I want to commend Isaac Saul’s take on President Biden’s ending his re-election campaign at the Tangle newsletter to your attention. To read the whole thing you need to register to receive the newsletter. Here’s a paraphrase of his bullet points:
Biden did the right thing.
We’re getting to watch political talking points being formulated in realtime.
For the first time in years we’re seeing Democrats trying to attract voters rather than drive them away.
Their present direction appears to split the difference between the least democratic response they might have made and the most democratic response they might have made.
We’re in uncharted water.
The president should have withdrawn earlier.
He supports an open convention.
Nancy Pelosi continues to be the most influential Democrat.
Asking how President Biden is fit to serve but not fit to run is a fair question.
The Silicon Valley tech-bro elites are becoming more obnoxious by the day.
When he polled his friends and family about it the main reaction of Democrats was relief.
The main reaction of Republicans was, basically, it doesn’t matter.
When he posed the same question on X the main reaction was that VP Harris couldn’t win.
She’s not a great politician.
The significant amount of money raised from small contributions over the last 48 hours suggests substantial grassroots support.
President Biden has been a drag on the Democratic Party for the last several months.
Trump is now the oldest major party presidential candidate in U. S. history. The track record of old Republicans running against younger Democrats favors the Democrats.
He thought that a Biden vs. Trump contest probably favored Trump. Harris vs. Trump may be about even.
What will Biden do for the next several months?
This will be the first Presidential election since 1976 to not have a Biden, Bush, or Clinton on the ticket.
Trump would probably have preferred for Biden to remain in the race.
Does this demonstrate that presidential debate do matter?
Note that President Biden took this action without our hearing directly from him.
This has been a pretty eventful couple of months
Those aren’t my observations—they’re Isaac’s. My only observation is that replacing President Biden with VP Harris on the ticket is the Democrats’ only play. Black women are the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc. How would the Democrats explain passing over a black woman in favor of, say, a white man?
I’ve known Obama since 1995. We both come out of Chicago politics. I know how it works. He’s behind the campaign to dump 15 million Dem primary voters & replace Biden with his choice. Classic Chicago Democrat machine politics. Selection over election. The bosses over the people.
In other words there are people other than Republicans who will see it that way.
Biden’s decision will allow a relieved country to applaud his success as president. Much of the Republican critique of Biden is pure nonsense. In fact, he helped steward sustained economic growth. He made critical investments in technology and infrastructure. He rebuilt America’s foreign alliances. And he was steadfast in the great moral challenge of our time, which was resistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dark designs on Ukraine and the world.
?It’s often said that if we could see ourselves through others’ eyes, we would make better decisions about our weaknesses. But Biden for many months resisted recognizing what television viewers could plainly see: that he was aging and increasingly unsteady in ways that made another term as commander in chief problematic.
Following up on their complaint about Democrats’ lying about President Biden’s condition, the editors of the Washington Examiner follow up with a complaint about lies with respect to the climate:
Climate change is real. The world’s average temperature is rising. It is just not rising as fast as Democrats claim and is not causing the damage Democrats say it is.
Take Biden’s statement about heat, deaths, and extreme weather events. Not one claim in that paragraph is true. In the U.S., extreme cold kills twice the number of people as extreme heat. Internationally, the numbers are even more stark, with extreme cold claiming nine times as many victims as extreme heat.
Turning to “extreme weather events,” hurricane frequency and intensity have not increased since 1900. Floods have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1950, and tornadoes have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1950 either.
I wish they were devoting that kind of attention to how the Republicans are lying as well.
My own view about climate change is that I think that climate change is a risk but not an issue by which I mean that is something which needs to be considered but is not an emergency. Furthermore, there is a fundamental flaw in the notion that we can combat global warming due to carbon emissions by buying solar panels and batteries from China. Chinese manufacturing is beyond our ability to regulate and the sad reality is that there’s a direct causal relationship between increasing Chinese manufacturing and increasing carbon emissions.
but a little later in the column she states pretty clearly why President Biden’s inner circle is undoubtedly giving him exactly the opposite advice:
The race for the Oval today is between two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys, and that’s a depressing state of affairs.
As for those D.C. careerists surrounding Biden who a) hid his true condition; b) gaslighted the press for focusing on what they called a nonexistent age issue; c) shielded the president from the truth about his cratering chances of winning; and d) seem to have put their self-interest first?
One way or the other, they’ll probably be out of their jobs soon.
What she doesn’t do and to the best of my knowledge no one else has either, is explain how we got in the position of having a choice between “two delusional, selfish, stubborn old guys”, one of whom has been rejected by the country once already and the other was rejected multiple times by his own party before becoming its standard-bearer.
BTW there’s bad news for Kamala Harris if President Biden stays in the race and re-elected. According to the Social Security Administration actuarial table, he’s likely to be alive at the end of his second term. What condition he will be in in 2028 I can only speculated on. And the full depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund should take place during a second term of his successor whoever that might be.
At The Hill Jeff Greenfield does his level best to explain the balloting rules of the Democratic National Convention and how, although unless he withdraws President Biden is likely to be renominated, almost anything can happen:
Particularly in an open convention, some early procedural votes could make all the difference. They could pave the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to quickly seize the nomination, for instance, or allow for a broader, more competitive contest. But either way, the rules will matter. (In what follows, I have drawn deeply from the wisdom of Josh Putnam, whose FHQ site is absolutely required reading).
The TL;DR version is it’s complicated.
At present I hold two seemingly contradictory opinions. First, I think it is very likely that President Biden will not withdraw, resign, or otherwise voluntarily remove himself from the 2024 election. Second, I think the optimum outcome for the Democratic Party would be if he did.
As we can see, a modest Biden lead in Virginia would actually be consistent with a roughly 3-point Trump lead in the popular vote. While Biden’s current polling deficits in the “classic” swing states (specifically the Michigan/Pennsylvania/Wisconsin trio) are not necessarily as large as they are on the furthest right column on Table 1, the fact that we’re having a serious conversation about whether he could lose Virginia is telling. Aside from Virginia, other stronger Biden 2020 states, such as Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico are within single digits.
We are not directly addressing down-ballot races here, but this is not the kind of Electoral College situation where Democrats could be plausibly expected to win either the House or the Senate majority. It may also be that Democrats are being caught at a low point right now—but, it must be reiterated, Biden was trailing before the debate anyway. So maybe he could pull some of the bluer states back from the brink as the election got closer, but the really important states at the center of the electorate are quite possibly a different story.
The pressure to step aside as a candidate has been rising to intolerable levels, especially over the past few days.
Democrats fully expect polls after the Republican National Convention to show a possible blowout that could bring down Democrats in Congress, too.
“His choice is to be one of history’s heroes, or to be sure of the fact that there’ll never be a Biden presidential library,” one of the president’s close friends told us. “I pray that he does the right thing. He’s headed that way.”
Yesterday’s AP poll, showing nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, ricocheted through the White House and Congress.
The Fair Model, updated with the BLS’s estimate of real per capita GDP growth, predicts that if he remains President Biden will not receive a majority of the popular vote. To remind you the Fair Model is neither a political analysis nor does it reflect opinion polls. It is an econometric model which has shown pretty fair accuracy over the last half dozen or so election cycles. Importantly, it also predicts that the Democratic share of the popular vote will actually decline if President Biden does not run.
That may provide us with an opportunity to see if my prediction, that complaints about the undemocratic character of the Electoral College will evaporate should Trump receive a larger percentage of the popular vote than Biden, holds true.
I have not watched the Republican National Convention. Did I miss anything?
National conventions have undergone substantial evolution over the years. When I first became politically aware, they actually held some significance although most of the real decisions were made in the proverbial “smoke-filled rooms”. They might have been on the radio or televised but the action was always behind the scenes. As primary elections have assumed more significance the national conventions have increasingly appeared anticlimactic, performative, and superficial.
What little I have read in the media about the Republican convention could well have been written a week or a month ago except for brief passages referring to the assassination attempt. Sadly, I’m not sure those reporting and writing for the major media outlets are capable of reporting what happened rather than telling you what to think about what happened.
The first thing it’s important to understand about the Red Sea is that very little traffic through it has a U. S. origin or destination. It is used primarily to ship goods to and from Europe not the United States. It does support some traffic to the United States from India. Why, then, are we involved in pursuing the Houthi pirates impeding traffic in the Red Sea at all? Simply put because
To support our European allies and
Historically, maintaining free transit of the seas has been considered a vital U. S. interest. Some have maintained it is a component of our grand strategy.
U.S. naval forces are operating at a pace not seen since World War II as they try to block threat after threat. The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier strike group on station in the area for months returned over the weekend, and the sea service says the ship group conducted more than 750 engagements while deployed. The strike group expended 135 Tomahawk missiles, premiere land attack weapons that the services haven’t been buying in sufficient quantities.
In other words, the U.S. is burning through missiles with no apparent larger plan to restore order to the region. The obvious answer is to punish the Iranians who arm the rebels, but the Biden Administration hasn’t.
I think the editors are mistaken and I’d like to explain why.
Stopping the Houthi attacks is well within our capability but we are choosing not to do so. We have the military capability of rendering the areas of Yemen from which the attacks are emanating unhabitable. I suspect the reason is that we have decided that the cost in civilian lives is not proportional to the military gain.
Can anybody imagine the Department of Justice conducting an even-handed investigation of potential Secret Service lapses in the provision of security to Donald Trump in a presidential election year? I don’t believe it and I think that experience should lead us in that direction.
My reaction to New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez’s conviction on a variety of charges was pretty simple. Luc Cohen reports at Reuters:
NEW YORK, July 16 (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Bob Menendez was convicted on Tuesday on all 16 criminal counts he faced including bribery at his corruption trial in Manhattan federal court, completing the once-powerful New Jersey Democrat’s dramatic downfall.
Senior Democrats including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and fellow New Jersey Senator Cory Booker quickly called on Menendez, who has served in the Senate since 2006 and avoided conviction in a prior 2017 corruption trial due to a deadlocked jury, to resign from the chamber.
My reaction was one down, 99 more to go. Furthermore, I think that Majority Leader Schumer’s and others’ quick reaction was to avoid the scrutiny from spreading any farther. They’ve known that Sen. Menendez was corrupt for decades. Knowing about it and doing nothing about it is itself corrupt.
The Senate does not have the power to eject Sen. Menendez from the body cf. Powell v. McCormack, but it does have the power to exclude him from committees and generally ostracize him. Sen. Menendez holds powerful positions on multiple Senate committees. Why?
