By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
At first blush, it doesn’t seem like the Democratic
Party’s strategy of allowing all its individual federal officeholders to weigh
in on a semi-hourly basis with their disparate thoughts on the viability of Joe
Biden’s candidacy is especially smart.
Over the course of Congress’s first week back from the
July 4 break, the party’s manic-depressive convulsion has been tough to
witness. On Monday morning, its members awoke with the expectation that a
cascade of elected officials would come out against Biden, but the anticipated
flood failed to materialize. Within 24 hours, it seemed like the revolt against
the former president was over. But by the evening, three vulnerable Democratic
senators reportedly said Biden had no hope in November. Senator
Michael Bennet soon confirmed as much in a prime-time appearance on CNN. On Wednesday morning, the
revolt was back on — or, at least, definitively not over — with former speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s deliberate refusal to take the president’s repeated
unequivocal claims that he was staying in the race at face value.
Keeping the Biden death-watch news cycle alive with new
and conflicting Democratic opinions on the matter at regular intervals is an
act of self-harm. The party is bleeding itself out before our very eyes,
perhaps operating under the assumption that the president will somehow notice
and save its members from themselves. It’s enough to drive average Democrats to
utter disconsolation, and that’s what’s happened.
You don’t have to be a seasoned political observer to
have witnessed at least one Democratic morale collapse. “Panic mode” is the party’s standard operating procedure. But the level of
despair to which Democratic rank-and-file voters and party operatives alike is
all but unprecedented.
Democrats emerged from a House caucus meeting on Tuesday in an elegiac mood. It “felt like a funeral,” one attendee
told reporters. “That’s an insult to funerals,” retorted another. A separate
meeting of “swing-district Democrats” featured “actual tears” from attendees, though they were “not for
Biden.”
“The fear among everyone I’m talking to is that Biden’s
intransigence will drag down close races in the House and Senate and imperil
democracy itself,” said Democratic donor Gideon Stein to Financial Times reporters. Others in the donor class
described Biden as a “mad king” playing “Russian roulette with the world at
stake.” The Biden camp’s deep pockets have every reason for melancholy. At
least one unnamed “senior staffer” on Biden’s campaign has been telling friends
that “they believed the endeavor was now doomed.”
One staggering vignette from the New York Times features Democrats wishing the worst for
Biden if only to shake up the presently stagnant dynamic. “Longtime party
loyalists,” the Times reported, “said they were now reduced to hoping
for another major public misstep” from Biden — some unambiguously mortifying
event akin to the first presidential debate – just to shake the party out of
its complacency.
It’s hard to describe the level of motivated reasoning to
which you’re committed when you convince yourself that, if your party’s
incumbent president suffers another public humiliation, it can only help. One
thing you can say about this attempt at psychological anchoring is that it
wouldn’t be necessary if the party set its own members adrift.
Right now, Democrats are bewildered and depressed. But
sadness will evolve into anger – hostility toward the person whose stubbornness
has imposed on them their present emotional distress. And maybe that is the
outcome Democrats who have committed themselves to this prolonged public
bloodletting want. Maybe if Biden can’t be seduced to abandon his pursuit of
the Democratic presidential nomination, perhaps he can be emotionally
blackmailed out of the race given the anguish he’s inflicted on his supporters.
After all, the man’s bottomless capacity for empathy is his superpower. Or was that a lie, too?
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