The party might be better off if it stopped pretending that the subject the whole country is talking about is the fixation of obsessive Republican hacks alone.
It’s one thing to hear Democratic lawmakers dismiss the cascade of revelations involving Joe Biden’s deterioration over the course of his presidency. Of course they would rather devote all their efforts to opposing the GOP. Of course they’d rather talk about the cruelty inherent in slowing down the rate of growth for programs like Medicaid. Of course they’d prefer to be “looking forward” rather than back at the Biden-era debacles that consigned them to the political wilderness.
It’s another thing entirely to hear that opportunistic line from pundits, even the liberal variety, if only because it’s probably bad advice.
“I am a liberal columnist, commentator, podcaster, and sometime political activist,” writes the progressive broadcaster Bill Press to open his latest column. “I have been a Democrat all my life. But I am still stunned by how dumb Democrats can be.”
Everything checks out so far, but Press cites the Democrats’ rush “to distance themselves from Joe Biden” as evidence of their stupidity. There’s not much to support the notion that this is a “dumb” strategy, perhaps because there is even less evidence on offer to suggest that Democrats are indeed running away from the former president. Press identifies only an embittered David Plouffe, the onetime Obama campaign guru who ran Kamala Harris’s operation in 2024, who complained that Biden scuttled the former vice president’s chances by dropping out of the race with just 107 days left before the election.
It’s possible, Press admits, that every revelation in the series of tell-all accounts of the scope of Biden’s infirmity and the effort to hide it from the public is true. “But what’s done is done,” he shrugs. “Every minute spent today talking about Joe Biden’s mental awareness in 2022 is a minute not spent talking today about Trump’s relentless efforts to gut our democratic institutions in 2025.”
In the paragraphs that follow, Press makes all the mistakes that led the voting public to wash their hands of Democratic governance. He castigates voters for issuing the wrong verdict in 2024: They faced a “clear choice” between “a white male and a black female; between a convicted felon and a former prosecutor,” and they blew it. He ventures the inaccurate and self-pitying claim that Republicans never engage in the kind of honest introspection demanded of Democrats. He even defends Biden on the grounds that “most historians” believe “Ronald Reagan was far more ‘out of it’ in the final year of his presidency than Joe Biden ever was” — a claim that the capable James Kirchick has dismantled, if the evidence of your own eyes wasn’t sufficient.
By insisting that Democrats must “look forward, not back,” Press is compelled to attempt the very retroactive conditioning that got his party in trouble in the first place. Not only have the revelations regarding Biden’s condition reminded the public of all the Biden-era lies they were so often confronted with — big and small, petty and consequential alike — but recent developments have raised the prospect that we’re still being lied to today.
Finally reckoning with the reality to which we are all privy might go some way toward demonstrating that Democrats know they abused voters’ trust over the last four years and, maybe, won’t be doing that again. On that front, they have a lot of work to do.
Somewhere between 55 and 62 percent of the public regards the Democratic Party unfavorably. That’s where the party has languished roughly since the election. Not only is the opposition consistently unpopular in objective terms, they’re also consistently unpopular relative to the GOP. Confidence in congressional Democratic leadership reached an all-time low in Gallup’s polling last month, and it’s not just because progressive activists don’t think the Democratic Party is progressive enough. “The Democratic brand is still not where it needs to be in terms of core trust,” said Democratic pollster Molly Murphy. “Even though voters are critical about Trump and some of the things he’s doing, that criticism of Trump doesn’t translate into trust in Democrats. The trust has to be earned.”
Some of the Democrats’ electoral strategists remain convinced that the party doesn’t have to do much to reap electoral rewards next November. Trump and the GOP will implode, they tell themselves, and their opponents will benefit by default. Maybe, but the numbers suggest that the public is still stewing over the way their intelligence was insulted on a near-daily basis in the Biden years.
If anything, the books, articles, and diagnoses that have kept Biden’s name in the headlines suggest that the party might be better off if it stopped pretending that the subject the whole country is talking about is the fixation of obsessive Republican hacks alone. Acknowledging the world we all inhabit might bolster the impression that the party is done leaning on journalists and entertainers to shape our perceptions of reality so that it more closely comports with Democratic narratives. It couldn’t hurt.