The punditry has turned against Biden. This matters?

Friday was a story of the DC gang that chatters versus the DC gang that matters. Experts abandoned the president Joe Biden en masse, while elected officials remained silent or stood by it.

In 2017, when Biden was planning his first campaign against then-President Donald Trump, he sought out an intellectual media outlet to publish an article about his reaction to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The article – “’We are living in a battle for the soul of this nation’” — found a home at The Atlantic.

Biden is known to be a regular cable TV viewer and especially enjoys MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He watches “all morning” when he can, according to a person familiar with his habits, and when he can’t, aides monitor the program and sometimes brief him on what was said. The admiration is mutual. In March, co-host Joe Scarborough declared, “I think he’s better than he’s ever been — intellectually, analytically.”

When it comes to your media diet, Evan Osnos, author of a biography of Biden, once noted that Biden likes “what we would call the classics” — including the New York Times, where Biden “pays a lot of attention to the columnists.” Biden spent hours briefing Tom Friedman during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Friedman and other Times columnists have regularly participated in off-the-record sessions with the president.

In the Obama era, while the First Family kept much of the Washington press at bay, Joe and Jill Biden hosted an annual summer party on the lawn of the vice president’s mansion, where he would go face battles with water weapons against reporters and their children.

But yesterday, after Thursday night’s calamitous debate, one by one, it was these same television presenters, columnists and media outlets who abandoned Biden.

After eviscerating his debate performance, Scarborough said now is “the last opportunity for Democrats to decide whether this man we have long known and loved is up to the task” of running for re-election. (Notably, his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski did not join him in this.)

The Atlantic published half a dozen articles calling for Biden to step aside. Tom Nichols wrote“Biden had a job – don’t sound old and confused – and he failed” and “it’s time to think about the unthinkable.” Ron Brownstein said, “the prospect of the party simply moving forward with Biden as if nothing had happened last night seems difficult to imagine.” The headline of an article by Franklin Foer, author of a favorable article best selling account of Biden’s first two years in office, it was “Someone needs to get Biden’s keys.”

At the New York Times, a new column or editorial crucifying Biden for his debate appearance and calling on Democrats to ditch him for a new nominee ran from Friday morning until Friday evening. In fact, Nicholas Kristof kicked off minutes after the end of the debate. “I hope he reviews his debate performance on Thursday night and drops out of the race,” he wrote.

In the morning, Paul Krugman, one of Biden’s staunchest supporters, joined the movement. Krugman’s headline – “The best president of my adult life needs to step down“—it matched the tone of all these pieces: praise for his service followed by an urgent demand that he drop out of the race.

Several people I spoke to about Biden’s relationship with the press said it would undoubtedly be Friedman’s betrayal that would hurt the most. His article set a new standard for framing his decision as one made more out of sadness than anger. Friedman wrote that he was in a hotel room in Lisbon watching the debate and that he cried. Then he hit a column telling his old friend that he “must abandon the race”.

By afternoon, everything had been said, but not everyone at the Times had said it. The final blow came on Friday night when the entire editorial board gave its opinion. The board said Biden was “an admirable president” but “is engaged in a reckless gamble” and “the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.” ” On the social networks, Biden aides mocked the play.

“The last time Joe Biden lost the support of the New York Times editorial board, everything went very well for him,” Cedric Richmond, one of Biden’s campaign co-chairs, said in a statement.

Biden’s relationship with the media elite has always been the key to understanding him. One thesis of Foer’s book, for example, is that Biden craves the admiration of D.C.’s opinion elites and has long used their frequent rejection of him as fuel to fuel his political rise. (This is one way in which he is not so different from Trump.)

After all, it was Maureen Dowd of the New York Times who stalled Biden’s first presidential campaign with her report on his plagiarism. Despite this difficult history, Biden never gave up on the Times – including Dowd, who has known and psychoanalyzed his Irish colleague for decades – even though all of the paper’s columnists have already given up on him.

Dowd handed her over cri de coeur Saturday morning, and how typical it was the most devastating from all of them: “He is being selfish. He is putting himself ahead of the country. He is surrounded by opportunistic enablers. He has created a reality distortion field where we are told not to believe what we have clearly seen. His arrogance is infuriating.” He says he’s doing it for us, but he’s really doing it for himself. I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about the other president.

Unlike Ivy Leaguers Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the liberal media establishment – ​​increasingly the product of America’s top schools as Biden aged – never swooned for Biden. He was excluded in the 2020 primaries and the Biden team resented. Any media embrace of Biden since the post-Jan Trump administration. Political resurrection has always been conditional.

“Mr. Biden has said he is the candidate with the best chance of meeting this threat of tyranny and defeating it,” the Times editorial board wrote on Friday. “His argument rests largely on the fact that he has defeated Mr. Trump in 2020. That is no longer a sufficient reason why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.”

There are other longtime skeptics who were prepared to turn on Biden the minute he showed signs of not being up to the task. The four former Obama staffers who host the influential “Pod Save America” podcast were came out on Friday with an episode in which hosts Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett called on Democrats to have an open debate about the merits of an open convention. His former colleagues David Axelrod and David Plouffe, who personally evaluated Biden for Obama in 2008, joined the chorus hours later. “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, who in February was ridiculed by liberals for mocking Biden’s age, was being celebrated yesterday by some of the same critics for his scathing post-debate comment.

Biden isn’t known for being a big Substack reader, but if he were, he’d see a few former top advocates making the same points: Joe Klein (“He needs to leave as soon as possible”), Andrew Sullivan (“For the love of God, leave”) and Nate Silver (“Joe Biden should give up”). And so on, among the personalities and media outlets he respects most: David Inácio, The Economist, The Washington Post editorial board.

Biden’s campaign, like the candidate himself, is based on the idea of ​​obtaining validation from the media – if you can – while always being prepared for betrayal. By far the most common reaction to criticism from Biden aides is that they have been underestimated before.

And yet one of the most common conversations we’ve had with more self-reflective Biden officials this year is about whether his record of misleading experts has made them dangerously reluctant to consider any criticism.

The story suggests that Biden’s aides will privately argue about the media pileup while publicly rolling their eyes about how it doesn’t matter. And it may not be.

It is certainly more significant that Biden won the support of Clinton and Obama on Friday, that he gave a well-received rally speech, that polls showed only a small movement in the race, and that not a single Democratic elected official has called for Biden would drop out of the race. race.

Brzezinski said Saturday morning he understands why. An early riser, she woke up later than usual because she spent last night dealing with the aftermath of yesterday’s show.

“I stayed up late listening to everyone going crazy on the phone calling Joe. And I was literally shaking my head, saying, ‘These people need diapers,’” she said. “It was a bad night. And it’s not the end of the world. Joe Biden came back from a much worse situation. His standard of living is that he comes back from the worst. I mean, if that’s what you all think, that he should give up, you haven’t been listening and you haven’t been watching this life.”

“I’m not going to walk away,” she added. “Of all your allies and friends in the media, I’m not even close to doing that. Not even close.”

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