Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
For the most part, the chaos and extremism that have characterized the first few months of the second Trump administration have dampened Democrats’ interest in relitigating the 2024 campaign. Yes, there’s been a constant undertow of self-recrimination over how the Democratic Party could have possibly allowed Trump 2.0 to happen. But there’s also a foxhole camaraderie among Democrats focused on the daily struggle against Trump and preparations for fast-approaching off-year and midterm elections. The next presidential election in 2028 is far enough away that reexaminations of the party’s presidential coalition and how it can be rebuilt are less of a preoccupation for the time being.
But while the 2024 campaign is receding into the rearview mirror, the 2024 campaign book season is just getting underway. And so this week excerpts from the Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again hit Democrats like a dirty bomb. The accusatory tone of the headline fully reflects what we’ve seen so far, with a host of Democrats (mostly unnamed) angrily or at least ruefully suggesting the 46th president’s age and mental condition were principally responsible for giving the country its 47th president last November. Legendary campaign operative David Plouffe, who lended a hand to Kamala Harris’s eventual campaign, is about as blunt as you can get:
“[I]t’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. By deciding to run for reëlection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added, “He totally fucked us.” …
Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed hundred-and-seven-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”
It’s indeed a recurring nightmare for Democrats to find themselves back in the fraught debates of last June, when Joe Biden’s terrible performance in a presidential debate led to a party-wide freakout followed by the president’s unprecedented late-campaign withdrawal three weeks later. But the idea that Harris was doomed to defeat by Biden’s stubborn persistence in dismissing concerns about his fitness as a candidate and as a president is questionable, to say the least. If the veep’s campaign began and ended in a political death spiral foreordained by a late start, why did she so quickly soar in the polls, taking the lead over Trump in the Silver Bulletin averages at the beginning of August? Yes, the race tightened, Trump got the late breaks, and the polls slightly underestimated him. But at the time, no one thought of Harris as helpless or hopeless, which is why the ultimate outcome (a narrow, not large, Trump win, to be clear) came as a surprise to many Democrats.
In looking at how and why Harris lost, the “doomed” diagnosis denies her own agency. She made decisions on a running mate, a convention, and a message — all hotly disputed by anxious Democrats in and beyond the campaign — that helped determine her fate. Her decision, for example, to ignore the massive Trump ad campaign depicting her as eager to use taxpayer dollars to provide gender-reassignment surgery to illegal immigrants in prison had little or nothing to do with Joe Biden. And even problems associated with Biden, like her struggle to project a “change” message, had nothing to do with her boss’s age and mental “decline,” and everything to do with Biden policies, for which she shared responsibility, along with unpopular policy positions she embraced as a candidate in 2020 (the source of the free-gender-change-for-criminal-immigrants own-goal).
The claim that Biden’s personal weaknesses gave us Trump 2.0 obscures the much more credible case that it was Biden’s ineffectual policies that made his reelection or his vice-president’s election such an uphill slog. On the issues of immigration and inflation, there’s no question the Biden administration very simply failed. It came around far too late to the steps needed to stem an unprecedented surge in cross-border migrations, to the point where neither Biden nor Harris dared even mention the subject. And while there were many explanations of the scary spike in living costs that characterized the Biden years, his administration was indelibly identified with one suspected cause, runaway government spending, thanks to the eager drop-cash-from-helicopters mood that surrounded party-line passage of the American Rescue Plan and then the laughably mislabeled Inflation Reduction Act.
This Democratic spending spree was designed to lift the economy from its pandemic slump and address very real infrastructure and environmental needs. But it massively reinforced Republican claims that the Biden administration was a vast exercise in partisan government overreach, while enabling Trump, of all people, to pose as someone able to restore the alleged normalcy of the economy as it performed during his own administration.
Fair or not, by 2024 the electorate had pretty much made up its mind about the Biden-Harris policy agenda, which is why his presidential job-approval numbers began to sink into the high 30s. Many Democrats at the time privately conceded that any Republican opponent other than Trump might have trounced Joe Biden. And while his age and mental sharpness were one problem for him, even a younger and more vigorous Democrat with the same record and policies would have struggled, which is exactly what happened.
Now one argument made by Democrats in the Original Sin reporting is compelling if impossible to verify: If Biden had wisely decided against pursuing a second term at all — say, in 2023 — Democrats would have had the chance to select a nominee not as intimately associated with his record and policy positions as Kamala Harris inevitably was. But it’s also possible an open and extended nomination fight could have (a) weakened the ultimate winner, (b) driven candidates to take policy positions unhelpful in a general election (as happened in 2020), or (c) produced a Harris nomination and a status-quo ticket anyway. You can always say, as Plouffe did, that the short runway available to Harris in 2024 made her campaign a “nightmare.” But the reality is that a brief general-election race probably made Harris seem fresher and more interesting than a yearlong marathon might have, and the initially upward trajectory of her standing confirms that judgment.
Perhaps Original Sin when fully available will make the case that Biden’s “decline” had a tangible effect on his presidential decision-making, which in turn led to bad and unpopular policies. But if Democrats make the mistake of not looking carefully at the ineffectiveness and unpopularity of many policies on which they fully and even eagerly agreed with the 46th president, the political mistakes will likely recur. And that would be truly sinful.
