Three Election Lies
Why it's now clear the American people won the presidential debate
Ever since President Biden’s catastrophic debate performance last month, Washington has tried to obscure its significance behind a blizzard of outright lies, prevarications and half-truths. Let’s pick apart three of the most egregious cases.
The Debate Exposed Biden’s Decline
The biggest lie is that Biden’s impairment only became clear during the June 27 presidential debate. In reality, longstanding polls have consistently showed that the vast majority of Americans, including most Democrats, have believed Biden was too old to run for reelection. For example, a poll conducted by ABC News and Ipsos back in February found a staggering 86% of Americans think Biden is too old to serve another term — a view shared by 69% of Democrats, according to an AP/NORC poll from last year. (Followers of this newsletter will have noticed these stunning figures at the time, as I reported on the polling back in September.)
“After That Debate, The Risk of Biden Is Clear,” a representative column in The New York Time asserts. But it was clear to ordinary Americans for a long time before that, as an abundance of polling shows. Just about the only people it wasn’t clear to were the elite media types, who instead of reflecting on how they missed something so obvious, raced to warn everyone of a crisis they were already familiar with. It felt like a farcical reenactment of the Paul Revere legend.
Counter to elite wisdom, polling shows that the debate barely shifted public opinion of Biden at all. Not because they don’t care, but because people were already factoring his decline into their perception of the president.
Despite all of the depressing parallels to the Soviet gerontocracy — even top Democrats apparently open to Biden’s withdrawal (Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer) are barely any younger than him themselves — there is a bright side to this.
With powerful Democrats from George Clooney to even perhaps Barack Obama supportive of Biden’s dropping out of the race, it is by now clear that the winner of the presidential debate was not Donald Trump. The American people won the presidential debate. They knew the truth, which is why the discovery of Biden’s decline by the news media had no influence on their view.
That the vast majority of ordinary people perceived Biden’s physical decline months or even years prior to Washington’s realization is no small feat. Biden’s aides have shielded him not just from the general public, but even his own staff. In April, Axios reported that Biden adopted a new procedure for walking to the White House from the Marine One helicopter, in an attempt to conceal his stiff gait behind a phalanx of aides. Biden has also held fewer press conferences than any president since Ronald Reagan (who also suffered from cognitive decline.) So uncommon is POTUS’s presence that when it was announced that Biden would be speaking at the NATO summit later today (his first solo press conference since November!), White House spokesperson John Kirby gave it a special name, calling it a “big boy press conference.”
Yet despite the extraordinary efforts, everyday people knew better. This speaks to a public wisdom that runs contrary to the misanthropic and deeply reactionary view that people are stupid. Fortunately the truth is exactly the opposite: it was the media professionals who follow politics for a living who noticed Biden’s decline last, while ordinary people perceived the truth.
If Biden drops out, many in Washington will attribute it to this or that media expose that revealed some aspect of Biden’s feebleness. But the credit properly belongs to the supermajority of American voters whose unwavering concern will have finally forced an intervention in which grandpa’s car keys are taken away.
“The People Already Chose Biden”
A talking point emanating from the White House and its lackeys is that the will of the people is clear from the votes they cast overwhelmingly in favor of Biden during the Democratic presidential primary. Replacing Biden, the argument goes, would be anti-democratic. This is very misleading, for a simple reason: there wasn’t really a primary.
Instead of a robust primary of the sort we saw in 2020, this year’s presidential primary resembled that of 2016, when the field was cleared to allow the coronation of one single candidate. Biden faced only long-shot candidates who didn’t pose a serious threat, like Rep. Dean Philips, Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. All had trouble simply getting on the ballot in multiple states, which they blamed on Democratic party leadership.
Far from an accident, Biden and his team engineered the clearing of the primary field. This is of course to be expected for an incumbent president seeking a second term, but Biden, like LBJ (who declined to seek reelection), is a special case. While campaigning in 2020, perhaps to allay concerns about his age, Biden cast himself as a “bridge” to a new “generation of leaders,” reportedly even signaling to aides that he would not seek a second term. Clearly, Biden understood that there wouldn’t be much enthusiasm for a second campaign. Had he allowed a robust primary to take place, his campaign could truthfully say the people had spoken. But as it stands, that just isn’t the case.
There were no real choices during the primary and the turnout reflects that. Virginia, a purple state, had record low voter turnout during the primary, totaling just 6%. (Many other states reported the lowest turnout in years.)
Does 6% really sound like “the will of the people”?
“Democracy is on the ballot”
Biden has sought to cast his campaign against Donald Trump as an existential struggle for the survival of democracy itself. While electoral stakes inflation is nothing new — I can’t remember the last time a presidential election wasn’t deemed The Most Important of Our Lifetime — Biden’s rhetoric represents an evolutionary leap for the genre, though not for the better.
There are of course real stakes to the election, as the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade vividly showed us. But regardless of who wins, our democracy will keep sputtering along; perhaps a bit slower or a bit faster, but the engine isn’t giving out, at least not on account of this one election. There are many reasons why, including the fact that Trump seems far too venal and incompetent to successfully mastermind something like that. But even if he weren’t, there are other reasons to be skeptical of the doomsayers. In a recent post, I cast doubt on the hysteria about nobody being in charge of the U.S. government if Biden is out to lunch. Such concerns, I explained, ignore the vast bureaucracy that runs the federal government and will continue to do so, even in Biden’s absence. For this reason it’s a mistake to make presidents the main character of American democracy. (Although it makes for great entertainment!)
Biden’s statement that “Democracy is on the ballot” is a polite way of saying, “vote for me or democracy gets it.” Ironically, the rhetoric echoes that of Trump himself, who during his 2016 campaign famously insisted that “I alone can fix it” — an outrageous claim for which he was justly mocked.
As with Trump, it’s obvious why Biden is using absolutist rhetoric about how he is uniquely able to avert catastrophe: it’s advantageous. Under what political scientists call the “rally ‘round the flag effect,” citizens tend to suspend criticisms of their government during times of crisis, especially war. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush’s approval rating spiked to levels higher than have ever been seen since. That’s what Trump is trying to manufacture when he tries to scare the shit out of people with his talk of rapists and murderers pouring into the country en masse; and it’s what President Biden is doing, too. The campaign slogan for either candidate could be, Vote for me if you want to live.
It’s not even clear Democratic leaders themselves believe it, as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein revealed in an interview with The Bulwark podcast on Tuesday, saying:
"I've had top Democrats say to me, basically, say something like, ‘I don’t know why all these Democrats who think Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy are acting the way they are. But the reason I'm acting the way I am is because I don't think that."
There are no doubt people who think this strategy is justified if it wins the election. But fear, it has been said, is the mind destroyer; and it’s no coincidence that the debate featured so little discussion of actual policy (unless there are going to be federal regulations about golfing handicaps.) Why would people care about policy if they’re led to believe a meteor is hurtling toward them?
— Edited by William M. Arkin
“Fortunately the truth is exactly the opposite: it was the media professionals who follow politics for a living who noticed Biden’s decline last, while ordinary people perceived the truth.”
Or the media professionals were lying the whole time. The reaction to Robert Hur’s report was telling here.
“Two rich geriatrics bickering about their golf game” says it all.