenestrate a boss.
Likewise don't forget senile people tend to become extremely defensive as a form.of self denial ala cognitive dissonance; you see it with anyone that has experienced family members going through senility; it's generally mid-stage. For his own sanity and ego Biden can't quit as it would require him to acknowledge something he personally is in denial about.
Why wouldn't they? Seriously--why? What forces in modern American culture counter the drive towards FYGM? Seeing the same damn thing with right and left eyes.
Courtiers we will always have with us. Biden's were just incompetent and he needed smarter ones. There is a long history of people closest to power successfully hiding the infirmities of the figurehead from the public. That was their main job and they failed badly, and there are a number of distressing implications to that fact.
Several commentators on the right who anticipated a bad performance like this were already coming up with quite clever and plausible ideas on the ways those close courtiers could successfully spin the decision to not have any debates at all.
For example, they could have said something like, "The President refuses to sully the dignity of his office and lower himself to the level of a treasonous insurrectionist by allowing a convicted felon with no sense of decency and with a long track record of total disrespect for our institutions to harm our democracy and create a divisive spectacle solely for his own corrupt purposes. Instead, President Biden is happy to embrace an alternative way to share his ideas for the nation's future and how he plans to continue Building Back Better by giving in-depth interviews to this country's most trusted news anchors."
Thus, no debates, a lot of heavily edited interviews, and a whole left-media ecosystem which would have repeated these lines over and over as if no reasonable person could possibly disagree with the validity of this 'explanation' and that, yes, while it was historically extraordinary to not have Presidential debates in the run-up to an election, Trump is so extraordinarily bad, that extreme times force good people into extreme positions. Biden wanted to have good, fair debates, he really did, after all, beating Trump would be a cake walk. But alas he was compelled by public spirit to refrain from doing them just this one time, because Trump just can't be trusted to behave himself in the manner befitting a candidate for our nation's highest office.
The anti-Biden commentators who wrote this script for the Biden people to follow all but confessed to the fact that it would probably have worked like a charm. And yet, the courtiers didn't do it! Instead, they thought it would be clever to bluff and insist on debate rules so lopsided in favor of Biden that they could position the Trump campaign into rejecting them as 'unfair' thus both being able to avoid debates while also being able to say, "See, WE wanted to have a debate, and it's TRUMP that refuses to!"
Then Trump called the bluff, and they had painted themselves into a corner and could no longer back out.
I think Scott Alexanders explanation that Biden has good and bad days and is "passable" from 10am-4pm made them "roll the dice" and figure they could silence the critics if he could just keep it together for 90 minutes if he got a Dr Feelgood shot right before the debate.
After all, Biden wasn't doing great in the polls before this. It was a toss up. If this gambit worked it might have put him over the edge. But it backfired.
From a cost/benefit perspective I can see how the costs would mostly be born by Biden himself the the benefits would flow to the courtiers.
I didn't follow the debate-rules saga, and didn't realize they particularly favored one or the other. To me the striking thing was the instant unanimity among the post-debate TV talkers (I saw this later, on the internet - a Joy Reid was talking, and I think Rachel Maddow was there? I don't know which network this is). It made me think the whole thing was a put-up. Not to deceive, but by Dem VIPs looking to unseat Biden (I don't know what else would be in their minds). That coordination always seems like a tell, but I grant I may feel some outsider paranoia.*
But this is not a theory, merely a first impression. I can only offer in support that people who are agents of chaos, which these media people very much are - and perhaps some influential Dems as well - don't fear a Trump presidency - they welcome it.
*Perhaps disliking the status quo in my country, I too long for chaos.
OTOH apart from Freddie Deboer the most-left substack I read is that of Josh Barro, because he gets off a good line sometimes, and he seems likeable and like someone Freddie Deboer would despise - so with AK a neat triptych of East Coast thought. (I don't expect to find my views represented on the internet.) But I also read him because I imagined him to be something of an insider. And he seems to have been genuinely blindsided by this affair.
So on that view, the presidential advisers have done a bang-up job heretofore but they either messed up or there grew up some dissension among them.
Your last line… totally plausible. I would love to have someone confirm that from the Buden team (not gonna happen).
> Journalists do a better job when they maintain a more adversarial stance toward public officials.
This has become an underestimated reason for voting Republican. Since ~2008, whenever the Democrats have held power, the press has gone from providing some oversight to acting as a de-facto arm of the party.
If you believe oversight of government is important, the only way to get it is to vote Republican. Then you may get too much of it, but too much is better than none at all.
I think it's more accurate to say that the press needs to remain skeptical of the president -- when you know they'd be critical no matter what it doesn't help (hence why the fact that fox news has been screaming about Biden being senile didn't help -- people knew they'd probably say that no matter what). For the same reason putting in a republican wouldn't help because as long as the media is split into conservative and liberal factions everyone expects the liberal media will say awful things no matter what. Putting a republican in the WH just flips the problem in the other direction -- fox news etc doesn't say bad things about the president while liberal leaning media does but since everyone knows they'd say bad things either way no one is informed and no guardrails are created.
What's needed is broadly unaligned media but that runs into two big problems.
1) Media consumers can now pick and choose what sources they listen to for different subjects -- you can read one source for local news or for theater and another for politics -- meaning that the incentive for political reporting is to appeal to politics enthusiasts who are usually the most partisan and don't want balance.
2) Donald Trump very effectively increased polarization by engaging in wide spread norm breaking which caused news outlets which were trying not to take a traditional left-right side to report on that fact in a way that then caused them to be perceived as taking a side and shifted incentives for them so they effectively had to. They could no longer draw right leaning viewers by continuing to be nuetral on the substance and only report on the means/norms.
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I agree that lots of good would be accomplished by voting in a republican president who respected traditional norms. Despite being a democrat generally I'd vote for Romney in a heartbeat for that reason. But Trump's unique skill is to polarize issues and that exacerbates the problem you raise.
To me Romney rather neatly represents the traditional norm (or rather, dating back to the 70s or so?) of the GOP ensuring that the well-off of both "right" and "left" continue being well-off, because mammon is all that matters, the country itself be damned.
His response to the border crisis would probably be, in his great and magnanimous decency, personally to adopt a bunch of kids. Boom, done.
Fine it doesn't need to be Romney in terms of policy, I'm just saying that for the press to have a way to tell when to call attention to something besides pure policy driven disagreement there needs to be a background agreement about the procedures by which things should be accomplished. All the republican speakers recently (dunno enough yet about Johnson to be sure) or Mitch McConnell would do fine on those grounds or Ted Cruz.
Take all of Trump's policies and put it in someone who is going to go through the normal process of how to change policy. Works via the foreign policy establishment, obeys traditional norms regarding the DOJ etc etc.
But if one thinks that the system is broken and it needs to be upended then there really isn't any nuetral ground on which a non-aligned press can stand.
And sometimes that's just how it works. If you don't have even basic agreement on what are acceptable ways for policy to be made then it just boils down to power and it doesn't really make sense to ask for a nuetral press because even the question of what kinds of things are a big deal (is the president being senile big...what about the president admitting he's taking a foreign policy position based on whether the people involved were willing to help his campaign etc) is no longer a nuetral question.
I don't expect you to feel this way - but if you're a conservative, you regard rule by Supreme Court - which being uniquely impervious, renders potentially all of us into de facto lunatics, since what is crazier than trying to move an immoveable object, by other than the lawfare means that are the only ones available, which ensure that howevermuch you win, you lost by conceding the legitimacy of the whole business - as a massive "upending". This phenomenon managed to happen without the media ever worrying in the slightest about where they could stand.
I’m not a conservative and if the court had said it's perfectly legal for the president to steal the election or engage in a coup I’d feel differently.
But saying you can't be prosecuted is very different than saying it's legal. I care about what happens to the country not whether we can take revenge on Trump and I don't believe it's the threat of prosecution that stops coups — indeed fear of prosecution is just as likely to cause someone to try a coup hence why many countries do give explicit presidential immunity.
As I said, I don't like the decision (not because of coup risk but because of how it might affect boring old favors for money) but it's within the range of bad but legitimate rulings. If you want the right to accept rulings they see as morally bad like Roe we need to be willing to do the same.
Indeed, it's exactly because I fear president Trump in his second term might appoint justices like judge Cannon who really will go beyond bad to genuinely illegitimate rulings that I care. Basically, I think the left is making the same mistake it made when it called Bush a fascist and tyrant (or didn't call out those who did) so when Trump came along who really does threaten the republic much of the non-crazy right just dismissed it as more crying wolf.
They seemed pretty eager to steer the narrative about Desantis straight into the ground, so I'm not sure we've yet seen them see the need to confront this danger of having nowhere unaligned to stand.
Now, I know that Desantis was a poor candidate.
How do I know? The media told me so from the first day of his candidacy.
And what happened from 2000-2008?? Bush and GOPe and Limbaugh and Fox News and right wing blogosphere, perfected the right wing echo chamber that allowed them to steal the 2000 election and inexplicably get an 80% approval rating for failing to prevent 9/11 that allowed them to invade a country and make tax cuts extremely irresponsible all designed to juice approval ratings and headline economic numbers to win in 2002 and 2004. The history books now show Bush/Cheney to be an unmitigated disaster!! And that is the context in which, as you whine like a lil’ bitch, that the press started acting as a “de-facto arm of the (Democratic) party”.
Obama deliberately chose Joe as the meat puppet and acceptable face atop the Bernie/Liz agenda as part of his post-SC primary “arrangement”.
He knew Biden’s limitations then (as some of the media did)- these limitations were probably seen as positives.
Omg, a political party is literally a conspiracy!! Candidates used to be chosen by a small group of people in smoke filled rooms!!
Who said it was a conspiracy? I am simply describing what happened. A negotiated arrangement-very common in political parties, as you noted. Similar negotiations (with “incentives”) happening between various camps now. Too bad they didn’t start that process two years ago.
A biting a probably deserved critique of staff that surrounds the president.
But life is about choices and we are lucky to be left with a promising alternative.
A team of upstanding, patriotic, truth telling, competent, model public servants.
Paul Manafort, so what if he was sentenced to 7.5 years for bank fraud and tax fraud. A trifling matter, and he was justly pardoned.
Roger Stone, so what if he was sentenced to 3 years for witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and lying under oath. Also justly pardoned.
Michael Cohen, sentenced to 3 years in prison, for campaign finance violations and lying under oath. So what if he was not pardoned.
Rick Gates, Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, sentences so short they do not belong in the same league as Manafort and Cohen, but we should still be thankful for their services.
And of course the head of government, who brought such talent to the campaign and to the administration. A master of public policy, deeply and widely well read, respected by his peers, a long and distinguished track record of service to his country.
Maybe we are wrong. Maybe it's not just the Team of Rivals that matters.* Maybe the voters matter more than thought.
*Give the executive things to decide and, as crucially, things to ignore. Curate. The people around him should bring him things he ought to decide, when events do not bring those things forward. This has been my assumption about how presidential governing (mostly) works with the aid of advisers. But Trump clearly doesn't listen to anyone. Truly sui generis.
Of course voters matter, they matter most of all.
Leaders show good judgement when they hire good talent. The previous administration was unusually poor in that regard. At least at the federal level administrations attract top-tier talent. And the appointment of close family members to key positions is straight out of the worst third-world practices.
And they would like to bring the same hiring practices to the professional civil service.
As one of many examples see how scrupulously fairly monies from the infrastructure bill are being allocated. Without regard to how a district voted, or how some senator or congressman feels about the administration. A lot of countries do not operate this way. A professional civil service is key. Without it we are looking at dangerous levels of backsliding.
I can only say what commenters always say, when this sort of objection is raised: this sort of emphasis on a professional, permanent governing class, on classiness and Ivy League and yes, decency and collegiality, both parties served by and serving them - has brought the nation to the brink of ruin.
I doubt there is anything unique about this field, that makes it the opposite of all other fields. I would like to have an "elite" doctor operate on my child (should the need arise), would like the aircraft I'm flying in to be designed and manufactured by elite aerospace engineers, like to listen to elite classical musicians, and so on. The answer surely cannot be "find cronies, loyalists, blood relatives, people who have no experience at all" in public service, because if they went to selective schools or scored highly on standardized tests there is something suspect about them.
I do think it is unique. It is not a science, it is not an art. Good people can do and have done much good in government service; but government service as such, or training for it as a class in a uniform way at a five-finger list of schools, was not the thing that made them good.
Which is not to say you don’t describe an ideal. But it was exploited, somehow, by some bad people in this country.
Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain should be embarrassed at how far short they fall of such luminaries.
I have to speak out against the Rasputin comparison. Say anything about the Mad Monk (and there is plenty to say), at least occasionally he did give sensible advice to Nicholas II, like when he argued against entering WWI.
"The President of the United States listens to a man with greater influence than Rasputin, but who gives worse advice," has got to be the saddest and most alarming plausible statement of the year.
Cheer up, it's also the year that brought us "Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, which owns DVD kiosk operator Redbox, filed for chapter 11 protection after accumulating nearly $1 billion in debt".
There's some sort of law of conservation of funny and sad, or serious and absurd.
I just want to say that I think you have Biden Derangement Syndrome but I'm not unsubscribing because your other takes are fantastic. Keep up the great work!
Arnold writes: A President "is better off setting a tone in which aides are focused on getting to the best decisions, not on obtaining a seat closer to the king." While that seems sensible, it's inconsistent with getting elected in the first place. The election process requires a large team of people who are good at the courtier game, i.e., political partisans who are focused on winning the election, not necessarily on making good decisions as policy makers.
The job of a courtier is to keep his or her monarch on the throne, and thus prevent the violence and upheaval that come with regime changes. The courtiers described in Valentine Low’s book are admirable. Problem is, we don’t have monarchs in the US and we do have a system in place for non-violent regime changes. A competent president should keep the courtiers at arms length, not draw them into his or her inner circle.
Also, either the role of First Spouse needs to be drastically circumscribed, or he/she needs to be subjected to the same scrutiny as the presidential candidates. “Dr. Jill” is a disgrace.
There is substantial overlap between those who want to play the Courtier Game and those who want to play the Great Game (espionage). This makes certain forms of corruption/nepotism very hard to root out. Not only are the perpetrators adept at 'hiding in plain sight' but they know where the political bodies are buried, and may even have a hand in making them.
While I know it's fashionable in some circles to call the last almost-four years Obama's third term it does appear that he has relatively narrow influence. I think he was able to talk Biden out of running in 2016 because his influence in the Democrat Party was at its peak. Once Biden won an election without Obama's direct support much evidence points to Biden's considerable ego taking over decision making
One way that the Courtier Game can be neutralized to a degree is for the press to force the administration to deal with unflattering (BUT ACCURATE) information. The opposition party also plays a part in this. When you have a situation where the bulk of the press is in the tank for the administration party, and the opposition party shares numerous goals with it as well, courtiers are going to win.
Do you think Obama devised Obamacare in some room by himself in 2006?? Obama and Biden and Hillary all promoted some type of universal health care reform. All supported raising tax on higher incomes. All support renewable energy. The differences actually come in foreign policy in which Bide would have withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2009. Hillary supported what Obama ended up doing in Afghanistan. Fast forward to 2020 and Trump made the right call surrendering to the Taliban and Biden implemented Trump’s withdrawal.
If the Democrats want Biden out, and it does appear that the press and social media fellatrices that have been servicing Biden for 4 years want him off the ticket now, then they are going about it the wrong way. Better to sweet talk him out of running again than suddenly stabbing him in the back this way when it was obvious all along that he wasn't capable of actually doing the job. Biden's back is up now and might have to be removed forcibly from the ticket (I don' expect any attempt to remove him from office).
As a doomer, I can't think of anyone who better personifies American decline than Biden -- a mediocre, corrupt and predatory politician in his best days who is now cognitively impaired due to his age. If continued decline is what the American people want, then they should be able to vote for it transparently in the person of Joe Biden. The only purpose of switching to a ticket combining Harris with a 'moderate Republican' like Portman (or Youngkin, or Pompeo) would be twofold: 1) to provide plausible deniability to what is bound to be such massive electoral fraud that it would be patently obvious even to naysayers like Kling; and 2) to fool people into believing they will get something different and better when the reality is they would get more of the same -- unsustainable spending, corruption, endless unwinnable wars, crime and lawlessness, incompetence (exacerbated by DEI), indoctrination instead of education, censorship, and so forth. Anyway, Drum undermines his credibility when he claims that Biden's debate performance was 'genuinely puzzling' and that it was only that debate performance that convinced him that Biden is mentally unfit to be President. C'mon man!
As for Trump being a 'nightmare for democracy,' as 'the Bull' argues, the thing about Trump is that he is a one-man wrecking ball, beginning with the Bush and Clinton dynasties, then the Obama legacy, the other GOP candidates, and now Biden. If any of the alternatives had anything better to offer, they should have been able to beat Trump at his game.
The 2004 film, "Alien vs. Predator," had the tagline: Whoever wins, we lose, which seems entirely appropriate to this year's presidential election.
Courtiers? Regardless of Biden’s advisors, hasn’t it been clear since before 2021 that Biden has diminished capacity? Maybe it has not clear to voters who focus on their personal lives (and TVs), but it has been clear to the DC media. I’m with Kling in that I find it disturbing and reprehensible that so many people in positions of responsibility have denied or stayed silent about the incapacity of our president for so long.
This is a very plausible explanation. But there is another one: Biden himself genuinely thinks he is the best for the job, the best to beat Trump, and no amount of discouraging would change his mind, short perhaps of a mass court resignation. People in proximity to power and privilege, with the added bonus of an excellent salary and significant status are not eager to lose all that. Moreover, they may perceive that Harris is not up to the job. Even now, with all the calls for replacement from the liberal press and donors, he is not budging. Courtiers can never defenestrate a boss.
Likewise don't forget senile people tend to become extremely defensive as a form.of self denial ala cognitive dissonance; you see it with anyone that has experienced family members going through senility; it's generally mid-stage. For his own sanity and ego Biden can't quit as it would require him to acknowledge something he personally is in denial about.
Why wouldn't they? Seriously--why? What forces in modern American culture counter the drive towards FYGM? Seeing the same damn thing with right and left eyes.