Biden defenders need to take the 'L'

The Democratic Party should move on from people who still can't admit how badly they screwed up.

We’ll be running SBSQ #27 (the Mike Trout edition) soon! There’s still time to submit questions in the comments of SBSQ #26. And my apologies for the slightly weird evening timing. My best-laid plans were a casualty of dysfunctional plane Wi-Fi.

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One funny aspect of the Substack business is that you’re constantly living in the shadow of posts you wrote a year ago. How come? Well, most paid subscribers opt for the annual option.¹ If you see a spike in your Stripe numbers, it’s often because of renewals from the anniversary of a successful newsletter from years past. So lately, I’ve been reminded that at this point last year, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, I was writing a lot about how Democrats had screwed up.

Once Joe Biden was finally forced out, choosing Kamala Harris rather than opening up the process was an understandable option. As compared to the alternative, a probable landslide if Biden had remained on the ballot, Harris likely at least saved Democrats a couple of Senate seats. But she was still a suboptimal choice given her mediocre electoral track record.

Less forgivable was the highly risk-averse campaign Harris ran, in which she almost seemed to go out of her way not to distance herself from Biden. But the clearest blunder was simply Democrats’ decision to renominate Biden in the first place without any semblance of a real primary. His age-related decline was obvious to overwhelming majorities of Americans by mid-2023, at which point there would have been plenty of time to have a competitive race.

In fact, having covered politics for 18 years now, I can’t think of a clearer example of when a strain of partisan groupthink was proven more decisively and consequentially wrong than after Biden’s debate with Trump on June 27 last year. If you’d been arguing that coverage of Biden’s age merely reflected media bias, then after that debate, you probably ought to have reexamined your priors about pretty much everything. But to the 86 percent of us who recognized that Biden was too old to run for another term, the whole thing had seemed like a predictable, slow-moving car crash.

Still, there were plenty of opportunities to acknowledge one’s error, particularly in the 24 dramatic days between the debate and when Biden eventually quit. Matt Yglesias, for instance, wrote an apology post saying that he’d been wrong about Biden.

And yet, there have always been denialists about Biden’s decline, from academics who tried to portray his behavior as heroic to people who formerly worked for the president, like Mike Donilon and Karine Jean-Pierre, who haven’t accepted responsibility for their roles. It doesn’t seem to have mattered that subsequent reporting has confirmed that Biden’s problems were even worse than critics like me had feared.

Pass the cranberry sauce, because we’re going to have a family chat about Olivia Nuzzi

So, yes, we’re going to do one more round of partying like it’s 2024. The debate about Biden’s fitness resurfaced over the Thanksgiving weekend for a reason that will require some explanation unless you’re glued to media gossip.

The CliffsNotes version is this. The journalist Olivia Nuzzi has admitted to a romantic relationship with RFK Jr. It’s not clear whether it was ever consummated physically. However, you don’t need to have gone to Columbia J-School to recognize that even sexting with a candidate you’re covering is a huge journalistic no-no. And that’s not all that Nuzzi has been charged with. In a series of Substack posts, her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza — also a journalist, formerly of The New Yorker and other publications — has accused Nuzzi of also having had an affair with former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate Mark Sanford. And also, having basically run interference for RFK Jr. in the course of what was supposed to be objective reporting.

(If you want more detail about all of this, I’d recommend Brian Phillips’s explainer at The Ringer. Although Phillips’s story very much needs an NSFW label because it contains excerpts — I wish I were making this up — of RFK Jr.’s erotic poetry.)

On July 4 last year — so after the debate, but before Biden was forced out² — Nuzzi published a story in New York Magazine claiming that Biden was basically a walking corpse (“his face had a waxy quality”) and that this was well-known to Democratic insiders despite their outward support of Biden. Lizza has alleged that Nuzzi committed at least one clear journalistic foul in this story by including “an anecdote about Biden not remembering the name of a ‘Democratic megadonor’ that I knew had been told to her off the record.”

Some inside-baseball talk. Most journalists respect a distinction between “off the record” and “on background”. “Off the record” means that you can’t report the information you get from a source, although it isn’t as though the source expects it to be deleted from your memory. Instead, you can try to report it out with other evidence or sources willing to go on the record.³

By contrast, “on background” means you can use the information, but please don’t put my name on it. There might be some further negotiation with the source on terms: whether the juicy bit of reporting is attributed to, say, a “senior White House official” or instead enters your narrative in an even more ambiguous way.⁴ (These lines are often blurrier than journalists would care to admit, especially when you’re speaking with sources who don’t regularly talk with reporters.⁵)

However, reporting a piece of information that was supposed to be off the record doesn’t mean it was untrue. Journalists care about this distinction because it affects our reputation both globally (undermining our collective ability to negotiate terms and conditions with sources) and locally (if Lizza’s allegations are true, no one ought to speak with Nuzzi in the future unless they expect to see whatever they tell her appear in print). But readers probably shouldn’t care about these inside-baseball mechanics. They should just want us to report the truth.

The Biden debacle should have killed off The Big Cope

And what Nuzzi reported about Biden was almost certainly true, according to both lots of subsequent on-the-record reporting and basic common sense from anyone who had watched that debate.⁶ However, that didn’t stop partisans who had insisted that concern about Biden’s age was just a media fiction from using Lizzanuzzipalooza to take a victory lap:

What the hell, exactly, is Aaron Rupar claiming that he was right about? That coverage of Biden’s age was just a “hysterical feeding frenzy”? That it was just right-wing misinformation? Rather than the inevitable result of the fact that Biden was asking Americans for another term so he could be president until he was 86, and could literally barely string a sentence together during the highest-stakes political moment of his life?

When I first started covering politics in the late 2000s, it was relatively rare to see liberals complain about the mainstream media. There are some good reasons for this. Liberals have higher institutional trust than conservatives, especially toward institutions like journalism. And the mainstream media probably does lean left, although in a more complicated way than conservatives sometimes assert.

However, there’s now a whole cottage industry of progressive/Democratic publications like Rupar’s Public Notice that make media criticism one of their main beats, often targeting center-left institutions like the New York Times more aggressively than the likes of Fox News.

That’s not to say this criticism is never warranted. I myself thought the media often went too far in normalizing Trump, especially during the 2016 campaign and the first year or two of his initial term. There’s probably also more basis for this line of criticism since the 2024 election, as several major media outlets have shifted to the right under changes in corporate ownership and pressure from Trump.

Plus, as a tactical matter, “working the refs” sometimes works. Most journalists and public figures aren’t as willing to push back against criticism as people like me with well-established audiences might be.

However, the result is that any time there’s any story that’s unfavorable to the progressive worldview and/or a Democrat’s election chances, a regiment of Rupars will swoop in to argue that Democrats don’t have an actual problem on their hands — only a perceptual one because the media narrative is biased against them. It doesn’t matter if the issue is something like inflation or Biden’s age, where voters can easily verify the claims against their own lived experience. ⁷

I’ve called this tendency The Big Cope: “the belief that Democrats would win every competitive election if only it weren’t for unfair media coverage”. The Big Cope is hard to kill off because this type of content is easy to produce and is self-evidently popular with a wide audience (Public Notice is very popular, certainly.)

I believe the Big Cope is damaging to Democrats electorally, since it allows them to attribute any cases where public opinion isn’t on their side to media bias — instead of doing the hard work inherent in democratic governance of actually listening to voters.

But because the Big Cope rarely offers testable hypotheses⁸, it’s extremely hard to disprove. That’s why the debate was so critical. It was Big Copers’ chance to demonstrate that coverage of Biden had been unfair. Instead, we got almost certainly the worst performance in the history of general election debates.

So how did Big Copers handle this? Well, they basically just pretend that the debate never happened. For instance, even recently, we’ll still get stories like this one from Margaret Sullivan, which criticize the media for having gone “overboard” in its coverage of Biden’s age, while at the same time critiquing them for not covering Trump’s age more aggressively.

It would be more persuasive for Sullivan to say something along these lines: “I was one of those people who thought the media went overboard in covering Biden’s age. And boy, was I proven wrong. Kudos to all the reporters who did diligent work on this question instead of just speculating. But we all learned just how dangerous it can be to have people this old running the country. And now Trump is showing some of the same signs of deterioration that Biden did.”

Honestly, I find it kind of depressing that people like Sullivan, who I thought did an excellent job as the New York Times’s public editor, have fallen into this partisan epistemic bubble. Again, 86 percent of Americans thought Biden was too old to run for another term before the debate. Maybe it would just be too damaging an admission. Or maybe people like Sullivan and Rupar aren’t worried really about persuasion because they’re preaching almost entirely to the converted.

Biden staffers who insist he was fine are either dishonest or delusional

But what I have even less patience for are people who directly aided and abetted Democrats’ disastrous 2024 because they were working for Biden.

For instance, Neera Tanden, Biden’s chief domestic policy advisor.⁹ Tanden is probably the only person in American history to lose out on a Cabinet nomination because of bad tweets. (Yes, really!¹⁰) Honestly, I kind of respect that.¹¹ Still, Tanden hasn’t given up her Twitter habit and also tweets at me a lot. Seeing my criticism of Rupar, for instance, she engaged in a classic bit of whataboutism by pointing out that President Trump is also extremely old.

I don’t think Tanden is a Silver Bulletin subscriber. If she were, she might remember that I touched on this very theme in the last politics-related newsletter I wrote. Trump’s age is one of the main reasons we might expect his approval ratings to continue to decline.

Personally, in fact, I’m in favor of a constitutional amendment to require that a president can be no older than 75 years old on Inauguration Day. And if you want to say Trump’s age should get more media coverage, I’ll agree with that too — although it has gotten quite a bit lately, including a big New York Times story last week.

Trump, at age 79, is also currently about two years younger than Biden was at the time of the debate. The late 70s/early 80s are often an inflection point for cognitive and overall health, so every year can matter. Subsequent reporting has suggested that Biden was OK-ish up until the 2022 midterms, at which point his condition rapidly deteriorated. So, on the one hand, we might not expect to see as many examples of cognitive decline for Trump right now as we did for late-stage Biden. And some of the examples that people like Tanden and Rupar cite can feel forced. Nodding off during a boring meeting is something that can happen to the best of us, regardless of age.¹²

On the other hand, Trump still has more than three years left in his term, and these problems will likely get worse. Possibly to the point where, as with Biden, the signs become unmistakable, no matter how much party apparatchiks deny them.

Tanden is, however, literally about the 8,199,999,994th-ranked person out of the 8.2 billion humans currently alive today with the moral highground to complain that the media isn’t covering Trump’s age enough. Because few people did more to try to lead the press off the scent of reporting on Biden’s age.

Tanden not only defended Biden after the debate — “He’s inquisitive. Focused. He remembers. He’s sharp,” she told the New York Times. She also literally testified under oath earlier this year (!) that she hasn’t noticed any (!!) signs of cognitive decline from her former boss.

In June, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee held hearings on Biden, and Tanden was among those subpoenaed to testify. The transcript of her appearance before Congress was published in October. In her opening statement, Tanden tried to walk a fine, legalistic line, saying she had “no experience in the White House that would provide any reason to question his command as President”.

Perhaps deliberately, this is an ambiguous statement. Someone can be “in command” in the sense of still having reporting lines flowing up to him, but not in full command of his mental faculties. The Republican probe focused, in part, on whether Biden’s staffers had unconstitutionally used an autopen to execute orders that Biden himself hadn’t endorsed. By saying that Biden was “in command”, Tanden is hoping to deflect accusations that White House staff was freelancing as a sort of shadow government without Biden’s awareness or permission.

Tanden, however, was also asked directly in the hearing for her personal opinion about “Biden’s cognitive abilities”. She responded that she had no concerns, and that no one else in the White House had expressed any concerns to her either:

I find this claim implausible. Biden’s cognitive abilities were the biggest story in the political world following the debate, if not before then. And political staffers engage in more than their fair share of office gossip. I’m sure that Tanden is saying what her counsel told her to say, avoiding provable lies. But it’s hard to believe that she spent almost four years in the White House and not only never had any worries of her own, but also never had a conversation with another staffer who expressed concerns.

It may be that Tanden wilfully blinded herself to contradictory evidence. Tanden said in the hearing that even though she’d gotten bad vibes about the debate (my phraseology, not hers) from her friend Ron Klain (Biden’s former chief of staff) she was “on a car ride to New York City” on the night of the debate. So she “listened to the debate on the radio off and on” — apparently unaware that, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, we’ve developed technology that enables you to livestream video from your phone.

Not to mention that, as someone obsessed with travel logistics, I find this an inexplicable choice for a high-ranking staffer. DC to NYC is an easy commute by plane, train or automobile. If you have an early meeting in Manhattan, you can easily travel there late at night (after the debate) or in the early AM (especially with a taxpayer-funded limo at your disposal). The debates are the biggest nights of the campaign outside of the election itself: this is the equivalent of missing your best friend’s wedding because you didn’t want to reschedule your haircut.

Unless, of course, Tanden was worried that things might go badly and wanted an excuse (even if only subconsciously) to flee the scene or preserve plausible deniability. Tanden testified that she found the debate “heartbreaking” but never watched it in full. And this is part of a pattern. Tanden also said that she never watched “the entirety” of Biden’s NATO summit in which he introduced Ukrainian President Zelensky as “President Putin” and that she didn’t listen to the audio transcript of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, who had described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory”.

It’s easier to avoid having doubts about your boss if you systematically avoid moments that might force you to confront them. So at best, Tanden seems to have been in profound denial.

Democrats should hold themselves to a higher standard than MAGA

This probably won’t be the very last time I write about Biden’s age. But I think I’ve hit my saturation point. So I’d like to remind you about a couple of things on the way out.

First, this isn’t just an election story. The bigger impact may have been on how the country was governed. Biden’s first two years in office were pretty successful, at least in terms of passing legislation. But almost everything after the midterms was a giant mess, and the trajectory aligns with the reported evidence of his declining capabilities. And that’s just considering domestic policy. Biden’s limited uptime may have undermined his role as leader of the free world when it came to negotiating peaceful outcomes in Ukraine or Gaza, for example.

And second, denialism about the mistakes they made in 2024 helps to prop up longtime Democratic establishment figures like Tanden who have consistently had terrible political instincts and who the party needs to move on from.

Because there is, in fact, an asymmetry between Democrats and Trump. Democrats are the party of those “In This House, We Believe…” yard signs. They claim to have the moral highground on democracy, integrity, the rule of law, and so forth, along with being the party of reason, science, and expertise.

One can debate how true this claim is¹³, along with how effective it is politically. At least sometimes, it actually carries political benefits for the blue team. Voters were relatively patient with Democrats on the shutdown, for instance, because Republicans are seen as the more obstructionist party.¹⁴

Trump’s argument, conversely, is basically that everyone is a hypocrite playing dirty pool — so you may as well look after your own interests. So the fact that Democrats were so obviously full of shit about Biden and were hoping to get away with a Weekend at Bernie’s plays into Trump’s hands and any voter’s most deeply cynical instincts about politics.

These pox-on-both-houses voters are an underratedly important part of the Trump coalition. For some evidence of this, we can look toward the AP VoteCast exit poll. Eight percent of voters last year had an unfavorable view of both Trump and Harris.¹⁵ And Trump won those double-hater voters by 15 points. The same was true in 2016 when Trump won the 18 percent of voters who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton by 17 points, more than enough to account for his margins that year in the key Electoral College states.

Not everyone got the Biden story right in real time, and that’s how it goes sometimes But if you didn’t, admitting you screwed up is just about the lowest imaginable hurdle. If even 17 months after the debate, you can’t admit that Biden had lost his fastball, is there any bullshit that you aren’t willing to engage in? There are some ways in which Democrats should emulate Republicans, such as in taking a more aggressive line on redistricting. But retreating from the reality-based community into partisan echo chambers isn’t one of them.

1. Although Silver Bulletin has an unusually high number of monthly subscribers because of our models. People subscribe for, say, our election or NCAA tournament or NFL forecasts, and then unsubscribe once the “season” is over. We’re happy to have your business, whichever flavor of subscription works for you!

2. This was while RFK Jr. was still running, for what it’s worth.

3. At the very least, off-the-record reporting provides helpful background context: you might shift your story toward or away from a given interpretation of events if you’re aware of information that you aren’t able to state outright.

4. For instance, you could say something like “people close to the president were concerned about Biden’s mental acuity”.

5. In my reporting for On the Edge, there were a couple of instances where I chose not to report details that were technically within my rights to report according to a journalism handbook, because I thought the source believed the information to be off-the-record, even if they hadn’t used the right magic words to that effect.

6. Or observed Biden’s other attempts to evade impromptu public appearances.

7. For example, notice that their grocery bills are rising, or that Biden’s signs of decline remind them of those they’ve inevitably seen before in aging relatives.

8. For instance, Biden’s age actually wasn’t covered that often until Robert Hur’s special counsel report last February, and then the debate in June. But publications like the New York Times and Washington Post publish literally tens of thousands of stories a year. It doesn’t take much work to cherry-pick a few of these to demonstrate your preferred narrative.

9. Tanden is also the former CEO of the Center for American Progress and a former advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

10. Joe Manchin cited “Tanden’s public statements and tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both sides of the aisle … I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget” in declining to confirm Tanden for OMB director, leaving her short of a majority.

11. Although my response if anyone ever circulated my name for a cabinet position would be “LOL, have you seen my Twitter feed? Are you fucking kidding me?”

12. I got kicked off a consulting project in my early 20s because I was repeatedly soporific during meetings that required me to commute at 5 a.m. from Chicago to Waukesha, Wisconsin.

13. For the record, I think it’s somewhere between “somewhat true” and “mostly true”.

14. Of course, Democrats managed to blow the shutdown anyway, using a dubious health-care-focused strategy that Tanden had advocated for.

15. Perhaps more surprisingly, 5 percent of voters liked both candidates.