On the menu today: After waiting three days, President Biden addressed the country for eleven minutes Wednesday night, and somehow, he still hasn’t elaborated on why he isn’t seeking a second term; a February edition of this newsletter foresaw a lot of our current circumstances; contemplating why the Acela corridor and California elite are so baffled by Harris’s low approval rating, and why they defend Harris so ardently; and finally, the coded objections to Harris selecting Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate, and the most vivid demonstration imaginable of American “girl power.”
Eleven Minutes of Poetic Rhetoric and No Real Explanation
Joe Biden quit the presidential race and chose to never really tell us why. The closest he got was a vague, cursory reference to being unable to unite his party:
In recent weeks, it has become clear to me that I need to unite my party in this critical endeavor. I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term. But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.
So, I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. It’s the best way to unite our nation.
Look, Biden chose to not pursue a second term either because of the polls, or because of his age and health, or both. The president just couldn’t bring himself to say it in front of the cameras. If you read between the lines, it’s clear Biden thinks he deserves a second term and should be the nominee. But what Biden euphemistically calls his party’s lack of unity makes that impossible — meaning too many Democrats stand in the way of his goal, because they think he has no chance. The Democratic Party’s “Super Friends” never showed up at his house, but clearly Biden and his inner circle looked at the prospect of a party civil war with Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, George Clooney, and the rest and concluded they would lose.
Contrast that with President Lyndon Johnson, addressing the country on the evening of March 31, 1968:
With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office–the presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
During the debate that ultimately ended his presidency, Biden claimed, “I’m the only president this century, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world like he did” — forgetting the three American soldiers killed in Jordan by a drone attack, and the 13 killed by a suicide bomber near the Abbey Gate entrance to Hamid Karzai International Airport. Last night, Biden said, “I’m the first president of this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.”
Biden’s contention is as inaccurate as his debate claim. Nine days ago, the Iranian-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq launched two drone attacks at U.S. forces stationed at Iraq’s Ain al-Asad airbase; thankfully no one was hurt. Then there’s the Red Sea: “The U.S.-led campaign against the Houthi rebels, overshadowed by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, has turned into the most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II, its leaders and experts told The Associated Press.” Good thing we’re not at war, because if we were, it would look like we were losing, or at least floundering:
Just this month, Houthi militants sank one ship and set another ablaze. The fighters, operating on land and in the water, have launched swarms of drones at U.S. warships and deployed a remote-controlled boat packed with explosives, tactics and weapons that experts say are associated with the group’s patron, Iran.
The recent uptick in Houthi activity has underscored the group’s ability to pose a sustained threat, relying in part on a steady flow of Iranian arms and expertise both to withstand U.S. strikes and remain on the attack. The faltering U.S. efforts to halt Houthi operations and protect global shipping have also drawn scrutiny from Congress, where lawmakers say not enough is being done to establish deterrence.
Five days ago, the Houthis launched a drone strike against a U.S. Embassy branch office in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing one civilian and wounding five more.
So, no, the U.S. is not formally at war, it’s just that hostile forces are shooting at us, and our military is shooting back at them. But relax, everyone, it’s not war! We’re left to wonder whether Biden thinks the current Middle East conflicts don’t count, or whether he simply forgot his briefings about them.
Of course, Biden offered his now trademark, chokingly ironic line, “When you elected me to this office, I promised to always level with you, to tell you the truth.”
Biden did nothing to reassure those who think he’s too old to do the job anymore — voice raspy and soft, still mumbling and not enunciating. (In another painful irony, Biden emphasized, “There’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.”)
As our Phil Klein wrote, “he looked weak and out of sorts tonight. He was slurring his words, trying to force his eyes wide open, and struggling to get through his speech on the teleprompter. He has no business remaining as the leader of the free world.”
For all our criticism — well-deserved criticism — let us pray for Joe Biden that he may remain in the best possible health, mind, and spirit for all the remaining days of his presidency.
If You Just Pay Attention, You Seem Like Nostradamus
This newsletter, February 12, 2024:
Biden’s age impedes his ability to communicate, and a presidential campaign is all about communication. Everyone knows Biden is in no shape for three 90-minute prime-time debates, and his allies are already talking about reasons why Biden should skip them — lest they elevate Trump, of course. . . .
I would note that we’ve had a lot of “How Kamala Harris got her groove back” profile pieces and coverage over the last three years, with no discernable change in public opinion of her. But with that said, if Biden announced he wasn’t seeking another term, the glowing coverage of Harris would reach saturation levels.
And if 2024 is going to be a pure base-turnout election — certainly neither party seems all that interested in appealing to independents and centrists anymore — Harris’s loopy, off-the-cuff, Hallmark-card, haiku speaking style won’t matter as much. She raises money, pounds the podium on abortion, and presses the buttons for progressives in a way that Joe Biden can’t or won’t. Recast her as Obama, cast Trump in the role of Mitt Romney or John McCain — an erratic billionaire businessman who’s too old for the job — and roll the dice.
Above, I referred to those endless, and almost always wish-casting, “how Kamala Harris got her groove back” profile pieces.
I think the best and certainly the most in-depth profile of Harris written in the past two years was the one by former National Review writer Elaina Plott Calabro, in the Atlantic.
Conservatives who can’t stand Harris will probably find sections of the profile far too generous to the vice president. But I think Plott Calabro hones in on what the rest of left-of-center Washington finds so baffling about Harris. They’re convinced she’s terrific, so why did the public sour on her early and never change its mind?
Plott Calabro:
Yet a consistent theme of Harris’s career has been her struggle to tell her own story—to define herself and her political vision for voters in clear, memorable terms. The result, in Harris’s first months as vice president, was that high-profile mistakes assumed the devastating weight of first impressions. Verbal fumbles (“It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day”) became memes and were anthologized online. Shortly after the Holt interview, White House aides began leaking to various news outlets about top-to-bottom dysfunction in Harris’s office and Biden’s apparent concern about her performance. In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides.
And Plott Calabro does not gloss over the fact that Harris — who is an extremely experienced public speaker, and who must have made thousands of oral arguments in courtrooms over the years — sometimes goes up on stage and offers verbal loop-de-loops that sound like a malfunctioning AI trying to churn out sage proverbs:
Go to enough of Harris’s events and you’ll notice a pattern. Many of them—conversations with community leaders at, say, a college campus or a civic center—begin shakily. The moderator opens by asking Harris a sweeping question about the state of the country, or the administration’s approach to some major issue—the sort of question that a seasoned politician should be able to spin her way through on autopilot. And yet Harris often sounds like she’s hearing the question for the first time.
During a discussion at Georgia Tech focused on climate change, I listened as Harris was asked to speak about the administration’s progress over the past two years in addressing the crisis. Her baroque response began: “The way I think about this moment is that I do believe it to be a transformational moment. But in order for us to truly achieve that capacity, it’s going to require all to be involved … and I will say, on behalf of the administration, a whole-of-government approach to understanding the excitement that we should all feel about the opportunity of this moment, and then also thinking of it in a way that we understand the intersection between so many movements that have been about a fight for justice and how we should see that intersection, then, in the context of this moment … And so I’m very excited about this moment.”
Plott Calabro dryly observes, “This is not Churchill. It’s not even Al Gore.”
In Harris, you have someone whom the Acela corridor elite — as well as the California elite — thinks is, if not perfection, then a figure who checks all kinds of “good” boxes: bicultural family upbringing, the desegregated busing program, living abroad in Montreal, graduating Howard University, intern for senator Alan Cranston, president of the UC-Hastings College of Law chapter of the Black Law Students Association, career prosecutor, married a successful entertainment lawyer, interfaith marriage, generous advance for her memoir book deal . . .
Perhaps one of the reasons you see such ardent defenses of Harris’s excellence is the number of figures in the media world who see themselves in Harris; if you mock her as an empty suit, reciting platitudes and not actually getting much done, they take it personally.
ADDENDA: Apparently, Kamala Harris shouldn’t pick Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate because it might upset the kinds of snot-nosed punks who burned the American flag out in front of Union Station yesterday.
As the software engineers say, that’s not a bug, “that’s a feature.”
Finally, do you want to hear about some actual girl power, not the pose or rhetoric?
During their unprecedented deployment, the “Fighting Swordsmen” flew over 3,000 combat hours and completed almost 1,500 combat missions in support of Operations Inherent Resolve and Prosperity Guardian. The squadron employed over 20 air-to-air missiles against Houthi one-way attack drones, which targeted civilian merchant vessels in the Red Sea and Bab-al-Mandeb Strait. During one mission, VFA-32 became home to the first American female pilot to engage and kill an air-to-air contact.