You know the party is in shambles when people are even drawing a scenario to have Michelle Obama running.
What were the Dems thinking?
And you would think that after the RBG catastrophe, after the Feinstein catastrophe, after having YEARS to respond to Biden's demonstable shortcomings, they would be hypersensitized to this issue and willing to confront it. But I think I understand why they're not.
You have to understand, most people who rise to that level of power are more arrogant and more selfish than you could ever imagine. They don't just want their party to win, they want to win on their terms in their way, and are incapable of seriously processing information that goes against the narrative they've developed. They built a series of assumptions that are preventing them from taking any other step than the path they're on.
1. "Hillary is our candidate, she agrees with our core neoliberal assumptions and she's part of our power circle, we're going to push her through regardless of how unpopular she is with the American public and we're going to discourage any other serious candidate from running against her."
2. "Biden is our candidate, he agrees with our core neoliberal assumptions and he's part of our power circle, we're going to push him through regardless of how poorly he's been performing on his own accord."
3. "Bernie is too progressive and he's not part of our inner circle, he pushes for anti-neoliberal economic changes that will hurt our pockets and the pockets of our Wall Street donor base, we can't let him win regardless of how popular he is or how much the public is behind his ideas."
Those were the foundational assumptions. But they aren't the only assumptions, because once the human mind has made a decision, it starts altering its other evaluations and values to align with that decision. "We want Biden to win because he has our values" becomes "Biden is the only one who can beat Trump!" There was never any objective evidence or even really good logic for that second claim - Biden had always been a poor campaigner, a poor debater, had lost to Bernie in every primary and trailed Bernie in every approval poll and head-to-head with Trump. But the evidence was irrelevant. Once they had decided "We want Biden because he has our values", they then had to build the rest of their narrative around that claim. They couldn't admit to themselves that they were hurting themselves with voters, with young people and progressives and independents, that they were hurting their chances to win in November. Once they decided that they liked Biden more, they had to trick themselves into believing that Biden was the objectively superior candidate in every other way too.
The exact same thing they had done for Hillary four years earlier.
When you start playing those mental games, you can't pull out of them easily. Once the narrative of "But Biden is the only one who can beat Trump" was set, they were committed to it. So even after Bernie was out of the picture, they still were unwilling to say, "Okay, Biden might have barely snuck through in 2020, but his popularity had gone through the floor, he's completely associated in the public's mind with inflation, Israel, and mental confusion, he's in his 80s now and declining every day, maybe we need to get someone else?" In order to maintain the illusion, they had to keep saying, "Biden's the only one who can beat Trump! Biden's the only one who can beat Trump!" And by the time they started realizing what a deep hole they were in, it began to look too late.
Of course, that's not the only lie they've been telling themselves, they have to lie and pretend that every other strategic move was the right one too. And they also have to lie and pretend things are going much better than they really are. You can see it yourself in this thread.
I've been saying for years that they need to find a different candidate than Biden for 2024. It should have been OBVIOUS that he was a one-term president at best, that being president from 82-86 in the state that he's in was never viable, and that the public simply doesn't like him and he can't campaign for shyt. But they weren't going to listen to that, because they have their narratives.
I pray it's not too late. If Trump wins in 2024, with the 2025 Project and all his disdain of democracy, with the chance to further solidify a conservative supermajority for decades, it really could be the end of American democracy as we know it and many other global hopes as well. I'm still going to fight for whoever the Democratic nominee is, and there is every chance that between now and November, something will happen to further sink Trump.
But we should NEVER have been in the position where a widely hated 79-year-old felon who spouts idiocy was the frontrunner. The degree of incompetence it has taken to be in this bad of a position yet again against such a bad candidate is really unfathomable.
i really hope that isn't true. i was also under the impression that biden wasn't running
if they lose, he's still governor, having gotten some national exposure to set up his 2028 run
