For the (very brief) moment, Joe Biden appears to have fended off challenges to his run for a second term, but, as Jon Stewart said on Monday on The Daily Show, the four months until November is a very long time. Events of the past few days suggest that Democrat insiders are looking to use that time to edge Biden off the ticket. If the saying that imitation is the highest form of flattery is true, their strategy for this replacement action must be ballast to Donald Trump, the former reality TV producer, as he heads into his convention — because the strategy appears to be running a reality TV show from Washington, D.C.
This theatrical model of politics is familiar to a party that, since the Clinton administration, has treated Hollywood as a governing partner and has run campaigns that way since 1988. But in the past, insiders could control the process, creating a spectacle that preserved their dignity and legitimacy thanks to the intermediary presence of journalists, who crafted leaks into narratives packaged to the public on a predictable schedule. Now the narrative is being steered by insiders and reported by journalists as it happens, because the main player (President Biden) won’t follow the script. In the process of fighting his intransigence, these players are turning themselves, half-wittingly and half-not, into scrambling real-world actor-directors in full view of Americans — and showing the lie of their claims to objectivity, respectability, or connection to the public.
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The witting part of this play surfaced in Stewart’s monologue last Monday, when he sketched out his dream Democrat convention: four days in which leading party lights made their best pitches to the electorate, with Biden himself remaining in contention, in the name of participatory democracy. Leaving aside the fact that a sitting president who concedes to an open convention has given up the chance of winning it, what will occur in Stewart’s scheme is not popular democracy, but a reality television show: entertaining, with spontaneity, while pushing toward an end that is partly predetermined. Stewart, seemingly un-ironically, actually compared his idea to Trump’s Apprentice.
His idea is not a one-off. James Carville proposed it in The New York Times, arguing that Presidents Obama and Clinton stage manage four town halls to pull a presidential nominee from the herd. A venture capitalist and Georgetown professor suggested the same thing in an internal memo, with Oprah and Taylor Swift playing the roles of herd-managers.
No one could accelerate this new strategy more symbolically, or get the unwelcome contender (Biden) out of the picture more charmingly, than George Clooney. On Wednesday, July 10, Clooney, who had hosted a June fundraiser for Biden, confided to The New York Times and its readership that, though he “loved” Joe Biden, the Biden he had loved was gone, and had been since before the fundraiser itself. Questions of bad faith (why did Clooney wait until now to disclose this fact?) or of deeper connections at work (Clooney is known as friendly with President Obama) did not enter the picture.
Instead, Nicholas Kristof, of The Times’ opinion pages, took the opportunity of President Biden responding to Clooney’s op-ed with boasts about his own stamina at 81 to author a tweet on the issue. This is the point when the wheels came off the wagon and the reality TV participants started becoming stars in the show they were trying to produce. Assuring readers that “I admire Biden. So does Clooney,” Kristof went on to say,
Biden is really trying to claim that he’s more vigorous than George Clooney? Really? I’ve traveled with Clooney … and it’s just sad to see Biden pretend that he can outlast Clooney at anything.
Put the words in caps and add emphases (“REALLY???” “SAD!!!”), and the vibe sounds like Trump, except where Trump is an authentic showman and scrapper, a Barnum & Bailey’s promoter who defines himself by hitting back hard, people like Kristof have always based their claim to authority on higher manners and principles. Now, in the face of internal resistance to their agenda, these apparently respectable insiders are starting to uncannily resemble players in a high school cafeteria, where students try on new roles (“class clown,” “provocateur,” “everybody’s friend”) in a bid for attention, then get frustrated when the roles don’t work.
A case in point is Nancy Pelosi, who followed Clooney’s pitch by suggesting that Biden reconsider his position on re-election, which, according to The New York Times, was her latest strategy, after “anger,” “fear,” and “panic” had failed, to edge Biden out. Questioned by a young black female reporter about her new statement, Pelosi evaded answering, becoming curter and curter, until she finally demanded, in apparent frustration, “Am I speaking English to you?” Surely this comment, from a leader of a party that speaks of racism and sexism as blights on the republic and of sensitivity to “people of color” as an essential good, was unintended. After all, Republican surrogates have faced mass-media interrogations for much less.
Through it all, President Obama has kept aloof, possibly working through proxies (George Clooney, Anita Dunn) who have either urged Biden to drop out or put him in a position where dropping out seems to be his only option. Yet, increasingly, even Obama’s proxies are casting the issue in desperately broad strokes. As Jon Lovett, an Obama speechwriter and Hollywood veteran, put it:
There have always been two Joe Bidens … statesman and politician, hero and fool. … Biden can leave office as one of the greatest presidents … or he can leave a stubborn old man who allowed hubris … to destroy his legacy and perhaps our democracy with it.
This Hollywoodization of reality — What will the aging Leader do? Will his Light or Dark side win? It all depends on this! — continues to ignore the fact that the problem is not the president, but the party, which is being led by people who neither know nor care what its constituent parts (black women, labor unionists, state and local officials, many of whom support Biden) really want or think. Since the 1990s, as its presidents (Clinton, Obama, Biden) rallied these constituencies, the players whose post-debate hyperventilating has been fruit for amusement (Rob Reiner, Reed Hastings) have steadily moved the party away from them with entertainment donations, financialization, and national nonprofit growth. All the while, the strategists these inside players use have relied on targeted campaigns and staged spectacles to turn out the necessary swing demographics in any given election.
Now these players are in a situation where events can’t be managed, and they’re mounting a clunky, staged, top-down effort in response: the effort of people who learned the trade from Hollywood and want entertainment yet also respectability. “Unscripted and Unbowed, Biden Seeks to Overcome Missteps with Policy Talk” was the high-minded yet gossipy headline The New York Times managed in this vein after the President’s Thursday NATO press conference, as if policy talk was somehow the distraction, not the point of a NATO summit.
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But real democracy is not a film — it’s not tightly wound and streamlined, but participatory and unexpected. Establishment operators aware of this reality, among them Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter and a Democrat until the 1970s, have in recent days urged Democrats to recognize it. In her latest column, Noonan specifically crafted her advice to the party off Democrats’ experience in 1948, when President Harry Truman was fighting from behind to claim the party’s nomineeship in a spontaneous convention that had it all: pigeons flying into fan propellers, rescued by House Speaker Rayburn; a third of the delegates walking out because the party was moving left; another contingent pulling the party farther that way; the president not going on until 2 A.M. and winging his speech to roars from the crowd. Noonan used this experience as a model, urging 2024 Democrats to ignore the donors and strategists and return to the authentic chaos of 1948, to “reach back to your old, best self.”
But Democrats don’t have that self anymore, because that was an actual “self,” a body politic, based on the associations and state legislatures, city parties and private-sector labor unions, whose leaders were accountable to them and fought to represent them, not to audition for participation in an insider club. It’s this older reality that the people at the top of the party have destroyed. And this disconnect allows Republicans a real opportunity: to broaden their appeal to the increasing number of Americans shut out by this false and distant process, who think, on the most visceral and practical of levels, that it has nothing left to offer. These voters — young, lower-middle- or middle-class, multi-ethnic and multi-racial, and disenfranchised — want substantial change in this country’s structures and the way it’s governed. They are a rich vein for Republican votes under President Trump, and hopefully his successors.
Matt Wolfson, an ex-leftist investigative journalist, tweets at @Ex__Left and writes at Oppo-research.com.
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