It's Officially Joever
Thanks Obama.
“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
—Kamala Harris
As soon as the wall of text was posted to Joe Biden’s official Instagram account, it was clear his reelection candidacy had finally reached its sundown. We will never know if a Catholic president will ever serve two terms, but this obviously confirms they are America’s most oppressed group. Well, it’s better to break up than be broken up with. It also remains unclear how the entire New York Times editorial board hasn’t drowned in their own splooge. Biden’s presidency could only ever end one way, but there was still a certain flubby majesty to how it happened in the face of mass peer pressure and light bullying. The weeks following his doddering debate performance unfolded like the booming grand finale of a fireworks show, albeit with every explosion replaced with skeins of bizarrely written social media posts from blue-check lanyards, rafts of clammy pleas to Vote Blue No Matter Who, a bullet flying two inches away from Donald Trump’s ear, and stilted press conferences and interviews in which Biden blinked rapidly and spoke in vague and lukewarm terms about how he’s still got the juice to win this thing.
The general tenor and shape of all that was predictable enough. Biden and the legions of Professional Democrats began a wild-eyed speedrun through the stages of grief at this moment of political atrophy. Their anxieties and curdled impulses have hungrily devoured any sober assessment of Biden for months. This singular imperative continued even as or despite our crypt-keeper president mistakenly introduced President Zelenskyy as President Putin and misidentified Vice President Kamala Harris as Trump. Now that Biden has officially endorsed his Veep for the Democratic nominee, forcing him to give up the car keys to the C2 Corvette will be a different challenge entirely.
Someone should check on Jeff Tiedrich.
The last few presidential elections have more or less exposed how America is fundamentally run by legitimized gangs in expensive suits. Even on these degraded terms, all this electability game theorizing and the nauseating accusations of ableism and ageism and fascism-enabling are now more explicit in their flagrant grifty nonsense, if not more clear.1 This wouldn’t be a crisis if the Democrats had any candidate under the age of 50 who had charisma that rises to the level of, say, Casey Anthony in daycare, or if the next clear nominee options weren’t completely bodied in their own party’s most recent primary. The Dems seemed to have no plan whatsoever—just aspersions and deflections and open-ended questions thrown into the breach against the superior firepower of grim electoral reality. This subterfuge was not so much a failure as it was a familiar Democrat plan executed with diminishing returns. They will raise money off the hazy and fervid hysteria they have created, but for a party whose whole campaign schtick rests on the premise that American democracy is at stake, they seem to be either phoning it in or actively throwing what should’ve been a layup of an election against an armchair dictator who’s quickly losing his fastball. This is 28-3 shit.
It was wildly irresponsible to not hold a primary to stress-test the candidacy and fitness of an 82-year-old man with an approval rating hovering in the high-30s and who initially hinted at being a one-term placeholder. And as queasy as it was to watch him flail and fume and feint through any public appearance, the spectacle has been mostly confounding. In the 2020 primary debates, his eye started bleeding and his comments were periodically nuts or steakheaded or Cornpop-related—but he could still gladhand voters and utter competently finished sentences. And countless people still questioned whether Biden was mentally fit to serve as president from the primaries up until his inauguration.
Throughout the summer of 2020, his media appearances became more brief and heavily stage-managed, with the stated rationale being that he needed to be protected from Covid. In retrospect, it was more likely to shield him from unscripted media interviews that would expose any inkling of early-stage brain rot. While this was symptomatic of some other, bigger issues within the Democratic Party, American politics had begun not just to reflect Trump’s personal obsessions and shortcomings but to actively resemble them. That ambient mirroring is familiar—the blindless to the frailty and weakness of a walking scarecrow was superseded by both a valid and unreasoning fixation on The Cheeto In The White House. As the Washington Post reported on November 21, 2020:
“Joe Biden spent months of his presidential campaign safely ensconced in his basement, communicating to the country via a television camera. His convention speech was delivered to a near-empty room in Delaware. His remarks after being declared the 46th president were given before a distanced parking lot full of honking cars.”
The expression of Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line appears to be flipped on its head. After Biden’s bleary and futile last thrash, it is clear that the mentality of Vote Blue, No Matter Who has given Democrats a false sense of moral superiority. Clearly, it doesn’t matter who they run as a candidate, even if it’s a literal Republican like Michael Bloomberg or if it’s in the form of Aaron Sorkin divulging his lurid fantasies of a Mitt Romney nomination in the New York Times. The priority here is whoever leads the party needs to pay tribute to its grotesque coalitions of special interest weirdos and grifters. Blue Team voters have resigned themselves to casting a ballot for figureheads who exalt tone and presentation and window-dressing above all else—who will do something like continue Trump’s border and deportation policies, but it will be polite and done in a clever double-banked fashion and not raise the temperature in the room too much. A dispiriting aspect of Project 2025 is the question of where the Democratic alternative lies; the all-but-official Trump platform is monstrous and deranged, but at least it’s an affirmative vision and a plan for voters to rally around.
It’s been clear since the 2016 primaries that without Obama’s coolly virtuosic nihilism, the Democrats have been desperately lacking a resonant frontman to rep their bloodless managerial technocracy. They’re like a football team that won a few championships with a star quarterback and have been running the same plays without them to no avail. By staking their entire electoral pitch to drawing parallels between Trump and Hitler, the Democrats have abandoned any attempt to appeal to the electorate on policy or choose a presidential candidate whose brain has a more solid consistency than apple sauce. Democrats feel entitled to power, because they long ago dismissed the unenlightened as cranks and lunatics and convinced themselves that Trump’s win was a fluke that would work itself out. In 2020, Biden coasted on an overwhelming wave of negative partisanship because he could reasonably campaign against a forgetful and vinegary incumbent who had duffed every single aspect of a pandemic response. They haven’t modified their strategy at all since then.
The optics of this, by any conceivable metric, are terrible. The Democrats will pivot emptily in an attempt to keep hammering on Project 2025, but it’s difficult to insist that Democracy Is On The Ballot when your party engineered the primary process into a formality to coronate Biden, browbeat any concerns about his age and electability, shoehorned a backup at the last minute when it was undeniably clear that trotting out a fumbling demented mummy was a massive millstone hanging around their electoral prospects. The Democrats picking Chicago to host this year’s convention has turned out unwittingly clairvoyant.
After the debate, Sam Kriss deftly argued that Joe Biden is the perfect avatar of a dying empire—but more specifically, I’d say he embodies the last 40 years of the Democratic Party’s neoliberal turn, as it has sapped them of their vitality and slowly desiccated them into this flailing, wheezing, decrepit raisin. It’s so heavy-handed that it’s almost poignant: Biden emerged as a Senator from Delaware, a land without any characteristics or anything distinct other than being a tax haven, an American Switzerland. The Dems are lost and out of ideas. As George W. Bush’s blithe swaggering sadism developed into a national embarrassment, forcing the GOP into wide retreat only to be swallowed whole by the Tea Party’s gateway idiocy, many smug lib/leftish bloggers and pundits were gawking at the epistemic closure of the Republican Party; meaning they had reached a point at which a given faction or institution succumbs to confirmation bias and internecine interests and starts spinning away from reality altogether, eventually collapsing under its gravity like a black hole. Now, a generation later, the Democratic Party appears to be limping toward a similar fate, and they’re just about out of gas.
If there is any upshot to this gongshow, beneath the high-handed bluster buzzing around Trump surviving an assassination attempt, this all-consuming golf blob is still a historically unpopular candidate. Republicans may have handicapped themselves by overturning Row v. Wade. It doesn’t help matters that Project 2025 is bringing some heavy Handmaid’s Tale vibes to the election, while recruiting J.D. Vance as a running mate represents a more virulent strain of Trumpism, one more thoroughly committed to the goals that Trump only gestures at flirtatiously. Even Senate polls in reliably red states like Ohio and Montana show how radioactive the GOP is without their Zaddy. Trump is also limited by the few blunt tools at his disposal—unflagging shamelessness and aggression, a knack for pushing on bruises and shoving others into traffic, and a wild and blank antipathy for other people—in hopes that it results in compelling enough television to keep him in power. And if “Ron DeSanctimonious” is any indication, even those skills are diminishing. Maybe all of this is a moot point if Kamala is the nominee and America is ready for its first wine mom president. I, for one, am of the opinion that it is time for a true rematch: Every Hildawg has its day.
The go-to talking point for Blue Team media remoras and lib-brained online busybodies was that anyone who looks at Biden and sees a fossilized mummy does not have the necessary qualifications to make a medical assessment about a cognitive decline. Fair enough. But it would also stand that these partisan hacks also do not have the requisite qualifications to make the medical assessment that attributes Biden’s longstanding stutter to statements like “we beat Medicare.”
Since both claims cancel each other out, we can establish that this was never an issue of neuroscience, but one of optics. Regardless of the state of Biden’s mental acuity, the average voter saw a doddering cadaver who struggles to finish a sentence and string together a coherent thought. The mounting pressure that media figures and party donors and Democrat bigwigs put on Biden to drop out was not borne of a coming-to-Jesus realization that an octogenarian who has survived two brain hemorrhages may be ill-equipped for four more years of the most demanding job on the planet; they knew he was mentally cooked, which is why they hid him from the public as much as possible leading up to the debate. His performance against Trump made this issue an undeniable liability.
"Someone should check on Jeff Tiedrich."
Lol. Awesome.
Can you please stop with all of this shit?