In today’s Morning Jolt, I wrote, “for the first six months of 2024, the arguments about Joe Biden’s age and health were completely inverted in Democratic circles. Those who thought Biden was too old for another term were scorned as ‘the bedwetting brigade.’ …It wasn’t merely that Democrats, as a whole, ignored the problem that Biden was too old to serve another term; it’s that they attacked anyone who dared say it out loud.”
The opening pages of Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House offer a particularly vivid example of this phenomenon:
Delaware senator Chris Coons, one of Biden’s closest confidants, missed the opening minutes of the debate as he shook hands and slapped backs at a campaign watch party in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia, a rich hunting ground for Democratic votes. But it didn’t take long for him to catch up on the catastrophe. Sitting down with a plate of snacks, he felt his phone buzz continuously in his pocket. A onetime Biden intern who held the president’s former Senate seat, Coons was known as Biden’s man on Capitol Hill. As he made quick work of his appetizer plate, the messages from fellow senators and colleagues arrived in rat-a-tat fashion. They all wanted him to answer for what they were witnessing. “Disaster!” “Terrible!” “What the hell is going on?”
…Now, jet-lagged, he found himself thrust into the unusual position of protecting Biden from Democratic senators. He knew, as Biden’s guy in their chamber, he could give no ground. If he did, it would only feed the frenzy. He shot back texts accusing his colleagues of bed-wetting, telling them to put their big-kid pants on and asking what was wrong with them that they would so easily go faithless on the president.
As his thumbs banged on the screen, he kept watching. He could see what they saw, even if he wouldn’t say it. This is awful, he thought as the debate hit the halfway mark. Damn, this really is not picking up. The back half wasn’t as bad, he convinced himself, but it was hardly good. He knew he would be a lead member of the cleanup crew. And while Democrats p***ing their pants was nothing new, they were right that the president had s*** the bed.
Got that? Senator Chris Coons knew that the president was having a debate performance so bad that it warranted that vulgar euphemism, but he chose to berate his colleagues for daring to acknowledge what everyone could see with their own two eyes. He was asking them to believe something that he himself didn’t believe, and to echo a spin that he himself knew was false.
How do could the Biden team expect to win when even the president’s closet allies don’t believe the message they’re expected to communicate? Isn’t there a fundamental problem of integrity when vast swaths of a party ask the public to believe something that the party leaders themselves know is false?