On the menu today: One member of the Democratic National Committee wants to put the organization on the record as officially supporting Joe Biden’s running for another term in 2024; Warner Bros. makes an extraordinary decision about a nearly completed film; and a hearty thanks to all of you out there supporting my fiction writing.
Uncertainty Generates Anxiety, in Life and in 2024 Politics
On paper, everyone in politics should be focused on the upcoming midterms, not the presidential election two years after that. But the increasingly loud speculation and grumbles of discontent reflect a circumstance that Americans haven’t seen since the late 1960s: a first-term president who could conceivably not run for another term.
Biden could choose not to run because of his age — or, God forbid, his age might make him incapable of performing his duties before then. (The topic is no longer taboo.) Biden doesn’t work a full schedule, and the 2024 campaign won’t allow him to do all his appearances remotely through Zoom and Skype calls, as he did the first time around. A presidential campaign in two years would expose all the flaws and weaknesses that the highly unusual circumstances of the 2020 campaign helped obscure.
If the Democrats nominate Biden again, at this point, he appears likely to be an exceptionally weak candidate. His job-approval rating is at or near record lows. It’s been a long while since Biden consistently led Donald Trump in polling of hypothetical head-to-head matchups. A recent CNN poll found that three-quarters of Democrats want the party to nominate someone besides Biden.
Uncertainty usually generates anxiety; Van Jones put it succinctly back in mid June:
When [Biden] does badly, when he stumbles, you get nervous and you wonder, is it just a stutter, is he tired or something else there. So, I think people just looking, honestly, I think Democrats are like, if this guy is ready to go, we’re behind him. But if he’s not ready to go, [he] should let us know.
Biden has reportedly told associates, including Barack Obama, that he intends to run for reelection. The arguments against Biden’s running again — at nearly age 82! — are clear and compelling. But Biden’s ego may not allow him to admit that he’s aged out of the job and that he’s performed poorly in it. He quite literally has been working his whole life to get into the Oval Office. Becoming the first president since Lyndon Johnson to voluntarily not seek another term would represent a de facto admission that he was never well-suited to be president, and was indeed elected because of unusual twists of fate. He was nominated because he wasn’t Bernie Sanders, and he was elected because he wasn’t Donald Trump. The country never really enthusiastically embraced him as the best option; it only settled for him as the least-damaging option.
One member of the Democratic National Committee wants to put the organization on the record as officially supporting Joe Biden’s running for another term in 2024:
William Owen of Tennessee recently drafted a resolution to put his fellow committee members on record as being supportive of the sitting president. The DNC has approved similar measures for past presidents. But the motivation this time was different. Owen said he wanted to blunt the pessimism surrounding Biden that was emanating from within the party’s own ranks.
Owen wants the DNC to vote on his resolution next month. It’s almost cute the way he thinks a DNC resolution means anything in politics. A national party’s resolution doesn’t bind anyone to anything. (Also intriguingly, Owens has donated quite a bit to Republican candidates in recent years, although he contends that this was because of clients he represented as a lobbyist.) All Owen’s resolution is doing is putting his fellow DNC members in an awkward spot, forcing them to publicly claim that everything is fine with Biden and that he’s a strong candidate for 2024, in the face of considerable counterevidence.
Several high-profile Democrats have dodged the question on whether they think Biden will run in 2024, and two Minnesota Democrats in the House, Angie Craig and Dean Phillips, have declared that he shouldn’t. Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York declared she didn’t think Biden would run for another term. Her primary rival through redistricting, Jerrold Nadler, said it was too early to say whether Biden should run again. Lots of Democrats are willing to send little hints and nudges to Biden and his team that they’re not enthusiastic about the idea of “Biden 2024.” But it’s unlikely that Biden will take any subtle hints, and no one around Biden likes the idea of walking away from powerful White House jobs.
We’re seeing something of a collective-action problem — ironic, since the Democrats are the more collectivist of the two parties. Unless something changes soon, Biden’s running for reelection will be a bad idea for the Democrats. (And even if Biden were to somehow win his reelection bid, the country will be stuck in the same mess we’re in now, just with an even older president.)
But Biden is going to run unless someone of stature within the party comes out and declares that the emperor has no clothes.
Why the World Will (Likely) Never See Batgirl
The Warner Bros. film studio did something extraordinary this week: It pulled the plug on an almost-completed Batgirl film and announcing that the movie would not be released anywhere — not in theaters, streaming services, cable, Blue-Ray, DVD, or any other format:
“The decision to not release Batgirl reflects our leadership’s strategic shift as it relates to the DC universe and HBO Max,” said a Warner Bros. spokesperson in a statement. “Leslie Grace is an incredibly talented actor and this decision is not a reflection of her performance. We are incredibly grateful to the filmmakers of Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt and their respective casts and we hope to collaborate with everyone again in the near future.”
It is likely that Leslie Grace, and everyone else involved in the production, tried their best — this was filmed in 2021 and involved Covid-19 protocols that drove up the cost of the film. The rave reviews of Grace’s performance from In The Heights indicate that she still has a long and thriving career ahead of her.
But as I noted on Twitter yesterday, if the Batgirl movie were any good, Warner Bros. would be releasing it somewhere. Full stop.
A lot of other explanations are being thrown around. Warner Bros. will reportedly write off the film as a loss on its taxes. (This prevents the film from being released in any form for many years.) And yes, the film was approved during a previous regime, and new CEO David Zaslav is attempting to cut losses. And Warner Bros. has a mess on its hands with its DC Comics-based films; the actor who plays the Flash, Ezra Miller, appears to be having a very public, ongoing, slow-motion mental breakdown involving multiple run-ins with the law.
But none of those explanations really work if Batgirl is a terrific film, or even just an okay one.
The New York Post reported that the early test screenings of Batgirl were “so poorly received by moviegoers that the studio decided to cut its losses and run, for the sake of the brand’s future. It’s a DC disaster.”
That is the Occam’s razor explanation, and it suggests that the film isn’t just mediocre or disappointing, it is apparently embarrassingly bad. So bad that Warner Bros. thinks it is better for everyone involved to swallow the sunken costs of the $90 million or so already spent making it.
Think about how many lousy movies get released, with studios hoping they can make money on opening weekend before word of their badness spreads. If Warner Bros. is not even putting Batgirl on its streaming service HBO Max, that means the film is so bad that the studio doesn’t want to be associated with it. No studio completes the process of making a good movie and then decides at the last minute not to release it in any form just because they want the tax write-off.
Just about everybody involved in the process of making movies got into the business because they want to make movies. Nobody is shelving a good movie forever because they want a smaller tax bill next year. If the movie is any good, it’s more valuable as a potential hit.
I’m sorry if you had high hopes for this one, but in all likelihood, it turned out terribly. Just don’t buy this spin that not releasing the film in any way is just part of a “strategic shift,” as the studio claimed.
It’s Hollywood, so we don’t expect honesty. But the contention that, “It’s a great film, we just decided we would rather have the tax advantage” is a new triumph in the long history of spectacularly implausible explanations.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to everyone who got the short story Saving the Devil and the forthcoming novel Gathering Five Storms off to a great start in sales yesterday. Saving the Devil was the number one new release in the extraordinarily precise category of “45-Minute Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Short Reads” on Amazon. (Although to be honest, I don’t know if anyone else released anything in the “45-Minute Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Short Reads” category yesterday.)
If you don’t like authors turning into relentless self-promotion machines around publication time . . . well, sorry in advance. Only the biggest authors get much of an advertising budget, and they’re the ones who likely need it the least.