Dear friends,
I was on a train during the presidential debate on Thursday evening. I stopped watching after President Biden ended his response to a question about the national debt with this:
Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.
I spent the 2020 election cycle holding my breath while Biden’s sentences petered out, but this was too much.
It was infuriating to me that one of the terms of the debate — set by Biden’s team, if I’m not mistaken — was that the candidates would not be permitted to use notes.
Even before I required cognitive rehab due to Long Covid, I never went into a classroom for an hour without notes. I didn’t always need them, but they were there when I had to check a fact or redirect after responding to the sometimes unpredictable comments and questions from my students.
Out of a sense of duty, I turned the debate back on and heard Biden’s grievous ‘response’ to the question on the impact of the Court overturning Roe.
At that point, I began a news blackout, and informed everyone who texted me that I could not comment on the debate.
On my train ride home, I caught up on news, analysis, general hysteria, and what my smart friends had to say. It was a rough re-entry from a lovely weekend.
My companion, Huck Finn (aka Lena), on the Waterbury Reservoir
I thought comedy would help me digest the debate, but Jon Stewart’s devastating assessment, in which he referred to the president’s “resting 25th Amendment face,” did not make the debacle easier to accept.
For the record, I don’t think we’re in a 25th Amendment situation. Biden has surrounded himself with able advisors. I would like him to listen better, especially on Israel, but I don’t think he’s going to sink the ship of state in the time remaining.
One of the best things I read was Monica Hesse’s sensitively written “It’s time for Jill Biden to have a hard talk with her husband.” Hesse noted that the “crap part of marriage” involves telling hard truths.
Jill would be able to reassure him that having a bad debate can still mean you’re a good president, but also make sure he understood that a debate that awful might preclude him from continuing to be president at all.
[T]his emotional labor is. . . what people who have been married for decades do for one another every day. They say, I will be in your corner no matter what. Now let’s make sure that you are in your own corner.
This isn’t about whether you can lead, she could assure him. This is about whether the Americans who watched that debate will believe you can lead. This is about what’s ahead of you if you win, and about what is ahead of the country if you lose.
As a fellow arthritis sufferer, I have bristled at the jokes about Biden’s stiffness, which strike me as incredibly cruel and entirely beside the point. But intellectual acuity, which is truly relevant to the job of campaigning and leading, is the right focus for American voters.
As Stewart and so many others pointed out, Trump was terrible in altogether different ways. Because I generally avoid listening to Trump speak, his mendacity and meanness still startle me. No one can reasonably suggest that his capacities include intellectual acuity. That should have been the story, but Biden’s inability to clear the low bar of coherence is what’s on our minds.
Two smart friends mentioned Ezra Klein’s discussion of the way forward for Democrats and democracy. Klein wrote earlier this year about the need for an alternative candidate. He is neither a hothead nor a far-left voice.
Klein criticizes the party for its lack of confidence and unity, not its lack of talent. He points out that standing by your man without regard to his obvious flaws is exactly what Trump’s Republicans are doing, and it is not a good look.
Party unity requires sometimes-messy coalitions; ideally, a party should hew to some bedrock principles. I believe that the Democrats, for all their many flaws, want to protect the rule of law and democratic institutions. They do not always do a great job, what with the temptations of corporate money, but this is the only viable party in our two-party system.
Klein is clear-eyed about the choices the Democratic Party made that got us here and sober about his own suggestion that it’s necessary to change horses.
No path now is without risk. An open convention would be a risk. Nominating Harris would be a risk. To run an 81-year-old with a 38 percent approval rating who just got trounced in the first debate would be a risk. Biden was headed for a loss before the debate, and he is likelier to lose after it.
I skimmed a conversation among writers for The New York Times, and attended to Jamelle Bouie’s reluctance to call for Biden to step aside. I’m usually in agreement with Bouie, and I found myself nodding along to most of what he said, except his conclusion.
[T]here is a real risk that the process of choosing a new nominee could tear open the visible seams in the Democratic Party. I have noticed that only a handful of calls for Biden to leave are followed by “and Vice President Harris should take his place.” . . . Why should Harris not be considered the presumptive nominee on account of her service as vice president and her presence on the 2020 ticket? And should Harris be muscled out, how does this affect a new nominee’s relationship with key parts of the Democratic base, specifically those Black voters for whom Harris’s presence on the ticket was an affirmation of Biden’s political commitment to their communities?
The most heartening thing I read was Lydia Polgreen’s piece, “Kamala Harris Could Win This Election. Let Her.” Polgreen names a few truths: many Americans do not want to see Trump in office again; Harris is not that popular either, but is untouched by scandal and can easily exceed expectations; her elevation would give Biden a graceful way out.
Harris, with her killer instincts and poise, could have wiped the floor with Trump on the issues that matter most to voters. We forget that she was very successful not just as a prosecutor but also as a candidate for statewide office in California. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the first Trump administration she drew blood with her tough, calm and deliberate questions, managing to score viral moments without seeming like a theatrical showboater.
My longest friend, who shares my lack of enthusiasm for the vice president, read Polgreen’s piece on my suggestion and then sent back “Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration, and Me,” having decided to learn more about Harris. The piece is about the author (who served time for a violent crime), his mother, his friends, his work, and a nuanced discussion of Harris — a former prosecutor, California Attorney General, and Senator. It’s a good read.
Read Reginald Dwayne Betts on Kamala Harris.
My friend’s impulse to learn more is one that I share, because I honestly haven’t thought a great deal about Harris since she dropped out of the primary in 2020. The choice in 2020 was so binary and clear that it was impossible not to support Harris as VP.
I’m going to keep digging into Harris’s record as the vice president. There are hints that she would be a more forceful critic of Israel than Biden. Goodness knows we need one.
Meanwhile, we have a short window in which to affect the current president’s consequential decision to stay or to go.
I’m going to suggest that we write a series of letters — to the President himself, Democratic leaders, and to First Lady Jill Biden. You can change the words, the tone, and even the message.
Weigh in on what’s next. It’s important that they hear from us.
President Biden is right that this election is too important to lose.
with love,
L