2024: When You Know Both Devils
THE GAP BETWEEN CAMPAIGN PROMISES AND WHITE HOUSE POSSIBILITIES
In 2024, the electorate has an unusual advantage. We know what the candidates promised to do if they were elected POTUS, and we know what they did once elected POTUS.
And yet, on the eve of the 5th stop on the "How Should a President Be" tour, I’m struck by this reality: In November, a successful sitting president may just lose to a disgraced one he beat just four years ago…for doing a terrible job.
I’m excited to talk about the confounding gap between campaign promises and White House possibilities with Princeton Professor Kevin Kruse tomorrow night on Instagram. Register here and/or join us at 7pm—and subscribe to Kevin’s newsletter, “Campaign Trails.”
REEL PRESIDENTS
Fictional presidents often strike me as an expression of the electorate's greatest hopes (unimpeachable character, good speeches, happy endings) and fears (aliens, corruption, women in leadership positions).
I unpacked these theories in a standing-room-only, clip-driven event with Alyssa Mastromonaco at Upstate Films—the most unexpected stop on the tour. It wasn’t recorded, but here’s the AV that Upstate put together for the event.
The groupings fall under the following categories: Great Speeches. Truthiness. Advisers. Personal Crises. Women.
Jed Bartlet won the fake presidential election I ran through the local library. He’s the platonic ideal with one potentially fatal flaw: Only President Bartlett’s wife knew he had MS.
BIDEN’S LAST CAMPAIGN
A fascinating new profile by Evan Osnos just went up at the New Yorker:
As I wrote in Comedian-in-Chief, Biden’s February 8th press conference was a missed opportunity: “The Administration could have chosen to emphasize the fact that Biden, unlike Trump, had been exonerated, but Biden wanted to dispute Hur’s comments.”
As for Biden’s age, Osnos (who has written an excellent biography of Biden) noted that his “springy, mischievous energy” has lessened, but “his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date.”
Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist and a founder of the Bulwark news site, told Osnos that messaging remains an issue: “I know that this is a thing with Democrats—it’s like herding cats—but if Biden is not the strongest communicator, why aren’t there hundreds of surrogates for him? Having spent a long time on the Republican side, I am constantly flabbergasted by the inability of Democrats to prosecute a case against Republicans relentlessly, with a knife in their teeth.”
Ezra Klein’s fantasy of an open convention, Osnos reminds us, didn’t work out well in 1968. I wrote about the effects of being primaried over at Slate.
“He gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined.” Still, Axelrod summarizes what I keep coming back to: “Both these guys are old. The difference between them is one of them is actually working on the project of building a better future—not for himself, but for the country and for our kids and grandkids. And then you have on the other side a guy who’s not looking to the future but is consumed by his own past.”
I know these are the least important points, but I want to know more about them: Biden is “always a little taller than you expect.” He kept the television set Donald Trump installed in the Oval Office dining room. And this is personal for Biden, too. “Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him.”
“If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?” He was told that he’d lose in 2020. He was threatened with a red wave in 2022. In 2024, the polls say he’ll lose again. Biden is right on this point, but he’s relying on old information in a rapidly changing country.
Bill Maher has called Biden the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Presidency.” It’s a pithier way of saying this: “Is Biden staying so long in his job that he would be blamed for handing it to the opposition?”
“Bruce Reed, one of his closest aides, said, ‘We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.’”
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who recently moved from the White House to the campaign, “made a distinction between ‘favorability’ (a line of inquiry in opinion polls) and ‘vote choice’ (the outcome of recent elections, notably the recent ones in which Democrats did well). ‘Historically, favorability and vote choice have been correlated,’ she said. ‘I actually think that that’s no longer the case.’”
On Biden’s missteps in the Middle East: “In Biden’s view, the attack [on Israelis] was part of a challenge that defines his Presidency: the assault on free societies.” He narrows in on “echt Biden: asking for patience to continue private negotiations, criticizing Netanyahu’s government without renouncing him. It would satisfy almost nobody in the short term.”
Same: “But, in one of the more perceptive observations I’ve heard about Biden, his longtime aide Bruce Reed told me that he ‘proceeds as if things are on the level and tries to force them to be so.’”
Trump’s most enduring legacy: “One of the few points of certainty is a chilling one. Half the respondents to a CBS poll in January said they believed that the losing side of the coming election will resort to violence.”