On the menu today: That video of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren squirming about her past comments on how sharp Joe Biden’s mind was is a lot of fun, but her inability to give an honest, straight answer six months after Election Day (and nine months after Biden left the race!) is evidence that Democrats still need to do a lot of brutally honest self-assessment about how the 2024 election cycle went so wrong for them.
Democrats Can’t Avoid Biden’s Legacy
Hopefully by now you’ve seen the hilarious interview of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on the podcast Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, haplessly trying to defend her insistence that Joe Biden was as sharp as ever in the summer of 2024:
Fragoso: Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity, he had a sharpness to him? You said that up until July of last year.
Warren: I said what I believe to be true, and—
Fragoso: You think he was as sharp as you?
Warren: Um . . . I said I had not seen decline, and I hadn’t at that point.
Fragoso: You did not see any decline from 2024 Joe Biden to 2021 Joe Biden?
Warren: Not when I said that. You know, the — the thing is, he . . . look, he was sharp. He was on his feet. I saw him at live events, I had meetings with him a couple of times—
Fragoso: Senator, “on his feet” is not praise. “He can speak in sentences” is not praise.
Warren: All right, fair enough, fair enough. Look, it is — the question is what are we going to do now, okay?
Back on July 8, Hasan Minhaj aired an interview with Warren that was recorded before the debate. After Minhaj joked, “One benefit of President Biden being the president is that we don’t have to argue about whether or not he can drive,” Warren smiled and said, “I’ve just got to tell you this, I talk to the man, okay, and the man is sharp.” She insisted, “The man knows what he’s talking about. He does the job.”
The transcript of Warren’s recent appearance with Fragoso doesn’t do it justice; as our Jeff Blehar laid out, it’s the Massachusetts senator’s sheepish, guilty facial expressions that make the clip so delicious. She has no defense, and she can only damn Biden with the faintest of praise, vaguely reminiscent of Jill Biden praising her husband like a kindergartener after the presidential debate: “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question!” The otherwise friendly host glares at Warren with utter exasperation.
As the Democrats move forward, they must come to some sort of sense of what lessons they’ve learned from the debacle of the 2024 campaign, an epic miscalculation that brought their most loathed political enemy back to the Oval Office. And there are at least six potential big lessons, although I’ll bet you can think of more.
One: It’s Joe Biden’s fault. This is no doubt a part of the story; whatever you think of CNN’s Jake Tapper co-writing a nonfiction book declaring Biden’s decision to seek another term as an octogenarian, the title Original Sin appears to fit. Had Biden announced he would only seek one term, Democrats could have had a real presidential primary, and the entire election cycle would have developed differently. Indisputably, the sight and sound of a doddering, forgetful, mumbling geriatric cemented the public perception that the president wasn’t really running much of anything and severely weakened the Democrats’ hand as the 2024 campaign season accelerated. But there’s one glaring complication to this theory: Joe Biden wasn’t on the ballot in November.
Two: It’s Kamala Harris’s fault. Another explanation that is no doubt part of the story as well, and we can throw in the fact that as far as we can tell, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz did nothing to help shore up the “blue wall” in key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. She was a shameless flip-flopper, appeared scared to do formal sit-down interviews, relied on platitudes, and proved to be the ideal candidate to wow a crowd of San Francisco donors.
One complication to this is that throughout the 2024 campaign, Democrats loved Harris and were convinced that she was doing everything she needed to do. As I wrote last October, Democrats are terrible at self-scouting; they can’t get an accurate read on what their candidates’ strengths and weaknesses are. (“Instead of self-scouting, Democrats walked around in a fog of optimistic happy talk — or they believed that the revulsion Donald Trump inspired was so intense and widespread that it could overcome any weakness on their side.”)
Three: It’s the economy. Voters consistently ranked the economy the most important issue, and while Democrats initially tried to run on “Bidenomics,” a couple years of high inflation and the skyrocketing cost of living left Americans feeling squeezed, and nullified any good vibes from a low unemployment rate.
Four: It’s the border and illegal immigration. Once Republican governors started shipping illegal immigrants to big cities, mayors of those cities howled at how unjust it was and how exorbitant the cost and social-services burden was. “D.C. is not a border town,” fumed Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, as if El Paso or McAllen were awash in spare resources to handle an influx of impoverished migrants. Democrats welcomed illegal immigrants, as long as they stayed far away from where they actually lived.
(We might throw in lawlessness in the cities as a component of this, or maybe we can throw the quality of life in Democratic-run cities in the next category.)
Five: It’s the wokeness — those born male in women’s restrooms and locker rooms, the obsession with pronouns, the philosophy of “diversity, equity and inclusion” that was thinly disguised discrimination against straight white males, etc. The Democratic Party appeared hell-bent on turning every aspect of American society upside down, in the name of punishing those who were deemed privileged or oppressors; with a revolutionary fervor, leftists ran amok, in what was allegedly activism but increasingly was obvious bullying.
Six: It’s that they weren’t progressive or leftist enough. Believe it or not, there are Democratic elected officials who genuinely believe this, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among them.
If the problem was really just Biden or Harris — i.e., the Democrats had the right message, but not the right messenger — then they can just run a better, more charismatic, clearer-speaking candidate next cycle and everything will turn out fine.
But if the problem is more than just flawed candidates — and remember that the GOP nominee had more than a few flaws! — then Democrats won’t get different results from running fresh faces on the same old agenda.
It means that huge amounts of federal spending don’t help Democrats at the ballot box, if dumping that much money into the economy quickly triggers a long stretch of high inflation.
It means that there is no way to be an open-borders party, and that the accusations of the GOP being a white-supremacy party aren’t just rejected by the electorate, they’re increasingly rejected by voters in minority groups.
It means that hard-left woke progressivism is a philosophy that is fundamentally alien to the American character and the principles enshrined in the Constitution. You can’t have equality under the law, or equality in the eyes of each other’s fellow citizens, if you’re always sorting people into a hierarchy of the oppressed.
(And it is very hard to believe the Sanders/AOC perspective that Americans yearn for left-wing government and, based upon that yearning, chose Trump and JD Vance. Populist government, maybe; even more progressive government, no. To the shock of many Democrats, non-voters preferred Trump; if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the national popular vote by 4.8 percentage points.)
But the whole Biden debacle points to a deeper, darker problem among not just Democratic elected officials, but their whole supporting apparatus outside of public office — the MSNBC hosts, the women on The View, the George Clooneys, the New York Times editorial board, and so on.
Remember, for the first six months of 2024, the arguments about Joe Biden’s age and health were completely inverted in Democratic circles. Those who thought Biden was too old for another term were scorned as “the bedwetting brigade.” Videos of Biden looking frail and elderly were dismissed as “cheap fakes” by both Democratic officials and the media. Special counsel Robert Hur’s entirely accurate assessment that a jury would perceive the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” was furiously denounced far and wide. When the Wall Street Journal printed a detailed, well-sourced report on Biden’s memory issues in early June, Democrats en masse slammed the article as a pack of lies and GOP propaganda.
It wasn’t merely that Democrats, as a whole, ignored the problem that Biden was too old to serve another term; it’s that they attacked anyone who dared say it out loud. Even though by February 2024, 86 percent of Americans thought Biden was too old to serve another term as president.
It was the biggest and most vivid demonstration of “the Emperor’s New Clothes” we’ve ever seen in American politics.
You may have noticed that we’ve barely seen Joe Biden in the three months since Inauguration Day. He’s done one major public address and rambled about “colored kids.” He spoke at the student Model UN conference, and his staff did not invite any media to cover his remarks. He was whisked in and out of an off-the-record event at Harvard University with minimal publicity. (We also didn’t see much of Joe Biden in his last year in office, and even less after he dropped out of the presidential race.) Biden, at age 82, is almost certainly now incapable of preforming presidential duties.
Imagine if Biden had stayed in the race, and imagine if somehow, he had won. Our commander in chief would effectively be Grandpa Simpson until he inevitably had to resign, or died in office.
The attitude of Elizabeth Warren and every other Democrat not named Dean Phillips was that this was just fine. They had no problem going out and insisting that Biden was still “sharp as a tack” and doing a great job. (Apparently, some Senate Democrats privately believed Biden was no longer neurologically fit to serve as president, but kept those concerns to themselves. Why didn’t any of these people think the public had a right to know? Why didn’t any of them conclude these circumstances were bad for the country?)
Why did they do this? You can come up with a lot of theories, but I think the simplest one was that having enjoyed the advantage of a friendly media for so long, Democrats were convinced the American people would believe whatever they told them. It was a combination of leading Democrats being stupid, and them believing that the American electorate was stupid. If Biden stuck to the teleprompter and didn’t fall over, and if Biden’s allies declared that the president was fine enough times, then just enough voters in just enough states would trust that Biden was indeed fine.
The Democratic Party was presented with a predictable, glaring, intractable problem, and they remained in denial until it was far too late. (It’s a philosophy they bring to the table when it comes to entitlement programs, the rise of China, the nuclear program in Iran, the performance of public schools, the consequences of excessively lenient prosecutors, and the legalization of hard drugs.)
The question that Democrats really need to be asking themselves is, “Do we perceive reality accurately?” They’ve become the kind of people who reflexively believe they’re getting gaslit even when the room is genuinely getting dimmer.
ADDENDUM: Our Christian Schneider puts his finger on a factor in why Democratic Party leaders can’t perceive reality accurately:
Consider the average voter in a swing state. Maybe people in that category aren’t deeply engaged in politics. Perhaps they’re just trying to keep up with their mortgage, their kids’ playdates, and what’s happening on The White Lotus. And then they log on to Facebook and see a viral video of a progressive activist shouting down a speaker for not using the proper pronouns. Or they see their liberal neighbors lionizing a telegenic young man who shot a health insurance executive in the back, depriving his two sons of a father. To those voters, this is now what the Democratic Party stands for. Not jobs, not health care, not education, but fringe cultural obsessions that alienate more people than they attract.
The political realm of social media is dominated by the loudest, the most outrageous, the most provocative, and the most extreme. But the political realm of social media is not representative of the electorate as a whole.