Having successfully ousted a sitting president from his re-election campaign, powerful Democrats and their media allies are ready to attempt their next feat of strength: propelling Vice President Kamala Harris to victory over former President Donald Trump.
The decisive question in this election may not be the choice between Trump and Harris, but the power that shapes the elite narrative and its limits.
One of the most absurd moves since the president was ousted is the claim that the media offensive against Biden demonstrates his political neutrality. But press coverage of Biden became relentlessly hostile after the June 27 debate made it impossible to deny his weaknesses and, more importantly, Democrats reached a consensus that he could not beat Trump.
Just days before that debate disaster, the New York Times backed the dismissal as “cheap fakes” of several video clips of Biden looking old and out of sorts, reporting that in addition to Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president was facing “the distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play on and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.”
On July 2, as Democrats were in the throes of post-debate panic, the New York Times The paper reported on the increased frequency of Biden’s “slips,” acknowledging that “by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observations and interviews, Biden is not the same today as he was when he took office three and a half years ago.” Some of the examples cited included the same events described as deceptively edited video content in the earlier report.
There were exceptions, of course. There was one hotly debated topic Wall Street Journal An article published in early June that was arguably too Republican-biased in its official sources, but served a valuable function in getting Democrats to speak publicly on the age issue as they questioned the information. Some of the same Democrats who opposed the article when it first appeared turned on Biden in the days and weeks following the debate.
In some cases, the tone of the coverage changed after the debate because Democratic sources were more willing to talk about Biden’s decline, editors became more comfortable publishing stories with blind quotes about Biden’s mistakes, and some of the quotes on record that once came only from Republicans now came from Democrats.
But even this suggests that Biden was enveloped in layers of protection that Democrats and traditional media institutions decided to peel back. Now that protective bubble is being installed around Harris.
The Democrats’ rush to crown Harris rather than hold an open, competitive convention is in many ways a rehash of the foregoing of a competitive primary process when the imperative was to push Biden across the finish line. Democracy, as its self-appointed defenders know, is chaotic. A chaotic convention, like a top-tier primary against Biden, could weaken the incumbent or near-incumbent without producing a better candidate. However, the lack of competition means that the front-runner’s flaws may not be litigated until it is too late.
All the people who pretended Biden was perfectly fine until the debate disproved that illusion are now praising Harris as a generational political talent on par with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. The number of people who actually believed in the latter on July 20 is not much greater than those who believed in the former on June 28.
However, the media and Democratic leaders are not invincible. If they were, Trump would never have become president and would not be a viable candidate eight years later. Biden was trailing Trump and Democrats were beginning to lose confidence in their campaign strategy months before the debate. One poll found that 94 percent of Democrats under 30 already wanted to replace Biden as their nominee. two years ago.
Harris is running basically the same campaign with the same people as Biden. She is trying to frame the race as a referendum on Trump rather than the Biden-Harris administration. The image of a woman who has been a prosecutor talking about abortion and Trump’s felonies is better for Democrats. It is also a telling retreat from the incumbents’ actual record. Harris’ first campaign ad contained no mention of Biden or anything she herself had done as vice president.
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That’s not to say Harris can’t feel relieved by what’s happened. The journalists who once covered her as a joke, known for her constant staff churning and frequent gaffes, will now be talking up her historic candidacy. For the first time in his political career, Trump has experienced weeks of more favorable coverage than his Democratic opponent (spare me the false equivalency of “but her emails”). That’s over and likely won’t come back, even if Harris turns out not to be the Democrats’ savior.
Democrats now have hope and energy where they didn’t have it before. The campaign no longer feels like a slow march toward certain defeat. Democratic operatives’ predictions of Biden’s electoral failure were about to come true. Harris at least is free of all that.
Another question is whether the same operatives and a compliant media can carry her to the White House in the face of a disciplined opposition determined to exploit all available material, assuming that is how Trump and the Republican Party actually behave.
