Biden’s Treading Water. It’s Not Enough.
Plus: A plea for Democratic courage.
Stop the news! There’s too much news! Here’s a few things that happened yesterday:
New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, long one of the Senate’s most powerful Democrats, was convicted on all counts in his federal corruption trial. Menendez had been accused of accepting “hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, mortgage payments and more” from people connected to the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s son posted video of a weekend phone call in which Donald Trump tried to sweet talk the third-party candidate out of the race, in part by buttering up his barmy anti-vaccine beliefs: “When you feed a baby, Bobby, a vaccination, and it’s like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a 10 pound or 20 pound baby . . . if you ever see the size of it. And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically.”
The Republican National Convention held a unity day, with one former Trump rival after another, from Ron DeSantis to Vivek Ramaswamy to Nikki Haley, trotted out to sing his praises.
In an interview about the security failures that let Trump come a hair’s breadth from death last Saturday, U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle gave maybe the most bizarre explanation imaginable for why Trump’s would-be assassin managed to scale a nearby roof without interference: “That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so there’s a safety factor that would be considered that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so the decision was made to secure the building from inside.”
It’s only Wednesday! Hang in there! And Happy Wednesday.
One Step Forward, One Step Back
— Andrew Egger
By the arguably insane standards of the present moment—in which our 81-year-old president is expected to have “good days” where his mental and verbal lapses are minimal and “bad days” where they come much thicker and faster—Tuesday was a good day for Joe Biden. He appeared energized and largely in command as he delivered a speech to a supportive crowd at the NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas, boasting of the ways in which he has delivered for black Americans and savaging Trump’s policy record while ridiculing his tone-deaf attempts to court the minority vote.
“Folks, I know what the hell a ‘black job’ is,” Biden said, tweaking Trump’s use of the phrase during their recent debate. “It’s the vice president of the United States.”
And he spoke reasonably about how Democrats must proceed in prosecuting the political case against Trump even in the wake of the attempt on his life last week. “Our politics have become too heated,” Biden said, but “just because we must lower the temperature in our politics as it relates to violence doesn’t mean we should stop telling the truth.”
And yet, even here, there were a number of painful stumbles. Despite speaking from a teleprompter, Biden repeatedly got lost in points he was trying to make before cutting his losses and moving on in his now-standard fashion: an abrupt “anyway.” At one point, he seemed mystified by the most basic component of his just-announced plan to control housing costs by instituting national rent controls.
“The idea that corporate-owned housing is able to raise your rent 300, 400 bucks a month or something?” Biden said, squinting quizzically at his prompter. “I’m about to announce they can’t raise it more than 55 dollars.” (The actual plan: capping annual rent increases at 5 percent.)
In a world where Biden was ahead in the polls, performances like this might be enough to quiet Democratic concerns. But we’re not in that world. And these performances are a far cry from offering the sort of reassurances necessary to close Trump’s increasingly commanding lead. YouGov polling released yesterday found Trump with significant leads in each of the seven key swing states, from a 2-point and 3-point edge in Michigan and Pennsylvania respectively up to a 5-point lead in Wisconsin and a 7-point lead in Arizona.
Remarkably, the same slate of polls found Democratic Senate candidates with major leads over their GOP opponents in the five swing states that have Senate contests this year: Across Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Team Blue’s Senate choice leads by between 8 and 12 points.
There’s the everyday hubris of a president thinking he alone can carry his party to victory in November—and then there’s the extraordinary hubris of thinking that while underperforming your own ticket by double digits everywhere that matters.
Just this morning, Politico reported that another polling memo is currently circulating among Democratic party officials, based on interviews this month with more than 15,000 battleground-state voters:
Alternative Democratic candidates run ahead of President Biden by an average of three points across the battleground states. Nearly every tested Democrat performs better than the President. This includes Vice President Harris who runs better than the President (but behind the average alternative).
Milwaukee 2024: Too Painful to Watch
— William Kristol
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
— William Wordsworth, London, 1802
I tried to watch some of the Republican convention last night, but I couldn’t stick with it for more than five minutes at a time. From Trumpists boasting to Nikki Haley caving, it was all too depressing and too infuriating: Truly a fen of selfish men (and women!) smugly wallowing in stagnant waters.
But it’s not just depressing. It’s alarming. If only the waters were merely stagnant! But they’re dangerous. Trump-Vance is by far the most authoritarian presidential ticket in modern American history. A Trump-Vance administration would normalize political violence while undermining liberty and the rule of law at home. It would betray allies fighting for liberty abroad.
Who is sounding the alarm? Who is our Milton? Yes, we at The Bulwark are doing our best, but—with the greatest respect to my colleagues—we are not Miltons.
By the way, I mean “the greatest respect” seriously. I’ve been involved in a fair number of efforts in my almost forty years in Washington, and have never been prouder to be a part of any crew than this group of truth-tellers and liberty-defenders who have—to quote Milton (!)—“the courage never to submit or yield.”
But while it would be nice to have a Milton today, that’s not what we most need. What we need is normal political leaders who will grasp the urgency of the moment and act to increase the chances of defeating the Milwaukee authoritarians.
That means a presidential candidate who is not aging and failing, ill-tempered and self-absorbed—who is, in a very different way from the Republicans, painful to watch. Someone who won’t, on a call with Democratic members of Congress, respond to a polite inquiry from Rep. Jason Crow (D.-Col.) about national security in this way:
First of all, I think you’re dead wrong on national security. You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific basin. Tell me who did something you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son . . . And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever . . . On national security, nobody has been a better president than me. Name me one! Name me one!
Ugh. This is sad, but also unacceptable. And the only response is: Find me an American leader who will do the right thing and step aside for the sake of the country.
But that also requires finding political leaders, leaders of the president’s own party, who will step up and call publicly for Biden to go. One small step in this direction would be to refuse to go along with the Biden campaign’s dishonorable and unprecedented scheme for a virtual ballot that would anoint Biden before the regular Democratic nominating convention, so as to make it harder to pressure Biden aside.
What we need from the leaders of the only party that does want to defend liberal democracy is some determination, some imagination, some courage, and some willingness to take risks for the public good. Then perhaps, to quote Milton,
“This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.”
Quick Hits
There’s a murderer’s row of great pieces up on the homepage today, by the way. Drink deeply from the flagon of indignation!
‘Everything is going right’—Trumpists can’t believe their own convention: Sam Stein
Donald Trump’s violent rhetoric, a catalogue: Cathy Young
What Trump-Vance means for Ukraine: Aaron Friedberg and Gabriel Schoenfeld
The Menendez conviction: a stark contrast to justice under a future President Trump: Dennis Aftergut
One other thing: We’ve seen lots of comments recently to the effect that Morning Shots has been a real doom parade recently—which, yeah, it sure has! We aren’t losing hope or our taste for the fight, but it’s hard to argue that things don’t look grim right now. If you’ve got thoughts on how we should be approaching this moment with a minimum of bumming you out over your coffee, we’d love to hear them:
And here’s a quick promise: When (if?) the news ever gets more hopeful we will deliver it to you with enthusiasm far exceeding this.
Cheap Shots
"One other thing: We’ve seen lots of comments recently to the effect that Morning Shots has been a real doom parade recently—which, yeah, it sure has! We aren’t losing hope or our taste for the fight, but it’s hard to argue that things don’t look grim right now. If you’ve got thoughts on how we should be approaching this moment with a minimum of bumming you out over your coffee, we’d love to hear them."
I'll take a moment to defend our hosts here on this count. From where I sit, and with all due respect to my fellow posters, whose wise words I take in and learn from each day, it's not their job to massage our feelings and tell us what we want to hear, how we want to hear it. We may not see eye-to-eye with their perspective sometimes, but they are informed observers, not hacks, and draw reasoned conclusions based on the available evidence. The discussions here are civil and courteous because that is the tone that they have set, and we all should take a little time in this uncivil era to appreciate that and extend to them the same courtesy that they have gifted to us. Likewise in terms of thinking of canceling subscriptions here over the tone and content -- is it their fault that the news has been consistently bad lately? Did they create the Go Joe or Stay Joe controversy? Does anything they say have any power of influence over the Democratic decision-makers or do they merely analyze and comment as do the rest of us? Would canceling a subscription change any of that, or would it equate to one less informed, participating soldier in the battle that we need to fight?
Let's not lose our heads over things here over which we have little to no control, and find strength in both our numbers and our ability to communicate our ideas. Discord and divisiveness are the devil's workshop in this case. Or MAGA's glee if we fracture and fail in our purpose. Or both. Let's not go there, please and thank you.
Look, I'm a big Biden fan. But looking at this post-debate performances objectively, he's not cutting it, whether it's the Sunday oval office or Lester Holt. It's barely a C - not much energy and the verbal stumbles continue. Yes, he can give a energized rally speech off a teleprompter, but he did plenty of those pre-debate (remember STOU) and the polls barely budged. He's behind and there is absolutely nothing to suggest that rally speeches will turn it around. Yes, he might be able to do the job, but that's not the question. Can he turn the "too old" perception around? That's it. And the cement is hardening.