[WSJ] Democrats Misled Their Own Voters

link should work for everyone

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democr...lfhyvpysiwf&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Democrats Misled Their Own Voters
Pretending Biden was fine was a far greater danger to the country than feigning admiration for Trump.
By Barton Swaim
July 21, 2024 at 5:36 pm ET

The Democratic Party owes Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota a groveling apology. Virtually alone among elected Democrats, he was willing in this year’s primary contest to speak the truth about President Biden’s mental and physical condition. Mr. Phillips did so firmly but politely in a failed bid for the presidential nomination. Yet even after he won 20% of the vote in New Hampshire, the party’s political class continued to ignore him and pretend all was well with Mr. Biden.

Shortly before Mr. Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday, Mr. Phillips repeated a comparison I heard him make in gymnasiums, bars and homes across New Hampshire in January: “Suppressing the truth is a dangerous game,” he writes for the Journal. “When I arrived in Congress in 2019, I was struck by its culture of silence and troubled by Republican colleagues who publicly sang the praises of then-President Trump yet excoriated him in private. It reflected a misplaced loyalty—one directed toward a person and party rather than principle and patriotism.” Democrats did the same until Mr. Biden’s debate performance forced them to acknowledge reality.

Mr. Phillips has every right to censure his Republican colleagues, too. These days the word “hypocrisy” is often misused to mean inconsistency, but their conduct can fairly be called hypocritical: They spoke one way in public, another in private. Still, hypocrisy—I’ll put it delicately—isn’t an uncommon vice in politics. There must be very few politicians who haven’t said one thing to constituents and its opposite among colleagues.

But Mr. Phillips’s parallel criticism is amiss in one regard: Republicans weren’t “suppressing the truth” about Mr. Trump. Everyone could see what the 45th president was like. Mr. Phillips thinks they should have voiced their disapproval of his bluster and crude behavior, and maybe they should have. But to do so would have been to revile the man Republican voters made it clear they wanted as the leader of their party.

That would have caused a lot of Republicans to lose elections—a consequence Mr. Phillips and his fellow Democrats might have relished, but not one they could reasonably expect Republicans to seek. It’s a bit rich to express surprise and outrage that politicians won’t tell the majority of their most active supporters that they are wrong and stupid.

What Mr. Phillips’s Democratic colleagues have done is far worse. They did help suppress the truth. Many Democratic voters, particularly low-information ones who never consult conservative media, had little idea how bad Mr. Biden was. Elected Democrats, with the eager compliance of their allies in the media, dismissed any expression of concern about the president’s acuity. They weren’t bowing to the will of the party’s voters and complaining about it in private; they were keeping the truth from those voters while speaking it plainly to their political-class coequals.

The Democratic base was never as loyal to Mr. Biden as the Republican base is to Mr. Trump, and it wouldn’t have required superhuman courage for a few elected Democrats, say, in fall 2023, to suggest aloud that perhaps the president should settle for a single term. The most ambitious of them might have put forward their names as presidential candidates. Only one did—Mr. Phillips. He’s right. Suppressing the truth is a dangerous game.

Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer at the Journal.




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not much interest in this topic either

 

the Journal dates the "coverup," if that's what you want to call it, to October 2021. That was the date of the last and final meeting Biden had with the House Democratic caucus, as described in the other thread which details the WSJ's extensive news reporting on the subject:

President Biden had just finished trying to persuade a group of congressional Democrats to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill when Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, took the microphone.

In 30 minutes of remarks on Capitol Hill, Biden had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers, according to Democrats in the room. After he left, a visibly frustrated Pelosi told the group she would articulate what Biden had been trying to say, one lawmaker said.

“It was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen,” recalled Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.), who would go on to mount an unsuccessful primary challenge against the president.

That was October 2021. That month was the last time Biden met with the House Democratic caucus on the Hill regarding legislation.
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more at the other thread: https://bbs.clutchfans.net/threads/...en-turned-into-an-epic-miscalculation.323785/

 

the ENTIRE article points to "Biden's state." read it. the other thread: https://bbs.clutchfans.net/threads/...en-turned-into-an-epic-miscalculation.323785/

 

lol. Just ask DD . . . he's apparently a board-certified internet M.D. specializing in neurological disorders.

 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-politics-of-crisis

Fred Bauer
The Politics of Crisis
Joe Biden’s presidency was undone by the same forces it unleashed.
Jul 22 2024

More than a pivotal moment in American presidential politics, Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not run for reelection also represents a strategic rout for the anti-populist alliance. This coalition risks being torn apart by its own contradictions.

Biden entered office with a significant political opportunity. The coronavirus vaccine was rolling out, the American public was repulsed by January 6,and Biden himself had a robust approval rating. In part because of his decades of experience on the national stage, Biden had a stronger appeal (at least compared with many of his 2020 primary competitors) to the working-class voters who were once a Democratic redoubt. Had the new president pivoted to the center on cultural issues and pursued blue-collar economics, he might have effected a center-left populist realignment.

True, Biden took some steps in this direction. He signed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, which included provisions to facilitate domestic semiconductor manufacturing, and signed a massive infrastructure package. At the executive level, the federal agencies he oversaw took a more aggressive approach to antitrust and worker protections, such as the Federal Trade Commission’s recent ban on noncompete agreements. These policies, whatever their merits, could have contributed to a broader progressive-populist pivot.

But Biden undercut this potential realignment by elevating the cultural-left vanguard. His administration pursued a “whole-of-government equity agenda” and heightened the salience of race and ethnicity at every turn. Seeking to appeal to progressive activists, the Department of Homeland Security eviscerated immigration enforcement, leading to an unprecedented migration crisis at the border. Unauthorized migrationdeclined after the administration announced asylum restrictions when the border is overwhelmed, demonstrating clearly that border crossings, despite progressives’ protestations to the contrary, are responsive to executive action. Federal energy policies, including Environmental Protection Agency regulations that discourage the manufacturing of gas-powered automobiles, further undermined Biden’s working-class appeal.

By embracing the cultural politics of the Democratic Party’s new base—upper-income, college-degree holders—Biden’s administration slighted the values of working-class Americans. This also had implications for his governing style. As policy analyst Tanner Greer recently observed, Democratic leaders are often constrained by the demands of various constituent groups, which act as coalitional stakeholders. Biden’s presidency, perhaps partly because of his advanced age, represented the apotheosis of that approach. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal presented a picture of the president as removed from close interaction with congressional Democrats and even Cabinet officials. According to CNN, Biden has not met with the full Cabinet since October of last year, and what Cabinet meetings he does attend are basically pre-scripted affairs.

The Biden administration’s dissipation into these competing coalitions raised major institutional questions. In Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton asserted that the executive branch must have unity as well as energy. Historically, presidents have been able to rally popular support through public spectacles, especially with the advent of mass communications. Instead, Biden’s has at times seemed like a ghost-ship presidency.

This perception has only deepened in the past 24 hours. Biden’s withdrawal is one of the most important developments in recent American political history—yet he still has not appeared to discuss it. Instead, a hastily written statement was released on his official X account (which he almost certainly did not post himself), followed shortly afterward by an endorsement of Kamala Harris. When King Lear divided his kingdom, he at least did it in person.

The president’s withdrawal represents an inflection point for the politics of crisis that once propelled him and has now dispatched his reelection bid. Perhaps one of Biden’s most important constituencies were the diehard foes of Donald Trump and populism more generally. They helped unite the Democratic Party behind him and disparaged any criticisms of his age. These forces demanded escalating political warfare against Trump, and Biden’s administration delivered it. The president regularly denounced Trump and “MAGA Republicans” as a threat to democracy. Biden, the New York Timesreported, thought Trump should be criminally investigated; his attorney general invested a special counsel with sweeping powers to prosecute the former president.

Yet this complicated dance ultimately proved Biden’s undoing. Perhaps seeing him as a necessary foil, Biden continually elevated Trump as the leader of the Republican Party. Arguably, this gamble worked in 2022 by dragging down Trump-branded Republican candidates in swing states. But it also helped Trump tighten his (already strong) grasp on the Republican Party. The indictments of Trump thrilled the anti-Trump “resistance” and caused GOP primary voters to unite around the former president.

The Democratic elite seems to be consolidating around Kamala Harris as Biden’s successor for the nomination. If she reinforces Biden’s immigration or cultural politics, she may find herself facing some of the same political headwinds as the current president. She may also have to answer for the various contradictions that Democrats have embraced over the past four years. In 2020, Joe Biden went from being a de facto segregationist to the only hope for “our democracy.” This year, the incumbent president went from being “sharp as a tack” to being too infirm to seek reelection. As the incumbent vice president, Harris will also likely be pressed on her knowledge of—and reticence about—Biden’s mental and physical decline.

Academic theorists have pathologized populist voters, but a major driver for contemporary populism is the sense of a loss of accountability—the fear that those with power do not use it responsibly. The deepening political conflict over the past few years and anxieties about Biden’s cognition have only heightened those concerns. Funding the trillion-dollar deficits of the Biden years required borrowing against the nation’s fiscal credit; the politics of crisis in effect borrow against the nation’s civic credit. By calling tens of millions of Americans a “threat to this country” in his 2022 speech in Philadelphia, Biden added his voice to the winds of political conflict. The politics of crisis have battered the country and now broken his presidency.

Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.
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