It seems like every writer and their dog has already published their take on the Wall Street Journal's bombshell report on Presidentish Joe Biden's decline, but seemingly lost in the hubbub over the White House coverup is one big question.
Why the hell didn't they ditch Biden two or three years ago?
The obvious answer is that his replacement would have been Kamala Harris, who my friend Stephen Kruiser and I have joked on many occasions got the veep nod from Biden as an insurance policy against getting 25th'd out of office.
But given what we know they knew about the rapidity and depth of Biden's decline, what would have been the harm for the Obama cabal in replacing one malleable figurehead with another?
Palace intrigue aside, let me show you a couple of items from that WSJ report that PJ's own Matt Margolis didn't get to in his excellent write-up earlier today. Matt covered how the White House protected Biden and tried to hide his decline from the press and even Democrat donors. But to me, the worst part of the scandal is how they protected Biden from facts.
"Former administration officials said it often didn’t seem like Biden had his finger on the pulse," the Journal reported. The story also indicated that Biden didn't see polls showing him losing to Donald Trump and that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) demanded to speak to Biden directly — something becoming less and less frequent as advisors took more control — "hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by [senior advisor Mike] Donilon to shield Biden from bad information."
The Journal also reported that "Many of those who criticized Biden’s insularity said his system nonetheless kept his agenda on track."
They did, eh? How would they know what Biden's agenda was when they shielded him from bad news?
Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), who quit the Democrat Party earlier this year, explained how it worked:
Manchin noticed that Biden’s staff played a much bigger role driving his agenda than he had experienced in other administrations. Manchin referred to them as the “eager beavers”—a group that included then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain. “They were going, ‘I’ll take care of that,’ ” Manchin said.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Biden is a man who learns from his mistakes — My word as a Biden, I don't make mistakes, Jack! — and corrects course. We have Biden's five decades of nefarious public "service" that say otherwise.
Biden's approval cratered after the deadly 2021 Afghanistan bugout that left 13 American servicemembers dead and a nation back in the grip of the Taliban. The optics couldn't have been worse, but the WSJ reported that one Democrat implored the White House to set expectations accordingly:
While it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.
That’s what Rep. Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Smith, a Democrat who then chaired the powerful House Armed Services Committee, was alarmed by what he viewed as overly optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for the operation.
“I was begging them to set expectations low,” said Smith, who had worked extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights about the region but couldn’t get on the phone with him, Smith said.
A sharper Biden wouldn't have done anything differently in Afghanistan — our 13 dead would still be dead. But he would have played it better politically, which, sadly, is all that counts these days. Afghanistan proved to be the first nail in the coffin of his reelection.
Yet the White House, the press corps, all of them... they ruined their reputations to protect a man who was already known as a serial fabulist and whom they could have ditched long before July 21, 2024.
The moral case to remove Biden from office was, well, unimpeachable. But the political case to remove him — This sundowner is going to be the end of us all! — was even stronger. For a White House that thrives on the most Machiavellian politics to commit political suicide is almost unimaginable, and yet it happened.
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