Who’s Running This Country?

by Matt Taibbi | Jul 22, 2024

If it happened in Belarus, Burundi, or Myanmar, Joe Biden’s blitzkrieg withdrawal from the presidential race would have inspired eye rolls. We jettisoned an incumbent president’s re-election campaign with all the pomp of an NFL practice squad transition, announcing the move via a blip of a social media post. Only in America is anyone tempted to take such head-scratching events at face value.

Can we get a WTF? In no particular order, the five strangest things about Sunday’s shocker roster change:

1. WHERE IS WALDO? The most consequential decision of Joe Biden’s presidency was executed by tweet Sunday, via a screenshot of a letter, posted at 1:46 p.m. There was no press conference, video, or photo commemorating any human being’s participation in the event. The letter wasn’t posted on the White House briefing room site, even as lesser news (including a statement purporting to quote Biden at length on “climate pollution reduction grants”) was posted yesterday. It was furthermore written neither on presidential stationery nor under campaign letterhead and appeared rushed, thanking Vice President Kamala Harris for “being an extraordinary partner,” but not endorsing her.

In a second tweet 27 minutes later, however, @JoeBiden announced, “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year.” Papers from The Washington Post to The New York Times reported Biden “wrote in a letter he posted” or “said in a statement” he was dropping out. However, we didn’t hear from any official spokesperson, not even deputy platforms director Andy Volosky (who reportedly runs Biden’s Twitter account), explaining how the announcement came to be. To say a president breaking up with America via digital post-it note is bizarre is a massive understatement.

Biden’s letter contained a lot of important informtion. It said he will “speak to the Nation in more detail later this week about my decision.” However, given defiant protestations by him and his staff about remaining in the race (comments that continued through Saturday night), it will be crucial for someone from Biden’s inner circle, preferably a family member, to make a public statement soon. As is, any story that puts Biden at the center of yesterday’s events is about as convincing as the “Michael Jordan cutouts move past the window” scene from Home Alone:

2. WHO’S IN CHARGE? After Biden’s cryptic letter came out yesterday, a slew of elected Democrats, including rumored potential candidates like Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, California’s Gavin Newsom, and both Bill and Hillary Clinton, all swiftly endorsed Harris. Harris instantly had her own campaign site, suggesting significant lead time and planning. Even JoeBiden.com immediately became a mirror to the Harris site, while Biden’s Twitter face page was refashioned to feature a Harris 2024 banner. For all the world, it looked as if the party had unanimously decided to throw its weight behind Kamala, and well before the weekend, too.

However, Barack Obama did not endorse Harris, nor did Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, or Cory Booker. We’re being told in numerous press accounts by more “people familiar with the matter” that this is all a mere formality, and the party leaders are “firmly” and “without reservation” behind Kamala Harris. But are they? Some sources aren’t sure.

Although the top candidates seem to be publicly coalescing around Harris, I heard late last night this may be a temporary stance, held until the Democrats are sure Joe Biden’s $239 million war chest will transfer to Kamala’s hands without issue. The Republicans are preparing a legal challenge if Democrats attempt to pass on Biden’s cash, arguing the pair needed to be officially nominated before such a handoff could legally take place. “Biden can’t transfer his money to Harris because it was raised under his own name, and there is no legal mechanism,” said GOP lawyer Charlie Spies. Eugene Munin, a former General Counsel for the Chicago Transit Authority who’s worked on election law issues, said the status of the Biden funds represents a bit of a “gray area” legally. “I don’t think it’s definitive at all that she can just declare that she’s now a candidate for president and start spending that money as a candidate for president,” Munin says.

At least one Democratic consultant and several Republicans believe the fate of Harris is tied to two factors: how well the public responds to her in the next week or so, and whether or not the funds issue can be resolved quickly enough to allow her to begin aggressively advertising her candidacy. Despite the quick endorsements there have been signs of unease. Just this past Friday afternoon, Harris held a conference call for top donors to what was then still the Biden-Harris campaign. She showed up a half-hour late and said little except that they were going to win. “Everyone was pissed after the call,” one donor told the Washington Post, recalling the disastrous end of Harris’ 2020 run, also marked by internal frustrations about the future Vice President’s behavior (“I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,” one Harris official wrote in a letter published by the New York Times). Rumors that have persisted since Biden’s own Hindenburg debate performance that top-level Democrats are less than thrilled with the prospect of a Harris run. The Times ran a long house editorial yesterday rejecting the idea of anointing Harris, hinting at electability issues and calling for a candidate to emerge from “process of public scrutiny” instead. Senior Democrats will watch to see how Kamala holds up under a few weeks of Internet fragging — millions are about to become introduced to the phrase “what can be, unburdened by what has been” — and then decide. How that decision is made, however, will tell us a lot about the question that matters more than anything right now: who’s America’s president right now? Obama? The Clintons? Politico’s “Why Biden Dropped Out” account claimed congressional leaders (“Chuck, Hakeem, Pelosi”) left the horse head in the president’s bed, while multiple Republican sources also pointed to Pelosi and Obama’s non-endorsements, reflecting a belief on the Trump side that the key to gauging Democratic strategy going forward will involve watching those two politicians.

The only person we know for sure isn’t currently running things is Joe Biden. Are we even sure he’s alive? The video below from July 17th is the last public sighting. Did he make it out of that car? Was there a box of cannolis on the next seat? I wish I were joking.

3. TOO SICK TO RUN, BUT FIT TO SERVE? On Friday, November 19th, 2021, Joe Biden went under anesthesia for a colonoscopy and was so insistent on keeping to protocol that he formally transferred power to Harris for 85 minutes. Pursuant to 25th Amendment procedure, Biden sent letters (on White House stationery) to then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Speaker pro tempore Patrick Leahy saying, “I have determined to transfer temporarily the powers and duties of the office of President of the United States to the Vice President”:

Yesterday’s Biden letter was different. It read, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” That message suggests two possibilities, both insulting to the collective intelligence. If Biden is too unwell to campaign or even announce his withdrawal, he’s clearly not fit to serve out his term. The idea that Harris can be a more “vigorous campaigner” because “her day job is not nearly as demanding as Mr. Biden’s,” as the New York Times put it, should make any sane person’s blood boil. If Biden could actually do a “demanding” day job, he’d still be running. We’re to embrace Kamala Harris “vigorously” campaigning while the ship of state floats forward unhelmed, like the ghost ship Demeter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula? The question of who’s minding the Executive Branch while Harris stumps should be the first and last question at her every campaign appearance. All this comes a week after Biden ripped Colorado Democrat Jason Crow for raising the issue of his fitness to be Commander-in-Chief, snapping, “I don’t want to hear that crap.”

4. SUNDAY SURPRISE According to Politico’s Eugene Daniels, Biden told his “senior team” at 1:45 p.m. ET Sunday that he’d changed his mind, meaning we’re expected to believe his senior team was given one minute to consider the move. Politico also reported Biden’s inner circle was saying as late as Saturday night that the president was staying in, “no ifs, ands, or buts.” Also Saturday night, the Biden campaign was making plans for events in Georgia and Texas later this week. Even Sunday morning, i.e. yesterday, sources told Politico Biden would not consider dropping out until a planned meeting this week with Benjamin Netanyahu. There was also this piece of damage control starring senior Biden aide Anita Dunn:

Shortly after the tweet went out, Dunn convened a phone call for communications staffers, according to multiple aides. Dunn reassured staffers who’d been insisting to the press that Biden wasn’t thinking about quitting had been correct based on the information they had up until the president’s thinking changed.

 

Some marveled that Dunn, who told colleagues that everyone was processing the news at the same time, didn’t know about it until just before the post went out on X.

“Some marveled that Dunn… didn’t know” is journo-speak for something, but what? I’m guessing it’s either, “Sources were impressed Dunn had the balls to claim with a straight face she didn’t know Biden was dropping out,” or, “Sources thought something about Biden’s announcement had to be bent if even Dunn didn’t know until the last minute.” The detail that staffers who’d been insisting Biden had no intention of dropping out were “correct based on the information they had” is transparent ass-covering. It’s not plausible this all happened in a few minutes on Sunday.

5. SOMEONE IS LYING ABOUT POLLS The official line promoted this morning is that Kamala Harris fares slightly better than Donald Trump in national polling. “Ms. Harris trails Mr. Trump by two percentage points nationally on average, 46 percent to 48 percent,” wrote the New York Times, adding: “This is an improvement over Mr. Biden’s standing… he trailed the [sic] Mr. Trump by three percentage points in the polling average, 47 percent to 44 percent.” The paper then showed a graph of the alleged difference between Biden and Trump in key battleground states, and while far from positive, the picture doesn’t appear so catastrophic that a change of candidate would be necessary. Ten days ago, an NPR poll put Biden ahead of Trump, 50-48, and heading into this past weekend, the Guardian described the race as “nail-bitingly close.” Biden himself last week said he would only consider stepping aside if he couldn’t win, and “no poll says that.” All the coverage of how Biden was convinced to step aside, however, suggests the Democratic Party and/or the Biden campaign is in possession of poll results far worse than what is being reported publicly, including “collapsing” numbers in Virginia, which the New York Times still has as a virtual dead heat, 47-46 for Trump. Politico quoted Biden team sources as saying Pelosi’s main card to play in convincing Biden to walk would involve disclosing “Democratic polling clarifying Biden’s dire political straits,” with one source “familiar with the matter” adding:

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way… She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

For weeks now, we’ve been fed two different genres of poll stories. One says the world is ending, George Clooney is right, and Biden must exit immediately because he can’t win. Another altogether different type of story said that if Biden couldn’t be convinced to leave, that would be okay, because he either wasn’t far behind or was actually gaining or winning. It looks like polls meant for public consumption are no longer even a vague match to internal party surveys. Every bit as much as wealth, reality is reserved for a few insiders now.

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