Biden Day in the Committee Room

 When excerpts were released earlier this week from Kamala Harris's upcoming memoir—they added to a swelling chorus of criticism from Democratic pundits who blame the party's 2024 loss on Biden's supposed intransigence. The quotes we've seen so far from Harris's book maybe don't go quite as far as—say—the Jake Tapper book in laying all the blame on Biden; but they certainly align with the general emerging consensus that it was Biden's insistence on staying in the race so long that doomed the party. 

I continue to believe this take is entirely misguided. It relies on selective memory of the period to pretend that the Democrats had realistic alternatives at the time—merely because it's convenient for us in hindsight to find a scapegoat; and Biden will do as well as any, since his career is effectively over. And so the always-smug Pod Save America brigade—the insipid representatives of knee-jerk party orthodoxy—all join the pile-on. We have decided to sacrifice Biden because he is no longer of any use to us. 

There is no factual basis to blame Biden for the 2024 loss. First of all: there was no realistic challenger to him in late 2023 or early 2024 who could have won a primary. If the Democrats had held a primary at the time, it would have been dominated by an extremely divisive fight over Gaza that would have split the coalition. (Many people were spoiling for that fight; and maybe, in light of Israel's horrifying actions, it would have been worth having—but we can't pretend it would have helped us win the election.)

People knew even at the time that Biden was getting old. That was obvious. But there was no "cover-up" of this fact. But, Biden had won the previous election. Usually, an incumbent party will run a successful candidate a second time on the theory that, all else being equal, past experience is the best guide we have to the future.  

People were worried he might not have the energy for a second term, however—so they held an unprecedentedly early debate to put Biden to the test. He failed the test. The party asked him to step down. He hesitated for a few weeks, then he did step down. The party ran someone else. Biden was not on the ticket in 2024. Harris lost. On what possible theory was Biden responsible? He should have stepped down because he was too old to run again? Well, good thing he did. What more do we want? 

I've always thought Harris ran as good a race as she possibly could—given Trump's head-start. But still—she's the one who lost it. And it's pretty distasteful for her and the Pod Save America dudes, etc., to try to absolve themselves at Biden's expense—when he wasn't even the one on the ballot in November 2024. (To underline the point—he wasn't on the ballot because he listened to what party insiders like these said to him and did exactly what they asked him to do!)

Three times the Simon Peters of the world have denied Biden since the election. "It was a cover-up!" "He was too old!" Tapper; Pod Save; and now, Harris's memoir. (And often with an agenda to push—Tapper in interviews made clear his real beef was that Biden had been too liberal on immigration policy.*) But, I say—"in my heart I never will deny h[im]"—to borrow a phrase from Anna Akhmatova (Kunitz and Hayward trans.) 

I think back to Joyce's story "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"—about the backstabbing Irish politicians in Dublin who sold out Charles Stewart Parnell. At the end of the story, one man in the committee room shames all the others with a poem he wrote about the hypocrisy of those who made a scapegoat of Parnell, even after he had "raised them from the mire"—the "coward hounds" who sacrificed him to appease the prejudices of the Church—and thereby doomed the Irish Nationalist cause for at least a generation.

I think of Joyce's poem when I think of the Pod Save America bros. "Shame on the coward, caitiff hands / That smote their Lord or with a kiss / Betrayed him[.]" Three times they denied him before the rooster crowed. And they deny him still. They put the blame on him because he is old, while they still intend to spend decades more in politics. They retroactively put the onus on him—because otherwise someone might blame them for the loss—or the actual candidate the party ran in the last election!

The Irish politicians of the late nineteenth century made the same decision to betray Parnell—and how did that work out for them? Laying him on the altar did not save them—indeed, it set back the date of Irish freedom by perhaps decades. And whose freedom will be vouchsafed, I ask, by selling out Biden now? Is betraying him going to do one thing to help us defeat Trump? Of course not—but that's not the point. The point is to salvage the careers and the reputations of a few podcast hosts—those "coward hounds." 

To quote Burns: O would, or I had seen the day
That treason thus could sell us,
My auld gray head had lien in clay,
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!

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* "In fact, there had been a desire to beef up border security at the beginning of the Biden administration, and that faded away. Secretary Mayorkas and others never knew why it just went away"—Tapper told Ezra Klein in a May podcast interview to promote his book. This is an absurd distortion of history. The high numbers of people crossing the border during Biden's administration had nothing to do with the number of border agents. Most people crossing the border voluntarily turned themselves in. What was really going on is that Biden—for most of his presidency—respected U.S. asylum law and allowed people to request humanitarian protection, as the statute requires (until, to his disgrace, he stopped doing so in the administration's final months).