Conspiracy stories come out of Hollywood, and insider plays come out of Washington, D.C., but sometimes there doesn’t seem to be much difference between them.
Four years ago in March, before Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg, seen as a plausible contender against then–former vice president Biden, dropped out of the Democrat presidential primary, and within a year was appointed secretary of transportation. Reports indicated he’d spoken, before making his decision, with former president Obama. A little over a month later, Bernie Sanders, the left-wing candidate whom Biden’s Buttigieg-enabled consolidation of establishment backing had left facing a monolith, withdrew, and within a year was chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. A left-wing journalist in The Guardian at the time compared Biden to the Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev: an aging apparatchik guaranteed to push forward the prior Democrat president’s policies and not rock the boat.
Last Thursday, those leftists who saw this 2020 shift as a decisive Democrat turn away from authentic populism got some measure of satisfaction from a disastrous debate performance by the anointed apparatchik. Briahna Joy Gray, the leftist writer and commenter who is also a scourge of Washington shibboleths, was direct, connecting the night’s disaster to Super Tuesday four years before: “YOU people brought this on yourselves. … You applauded Obama calling on the other candidates to drop out so Biden could win.” Matt Stoller, the antitrust crusader, accused the party of incompetence and wrote flatly: “No one’s in charge.”
This last statement may be true, or it may not be. What the party may do next is stick with President Biden, who does not seem fully in charge of anything. But Democrats also may revert to someone else being very much in charge: former president Obama, who in 2015 encouraged his vice president not to run for president as an exercise in political risk management, and who in 2020 lent him support for the same reason. This year, as a third exercise in risk management, President Obama might again attempt to slide his successor out.
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For the past seven and a half years, former president Obama’s post-presidency has been a great unwritten story: the strange piece of furniture in the room no one comments on yet everyone knows is there. Nominally spending his time increasing his net worth, he lives in Washington, D.C., the first ex-president to do so since Woodrow Wilson, who was incapacitated by a massive stroke. At first, this choice was explained as Obama’s second daughter, Sasha, wanting to finish her high school education in the city, but soon Sasha was out of the house, and the Obamas remained in Washington. By 2023, two Washington journalists, speaking anonymously to the reporter David Samuels, told him that Secret Service vehicles bearing White House officials were regularly seen pulling in and out of the Obama residence at night, but no one was reporting on the story.
Staffing at the Biden White House seemed to support what this fact implied — that Biden’s first term was Obama’s third. Susan Rice, Neera Tanden, Samantha Power, John Kerry, Antony Blinken, Robert Malley, Wendy Sherman, John Podesta, Anita Dunn, and Bob Bauer — from domestic to foreign policy to political operatives, the Biden administration has been a reformulation of the Obama world. When the former president visited the White House, footage captured staffers crowding around him as President Biden wandered, vacantly, through the crowd.
In this context, it’s instructive to consider an article in Axios that appeared some hours before last Thursday’s debate, purporting to explain why Michelle Obama was not campaigning for President Biden: her distaste for politics and her dislike of the way the Biden Family had treated her friend Kathleen Buhle, Hunter Biden’s ex-wife. Both of these reasons were less than sturdy. After all, the “unwilling” political participant Michelle Obama coined what the media deemed the most memorable line of recent election cycles — “when they go low, we go high” — and the idea that a woman who famously values family cohesion would take offense at a family’s rallying around its son after a divorce seems like an anomaly. But, viewed politically, this information and the date of its release make sense. If Michelle Obama is seen by her husband or the party as a plausible replacement for President Biden, then there’s real incentive to make her lack of participation in the Biden re-election effort seem like something other than a potential candidate avoiding sullying-by-association.
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Viewed from this angle, well placed Democrats’ response to the Thursday debate disaster supports the view that the Biden implosion was part of a planned obsolescence. There was something ritualized about the self-described Democratic “freakout” after the debate: these spontaneous eruptions all used the same language. Biden, it was said, had one job — to “reassure” his “neurotic” party — and he failed. These Democrats were “heartbroken,” and their “voice[s] cracked” as they critiqued the President. Biden was “doing his best,” but his best was not good enough.
Meantime, members of the party’s right flank made their voices heard in distinctive ways. The financier William Ackman talked about the country “rally[ing] around” President Trump while also floating JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon as a replacement Democrat candidate. The message here seemed clear: certain big money players would reconsider their drift toward Trump were a suitably pro-corporate (and anti-antitrust) candidate selected in Biden’s stead.
Embracing this interpretation of what happened Thursday night means assuming that the signs of the president’s decline, and its irreversibility, were clear not just to his close advisers, but to a wide swath of Democratic insiders as well. Both common sense and historical precedent support this view, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s widely reported failing health in the winter of 1945, which was known around Capitol Hill.
It’s hard to believe, in an era where the presidency has become much more public, that similar interactions didn’t occur with President Biden and get widely reported this winter and spring. It’s also hard to believe that President Obama, living nearby, was not aware of these reports. In context of a failing President Biden being unwilling to step aside, a play may have gotten formulated: to allow for a planned disaster followed by a gentle replacement urged by President Obama, the one figure in the Party with near-universal authority.
Following this line of reasoning down a logical path, it makes sense that advisers close to President Biden who are also Democrat loyalists with ties to the Obamas (including, reportedly, Anita Dunn) might have supported the unprecedented debate framework, which allowed for an early debate — giving time for the party to take Biden off the ticket, but not too much time for a replacement candidate to be smeared by too much scrutiny other than in a second debate, which might not be too hard to handle. (As President Biden’s slow revival on Thursday showed, even the most frail of candidates can score shots in a 90-minute debate.) It also makes sense that many of the liberal columnists who set the terms for and justify the party’s policy and political shifts (Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman) have been of one accord in their post-debate urgings for the president to step aside.
This wouldn’t be the first time such a play was made. Concerted insider aggression against elderly players deemed to be hurting the party’s interests has become common among Democrats these past few years. This aggression has ranged from plays against former Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer to those against the late senator Dianne Feinstein. The first play worked (Breyer resigned), and the second did not (Feinstein stayed on), but, in the context of a presidential election, making the same play against an elderly president might have seemed worth the risk.
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Politics is paradoxical because it’s both intensely human and intensely transactional. It turns on connection and persuasion, but also on negotiations and détentes. In times when power is closer to the ground, these two qualities intersect: interests get played out, and so do personal relationships, in the scrum of local political contestation and the quiet but known intensity of backroom politics.
But when politics centralizes, it enters the genre of theater, where scripted tableaus are staged by small coteries to gain public support for particular moves, whether out of Versailles in the 1780s or Northwest Washington in the 2020s. In the process, a gap gets created between what’s said to be happening and what’s actually happening, between narrative and reality.
Hypocrisy fills this gap, and so, sometimes, does collateral. That the collateral in the Biden debate tableaux may be a corrupt elderly man becoming an emperor with no clothes in full view of 48 million people is one of the more human, though not the most egregious, testimonies against our centralized style of government.
Matt Wolfson, an ex-leftist investigative journalist, tweets at @Ex__Left and writes at Oppo-research.com.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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