Over the course of Congress’s first week back from the July 4 break, the party’s manic-depressive convulsion has been tough to witness.
At first blush, it doesn’t seem like the Democratic Party’s strategy of allowing all its individual federal officeholders to weigh in on a semi-hourly basis with their disparate thoughts on the viability of Joe Biden’s candidacy is especially smart.
Over the course of Congress’s first week back from the July 4 break, the party’s manic-depressive convulsion has been tough to witness. On Monday morning, its members awoke with the expectation that a cascade of elected officials would come out against Biden, but the anticipated flood failed to materialize. Within 24 hours, it seemed like the revolt against the former president was over. But by the evening, three vulnerable Democratic senators reportedly said Biden had no hope in November. Senator Michael Bennet soon confirmed as much in a prime-time appearance on CNN. On Wednesday morning, the revolt was back on — or, at least, definitively not over — with former speaker Nancy Pelosi’s deliberate refusal to take the president’s repeated unequivocal claims that he was staying in the race at face value.
Keeping the Biden death-watch news cycle alive with new and conflicting Democratic opinions on the matter at regular intervals is an act of self-harm. The party is bleeding itself out before our very eyes, perhaps operating under the assumption that the president will somehow notice and save its members from themselves. It’s enough to drive average Democrats to utter disconsolation, and that’s what’s happened.
You don’t have to be a seasoned political observer to have witnessed at least one Democratic morale collapse. “Panic mode” is the party’s standard operating procedure. But the level of despair to which Democratic rank-and-file voters and party operatives alike is all but unprecedented.
Democrats emerged from a House caucus meeting on Tuesday in an elegiac mood. It “felt like a funeral,” one attendee told reporters. “That’s an insult to funerals,” retorted another. A separate meeting of “swing-district Democrats” featured “actual tears” from attendees, though they were “not for Biden.”
“The fear among everyone I’m talking to is that Biden’s intransigence will drag down close races in the House and Senate and imperil democracy itself,” said Democratic donor Gideon Stein to Financial Times reporters. Others in the donor class described Biden as a “mad king” playing “Russian roulette with the world at stake.” The Biden camp’s deep pockets have every reason for melancholy. At least one unnamed “senior staffer” on Biden’s campaign has been telling friends that “they believed the endeavor was now doomed.”
One staggering vignette from the New York Times features Democrats wishing the worst for Biden if only to shake up the presently stagnant dynamic. “Longtime party loyalists,” the Times reported, “said they were now reduced to hoping for another major public misstep” from Biden — some unambiguously mortifying event akin to the first presidential debate – just to shake the party out of its complacency.
It’s hard to describe the level of motivated reasoning to which you’re committed when you convince yourself that, if your party’s incumbent president suffers another public humiliation, it can only help. One thing you can say about this attempt at psychological anchoring is that it wouldn’t be necessary if the party set its own members adrift.
Right now, Democrats are bewildered and depressed. But sadness will evolve into anger – hostility toward the person whose stubbornness has imposed on them their present emotional distress. And maybe that is the outcome Democrats who have committed themselves to this prolonged public bloodletting want. Maybe if Biden can’t be seduced to abandon his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, perhaps he can be emotionally blackmailed out of the race given the anguish he’s inflicted on his supporters. After all, the man’s bottomless capacity for empathy is his superpower. Or was that a lie, too?