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The Democratic Party Owes Us Some Candor
The plan it put in place after 2020 is not working—so what are they going to do about it?
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
I have not seen the Democratic establishment more shaken at any point in Joe Biden’s presidency.
The precipitating factor was the political subterfuge Robert Hur smuggled into his special counsel report on Biden’s retention of classified documents, issued seemingly without any effort by the Justice Department leadership to strip it of gratuitous smears.
The White House, the Biden campaign, official Democratic Party organs, leaders, and surrogates alike are caught up simultaneously in a fit of damage control, media criticism, and internal recriminations.
It would be supremely odd if they didn’t react to the Hur report with some defensiveness. But if Biden had held a steady lead in head-to-head polls with Donald Trump for the past few months, I think the reaction would’ve been much less frenzied. They are worried, and coming to terms with it.
That’s all natural. What’s missing, and what we can’t likely expect until they reach the stage of acceptance, is any effort to account for how the party, under Biden’s leadership, helped create the conditions for today’s peril. Both the specific challenge of the Hur report, and the broader one of Trump’s quickly clearing path to a third act in politics.
They may never admit responsibility for any aspect of the political status quo. Recent reporting suggests even old colleagues from the Obama-Biden years can’t get straight dope from the people running the Biden re-elect. They want everyone else to think that everything’s going according to plan. But it’s obviously not. They must know that, and must have some thoughts about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. Rank and file liberals should thus demand clarity from them on where they plan to go from here.
Republican voters and elites naturally deserve most of the blame for Trump’s momentum. Senate Republicans could have provided enough votes to convict Trump of inciting insurrection, and disqualify him from federal office. Kevin McCarthy brought Trump back into the good graces of the national GOP. Republican media has lied to voters about the 2020 election and the insurrection for years. Republican voters have developed horrendous civic hygiene, bathing daily in bias-confirmation, scapegoating, and other forms of self-indulgence.
But politics in the United States is much like one-on-one combat; even candidates and campaigns that cheat and steal are meant to study their opponents, understand their strengths and vulnerabilities, and build their strategies around that understanding. That goes doubly so for rule-following campaigns like Biden’s.
In the days after he won the presidency, his approach to preparing for two terms became clear, and had remained largely unchanged at least until last week. I’d whittle it down to something like this:
Move on from Donald Trump—don’t bring him up unless prompted, and even then refer to him as “The Former Guy”—discourage investigations of him, treat him as a past-tense figure. Here’s how NBC News’s marquee political reporters put it over three years ago: “President-elect Joe Biden has privately told advisers that he doesn't want his presidency to be consumed by investigations of his predecessor, according to five people familiar with the discussions, despite pressure from some Democrats who want inquiries into President Donald Trump, his policies and members of his administration. Biden has raised concerns that investigations would further divide a country he is trying to unite and risk making every day of his presidency about Trump, said the sources, who spoke on background to offer details of private conversations. They said he has specifically told advisers that he is wary of federal tax investigations of Trump or of challenging any orders Trump may issue granting immunity to members of his staff before he leaves office. One adviser said Biden has made it clear that he "just wants to move on."
Desensationalize the presidency, at least relative to Trump. Be decent, avoid controversy, don’t impose your presence on an exhausted public.
Husband political capital with empathy, a magnanimous spirit of bygones, and ostentatious displays of bipartisanship.
Win loyalty by improving the economic fortunes of the working-class, particularly in key states. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told the reporter Ron Brownstein over a year ago. “But we are going to run that experiment.”
This rubric explains just about every significant decision of Biden’s presidency: Why Democrats short-circuited Trump’s second impeachment trial (move on from Trump), why Biden nominated Merrick Garland (a bipartisan figure, clubby with Republicans, uncomfortable using official power against partisan opponents), why Garland appointed a senior Trump Justice Department official to investigate Biden (avoid controversy), and why Biden emphasized infrastructure and pro-manufacturing legislation as his legacy items (bipartisanship, targeted economic gains).
Refer a friend
To give Biden his due, I’d say he executed his vision almost exactly as conceived. Democrats did not botch the implementation of his plan, to the contrary they implemented it almost perfectly. The problem is that, to this point at least, it has been a comprehensive political failure.
Garland dithered so long that Trump may actually avoid prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election before the 2024 election. Senate Democrats have abdicated their oversight obligations almost entirely. Republicans filled the informational vacuum with slanders and innuendo that Democrats have left largely unrebutted. Biden created the strongest economy in decades, particularly for working class Americans. The sum of it all has been low and declining poll numbers for Biden and climbing poll numbers for Trump. And that was before the Hur report and ensuing media feeding frenzy.
The standard response party elites offer to this record goes something like: It’s early still, there’s a long time until the election. And that’s kind of true. But it’s not as true as they wish, and (by definition) less true every day. Back in September, we could still imagine Biden walking the same path Obama took to re-election. Five months later, we’re still waiting around for signs of bounceback, evidence that voters are changing their minds once again. If things don’t turn around soon, early will turn to late, and implementing a new strategy will become impossible.
And so Democratic leaders owe rank-and-file liberals, first, an acknowledgement of the fact that the plan has not worked as they imagined it would. No more bullshit about how early it is in the campaign—unless the plan included Trump leading in the polls less than a year before an election, then it has not worked as they imagined. They also owe us an explanation of why the plan hasn’t worked the way they imagined it would, a justification if they intend to proceed with the same failing plan, an actionable timeline of when they expect it to bear fruit, and what Plan B is if it never does.
Ideally this would come from Biden in some private-but-reportable venue, and if not from Biden directly then from someone known to speak for him. It should include an assurance that, if he can’t claim a lead in the polls with one strategy or another very soon, they will consider every possible alternative approach to blocking Trump from power, including one where Biden and Kamala Harris yield to fresher faces without hardened opposition.
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I realize this is all very unlikely to happen. But it’s hardly too much to ask. The greatest gift Biden ever gave the country—greater in my estimation than the sum total of his policy achievements—was denying Trump a contiguous second term. He seemingly understood driving Trump from power and keeping him out to be of existential importance to the United States. But he did not end Donald Trump’s political career in a single blow; Trump currently stands better-than-even odds of becoming president again, and eradicating American democracy. Biden has acknowledged privately that he’s not the only Democratic politician who can beat Trump—that he believes many other, younger Democrats could win the 2024 election, if they were running. He owes it to the country to be clear-eyed about his own potential, and accept that if his candidacy creates intolerable risks, he will end it.
His job isn’t to prove the haters wrong. It’s to save America from fascism. If the best way to do that is retire and hand the reins to a younger candidate with more vigorous politics, then that’s both the most responsible thing he could do, and the most dignified.
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