Maybe, but the flip side of Biden being a hero is an appreciation for everything Dems have done correctly since July.
1. Remember, a big part of the reason Dems felt helpless back in the spring was a lack of options. A presidential primary was never in the cards for a number of reasons. A primary challenge against the president is highly correlated with losing the presidency -- in fact, since WWII, every single sustained primary challenge to a sitting president ended up with a loss and usually a blowout. And many of those were before the primary process had become so long with all the fundraising and 15 different candidates and debates 18 months before election day, etc.
2. Joe had to deal with an unusually stressful and challenging presidency. Easily the most stressful presidency, in terms of demands on the president, in a long time. He came into office focused on a pandemic, but then inflation started to take over. The Fed was not super responsive to that inflation (right or wrong), and so we had to endure all the bullshit about gas prices. We had pains in the asses in the Senate refusing to play ball on any necessary legislation -- or even the campaign promised legislation -- and that extended well into 2022, which wasted the best time for legislation (presidents accomplish way more in their first year than any after). Oh yeah, Putin invades. The aftermath of the J6 insurrection. And then, when everything seemed like maybe it was settling down, Hamas decided to its thing.
The point: Joe's decline was not, I think, anything that was easily foreseeable. Yes, he had lost his fastball by 2020. Well, Warren Buffett hasn't had a fastball for 15 years and still did OK. A lot of old people look and sound old but are still able to function very effectively. And if Joe's presidency had been as demanding as, say, Trump's first term, he might have been OK. His lucidity collapsed in a hurry and O7 was, to me at least, a clear demarcation. That whole situation has been fucking exhausting FOR ME, let alone the president.
3. So there we were. A regular primary was off the table; Biden's mental side wasn't apparent until well after the primaries would have begun. There's a reason why nobody was jumping into the race in 2023. There was nothing stopping Gavin Newsom from challenging Biden -- except the realization that it was a terrible idea in virtually every respect.
Could we just hand it over to the VP? If you'd asked that question in March, you would have gotten 99% negative response. Kamala had run an absolutely shit campaign in 2019. She was extremely unpopular earlier this year. There were no indications that she had what it took to run a successful campaign. And running as the VP of an unpopular president is a fucking bad situation. You can't throw the president under the bus for a number of reasons, but if you don't distance from the president . . . and anyway, what was there to distance from? The economy has been in great shape. We've had some great legislation. This border stupidity, which almost nobody understands (including me -- I understand a big chunk of the policy issues, but not nearly everything).
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4. And that was why we despaired, when it became clear that Biden couldn't do it. July was just about the worst month politically that I can remember, save possibly October 2016. We were fucked. We had no candidate; we had a war chest that we couldn't easily use; we still had fuckers ostensibly on our team in the Senate throwing sand in the gears. The Supreme Court was destroying the country.
AND SINCE JOE STEPPED DOWN AND KAMALA TOOK OVER, IT HAS BEEN ALMOST PERFECTION.
All those jokes about how Dems aren't organized and can't message -- can be throw those out forever? This wasn't just a Kamala revolution. It's been a masterclass up and down the party. Everyone has been involved. The DNC was a spectacular success, probably the best and most effective convention I can remember. I still get goosebumps thinking about the national block party they threw for . . . the roll call. We had Lil Jon getting the crowd and the country PUMPING while they were doing the delegate business.
State parties stepped up. The money started flowing. All these groups like White Dudes for Harris -- they didn't show up by magic. The media strategy was brilliant. They had Kamala spend two months building up her vibes -- which is the 2024 way of saying they boosted her personals, which was an absolute 100% necessity because as hard as it is for a black woman to win the presidency, a disliked black woman has no fucking chance. And we'd learned the hard way what happens when you run a female candidate who is too serious about policy and doesn't smile enough.
Once people became comfortable with her, and once we got into the race, then the policy started coming. Remember when people were saying "gee, I don't know what Kamala stands for? What are her ideas?" That was only 3 weeks ago, a month ago. You don't hear that so much.
5. Look at the enthusiasm we have now, and remember where we were less than half a year ago. THIS WAS A MASTERCLASS IN POLITCAL CAMPAIGNING.
And it started with Joe Biden. In part because he managed to thread the needle on foreign policy better than I could have imagined. It's not only that two really important wars were raging -- he had zero support from the assholes in Congress who were more beholden to Trump than even trying to do the right thing for the country. We took some hits, but it could have been much, much worse.
And then for stepping down when we took the keys away. That's a really hard thing to do. And think about how demoralizing it must have been for Joe himself. All he did was bust his ass leading the country through difficult times for four years. It exhausted him. Like, it would not surprise me if he dies within 6 months of leaving office -- not because he's old or unhealthy, but just because he poured everything he had into the job. And after all that, it seemed as though he had no friends and no support and no fucking gratitude. He's been in politics long enough to understand how that is, but it really wouldn't surprise me to learn that it still hurt him on a visceral level.
And oh yeah, his family situation. Yikes.
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So no matter what happens on Tuesday, Joe Biden is a hero. Most of us are confident now, and certainly excited. The master class might come to full fruition, hopefully. But I'd like to give him some props in advance.
