An Inconvenient Blog

By Abigail

footnotes from Ashkan

I guess my begrudging endorsement three days ago didn’t mean much to Joe Biden. After four mediocre innings, he’s been pulled by the proverbial manager (84-year-old Nancy Pelosi, apparently?) after giving up one too many runs. And our bullpen, which should be crowded with exciting alternatives, has opened its gate to spit out relief in the form of Kamala, who, despite gay Twitter’s best efforts, is not the charismatic up-and-comer America seems desperate for. 

The Biden presidency post-mortem genre already feels tired a day after the news of his dropout aired and three months before the election, so I won’t spend too much time on it. In 2020 I thought he was the right person coming in at the right time. Someone who could calm Americans down after four years of grating political polarization and chaos. I liked Buttigieg way more and somehow found even Klobuchar to be more interesting, but Biden was undoubtedly a known quantity. We all liked him as the slightly goofy sidekick with a heart of gold during the Obama years, so why not let him have his own spin-off? 

My co-writer will probably accuse me of being soft on Biden here,¹ but I didn’t take too much issue with his tenure. I think he inherited a lot of bad things, like a pandemic, the return of land wars in Europe, and the biggest shitstorm you’ve ever seen in Afghanistan.² I thought maybe in 20 years he would be remembered sort of the way Jimmy Carter is, a good-hearted guy who bumbled into a series of wrong turns but never meant any harm. The last few months have changed my mind. Misplaced party loyalty got the best of me during the initial talks of cognitive decline and unfitness, but even I’ve had to acknowledge reality. It is deeply disturbing to have a man sitting in the Oval Office who sets the bar for performance so low that we congratulate him for occasionally speaking in complete sentences. 

But Biden is already old news. Last October, stuck on a long car ride,³ I remember reading not one, but two, scathing profiles of Harris published literally within a day of each other. They described a fundamentally capable and skilled woman totally at a loss in the office of vice president, shaken badly by a few blunders and unsure of what her agenda and public image should be. Granted, this was almost a year ago, but it doesn’t inspire confidence to read in The Atlantic that three years into her job she was personally removed from the day-to-day mechanics of working on her assigned issues⁴ and struggled to verbalize her goals for her own role. 

We all know Kamala’s bio by heart. If nothing else, she gets nearly every possible diversity point awarded by the Democratic establishment. But perhaps that institutionalized form of condescension that we use to openly admit to selecting people solely on the basis of their immutable characteristics rather than their merit has backfired here.⁵ Surprise! Biden waited too long, and picked wrong, and now Democrats can really only be sure of one thing: disappointment. I’m not saying we as voters should all throw the towel in, but in some ways it feels that Biden and the party have already done that for us. Instead of turning to the future, nostalgia for what was familiar but ultimately outdated has guided the Democratic agenda and now we are left with a figurehead who is more celebrated for her strange laugh than literally anything else about her. 

Ashkan’s Response

1. I will! ↩︎
2. Joe Biden’s two greatest foreign policy failures don’t quite strike me as an inheritance as Abigail frames it. There’s a good deal of evidence of direct causality — on Russia, Joe dispatched diplomat-extraordinaire Kamala “Kissinger” Harris to Moscow the day before the invasion to dissuade Putin. He invaded. He sniffed out a weak American regime and took full advantage. As did Hamas in Israel. There’s a reason that no new wars were started under Donald Trump’s presidency (in fact multilateral diplomacy flourished, see Abraham Accords); his strongman and erratic persona deterred any rogue power from trying their luck. Joe Biden was just known as the Sleepy Pines Retirement Community escapee who bungled an Afghanistan withdrawal so bad that the Taliban, in addition to impressively achieving Wikipedian sovereign recognition, also were gifted heavy American military equipment and a few of our dead servicemen — and no one was fired! I’m scared China will invade Taiwan, Zelensky will remain Putin, and the world will continue to burn with four more years of Biden-Harris. ↩︎
3. Chat, remind me to never go on another road trip with Abigail. ↩︎
4. I was personally underwhelmed by her border tsardom. ↩︎
5. Of course, Abigail again recycling lines from her recent The Ben Shapiro Show appearance. Is he really that short in person, by the way? ↩︎