Biden Becomes Litmus Test for 2028 Contenders

[EarlG]

36. I think it was a series of cascading failures

As soon as Biden announced he was seeking re-election -- and to be fair, he probably felt good at the time, he was the incumbent president, and he'd already beaten Trump once -- the wheels were set in motion and there was no turning back.

Being in the moment-to-moment of the campaign, Biden's team didn't reach a point where they felt that what they were seeing crossed a line serious enough to abruptly abandon their efforts, until it was practically done for them. The slow but increasing drip of criticism created the "frog in a pot of water with the heat being slowly turned up" scenario, in which the frog doesn't jump out of the pot until it's too late. During that entire process, Democratic politicians were being forced to take sides.

I'm sure most of the people who publicly called for Biden to step down during the campaign genuinely believed that he wasn't up to it. But the unprecedented, hyper-political nature of the thing, during a hyper-political point on the calendar, allowed the media to revel in the "Dems in disarray" narrative -- which, to be fair, we were! -- and forced all of our prominent politicians and media figures to have to label themselves as either a team player or a ship-jumper. That was a choice that absolutely nobody wanted to have to make.

So I don't think there was any single cause other than simply Biden's decision to run again -- which I'm sure he felt was the right decision at the time -- that then turned into the pretty much unstoppable chain of events we saw play out.

But ultimately, my original point was who cares? Obviously I do, because I just wrote a bunch of paragraphs about it. But I don't want to care. It's old news -- I don't think there's anything much to learn from it. It's not like it was a set of circumstances that will be repeated any time soon.