Love is the "Original Sin"
This is about more than Biden
Biden has a unique gift, a secret ingredient that not many in politics have. It’s like sunlight, it dazzles. It’s something that Donald Trump, and many political pundits, could only dream about.
That golden gift is - a soul.
Source - Goodreads review of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, liked 85 times
This book is a work of perfection, an inspired utterance that people all over the world need to read. My eyes have been enlightened and my heart is stirred into action but also convicted that I have not given President Trump the great honor and respect due to him based upon his pro-Christian accomplishments. I am shocked and amazed at his ongoing track record of Christian leadership. This book along with Trump’s Unfinished Business provides a scriptural template for the governments of sheep nations to follow.
Source - Amazon review of President Trump's Pro-Christian Accomplishments titled “Trump: God’s Chosen, Golden Vessel”, found helpful by 7 people
Love is blindness
I have to start this post with the admission: Maybe love isn’t the best word for it, and calling love a sin might be clickbait. But it’s the word used when people say, “I love New York”, and I’m sure there are far too many Americans who love their politicians as much as they love their cities.
The love that I fear is that of idol worship. It’s celebrity adulation. It’s unconditional, unconstrained glaze. It’s falling for a flagrant conman and liar.
And it’s also loving a good cause so blindly you inadvertently sabotage it. Loving a genuinely good man and becoming so loyal that you ignore the truth.
Yeah, this is the part where I talk about Biden—though not without reason! I know there are those who would say that we should only be talking about Donald Trump and his evils right now—
Stop asking about a Biden “cover-up.” It’s an irrelevant, contemptible distraction from what’s threatening America.
—but if Democrats want to beat Donald Trump and help America, Democrats need to be the best versions of themselves they can be1. The past four years showed room for improvement, and there are specific ways I want to see us improve (which I describe in the “Solutions” section below).
But first:
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
In many ways, Joseph Biden is a goddamn hero. He has always tried his best to rise to any occasion and never give up, serving his country and helping Americans, even as life gave him tragedy (the death of his wife and daughter) after tragedy (his brain aneurysm) after tragedy (the death of his son Beau) after tragedy (his son Hunter’s troubles with addiction) after tragedy (now, sadly, his prostate cancer).
Yet no man is perfect, no politician is without ego, and no amount of good intentions can fully guard against potential paths towards hell.
So, onto the book that everyone’s been talking about: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, a deep dive into the conspiracy to cover up the extent of Biden’s aging.
Note, however: This is not only a story about Biden having become too old to run for re-election and preventing Harris from being able to run a full campaign that would have beaten Trump, or preventing a better challenger from taking her place2.
It’s also a story who of a president who wasn’t fit to be president—and who was surprisingly unfit in ways eerily similar to those of our current president.
The last 4 years
Reading about Biden in Original Sign disturbingly reminded me of his political arch-enemy, Donald Trump himself. I know it seems like an absurd comparison to make: Who could be more different than these two men? Both of them egotistical politicians, yes, but one actually caring about his country and his people, the other only caring about himself. One driven to mild dementia by the inevitability of age; the other deeply and dementedly delusional for years (and also entering dementia), and for no other reason than a lack of character and judgement.
And yet:
How many of the following behaviors described in Original Sin fit Donald Trump to a tee?
Making unilateral decisions, refusing debate:
Staffers didn’t interrogate whether he could robustly campaign in 2024, whether he’d be prepared to resign if he began struggling during a second term, or whether he was confident that the vice president could take over in such a scenario.
Instead, Donilon made it clear that he had talked to Biden and the president was running. And that was that.
[...]
“We don’t need polling,” Dunn told him. “The decision has been made. He’s running.”
Pretending like bad news doesn’t exist:
They shielded him in every meeting,” Cabinet Secretary Number Three recalled. “They always wanted to keep him happy. They would say, ‘Don’t say that. Don’t tell him that.’ They always wanted to shield him from bad news.
Cultivating a culture of fear and gaslighting:
The day after the debate, leaders in the White House essentially acted like it hadn’t happened. They acknowledged to their subordinates that it had been a bad debate but said nothing more. But Biden’s aides felt like they were being gaslit by their own bosses. “Senior leadership has given us nothing. To act like it’s business as usual is delusional,” a White House official told [Alex Thompson] at the time.
People whom Alex had been reaching out to for years were suddenly talking. They were disillusioned and angry, but they feared speaking up. If anything, the debate had made Biden aides more watchful for signs of disloyalty.
“Speaking Biden” was a particular skill, and some people just set Biden off. A meeting could easily get derailed, and then aides would have to reconvene without the person who had triggered the president. They noted that they sometimes spent more time on strategizing how to present the decision to Biden than on the substance of the decision itself.
Having sycophants who will rationalize anything:
Pramila Jayapal had reached out to the president’s team to set up a Zoom call with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
[...]
Throughout the call, Biden was defensive and angry in a way that many members of the CPC had never seen before. He insisted that he was the real progressive in the room. He challenged Jayapal quite directly. He suggested that progressives on the call had not been sufficiently aggressive in their focus on how America’s wealthy were gaming the system.
“It was insane,” one CPC member later said.
Jayapal was texting Biden’s team during the meeting, and she let them know that it wasn’t going well; he was getting way too defensive. A staffer in the room with Biden got the message, wrote it out, and handed it to him. Biden read it aloud: “Stay positive. You are sounding defensive.”
Later, Biden supporters improbably claimed that he was just attempting levity.
Attacking the press:
The message from the White House was clear, this reporter believed: If [a reporter from a national news outlet] went forward with the story from anonymous aides, the White House would aggressively dispute it, on the record, and portray her as a liar. She chose not to publish.
Suspecting disloyalty from allies:
[Harris’s] aides got the impression that doing more than the bare minimum to help her was considered an act of disloyalty to Biden. Some of that culture carried over into the White House.
Avoiding responsibility:
It was the news media’s fault for not sufficiently covering Trump’s lies, it was the Progressive Caucus’s fault for not going after oligarchs enough, it was the New Dems’ fault for not talking up his achievements enough. It was everybody else’s fault.
…but so what?
This is a bad look, and sure Biden could have dropped out sooner, but maybe this is all just that: A bad look. We don’t really know if the election would have turned out differently with a real primary or an open convention with challengers to Harris. What does it really matter if Biden’s inner circle was overly protective of him?
Jake Tapper argues that communication is a key skill that the President must employ in order to persuade the public, and through them their representatives, of issues to better pass legislation. There is some evidence that Biden’s inability to communicate did indeed have real world consequences. For instance:
Republicans took advantage of the president’s limited communication abilities to slow-walk the vote on aid to Ukraine.
We can only guess what else may have been impacted by Biden’s diminishment. Would a younger, more vital president have so thoroughly botched the Afghanistan withdrawal? Or have failed to stand up against Netanyahu?
In summary:
Beware blind loyalty3, and beware those like Mary L. Trump who demand it:
Given what we’re up against and what’s at stake it’s pretty shocking how little it’s taken (90 freaking minutes) to make what seems like the entirety of the Democratic political world panic, calling on Biden to drop out, floating new tickets that don’t even include Vice President Harris and freaking out about a fight on the convention floor that is as likely to happen as Donald’s ever becoming presidential. Let them have their moment, I guess, but I’m going to follow President Biden’s advice and keep the faith.
Faith is not a tool to win elections. Pragmatism is.
But if blind loyalty is the problem… What can we do about it?
Solutions
Back when I was a child, and George W. Bush had been recently elected for the first time, I’d sometimes find myself in arguments with other students about whether Bush was a good president. This would sometimes transform into arguments about whether Bill Clinton had been a good president, and that would sometimes segue into discussions of his adultery. My argument would always be the same, a response I’d parroted from Leftists in the media: Clinton had been America’s president, not America’s husband. His personal life had no bearing on whether or not he was good at his job.
It took over two decades, and one Stormy Daniels, to make me rethink that position. Adultery does have something to say about character, and character does have relevance to the office of POTUS. It’s true that adultery isn’t the most important factor, not by far, and it’s silly to be impeached just for lying about it. But adultery is not a good look, and I had been taking the opposing argument too far.
This is the basis for the reversal test4: Say you’re outraged about a particular political scandal. Would you still feel the same way if the same scandal had happened to the other party? Would you feel the same way about your politician’s actions, were those actions performed by an opposing politician?
From this test, we can derive a general rule: When in charge, implement systems you’d want to have in place if it was your worst enemy in charge.
What follows are a few examples of such systems I think should be added, but please comment with ideas of your own!
Idea 1: Mandatory cognitive testing
Currently, no law requires that the POTUS receive yearly physicals, and there is no oversight to how physicals are conducted or reported. To ensure presidential fitness, physicals could be mandated, bi-annual, performed by doctors confirmed by a bipartisan body, and include a cognitive component. (Should a president be found to be unfit and the president unwilling to step down, Congress could then impeach or the 25th could be invoked.)
Idea 2: Age limits
The minimum age to be president of the United States is 35 years old. There is no maximum age, but perhaps there should be. I would propose a limit of 70 for POTUS and 76 for Congress—numbers that are, I admit, largely arbitrary. It feels wrong to me to enforce arbitrary limits like this (everyone ages differently!), but I also think the benefit will outweigh the cost.
Idea 3: Mandatory primary debates
There were two Democratic party presidential debates in 2024. Biden was not invited to the first and refused to participate in the second. If he had participated, the June 27th debacle may well have happened in January, which would have left ample time for a real primary race. During election years, the DNC could simply require that incumbent presidents participate in at least one debate.
Idea 4: Do town halls
Town halls, like debates, also give voters a chance to understand candidates better—but that’s not all. Televised town halls would create a channel of communication that could be used to discuss the state of the country and what’s being done to improve it. Most of Democrats’ legislative achievements under Biden were long-term investments in the country’s future, difficult to appreciate by voters in the short-term. A tradition of hosting regular town halls might have made the legislation better known and more popular (and perhaps even better: They would give voters now a chance to critique Trump’s many harebrained policies, his blindspots, or his corruption to his face).
Idea 5: Nation-wide simultaneous primary vote
This idea doesn’t quite fit the rest of this list, but it can be an answer to the hypothetical, “Imagine if your worst enemy was running in the Democratic primary against you… and he has an advantage in Iowa.” There’s no reason to make Iowa and New Hampshire so much more important than the rest of the country, no reason to make the voting in later states useless, and as Matthew Yglesias argues, no reason to give the media more power in deciding primary elections by letting them predict self-fulfilling prophecies or winnow the field to only two candidates based on early states. Better to have all states vote on the same day.
Final note
I meant to publish this post two weeks ago, which in today’s political climate feels like an eternity. Earlier drafts were bad, though, and my chemotherapy threw a wrench into the works. Thankfully, I’ve got only two more infusions left (barring any future recurrence, which is frighteningly a very real likelihood). Cancer sucks, and I wouldn’t wish it on scarcely anyone (not even for murder). I wish Joseph Biden the very best of luck in fighting his off, and I wish his family well5.
P.S. “Love is Blindness.” Great song.
If Democrats held any of the House, Senate, or Presidency, then sure, I could see there being more important things to discuss than Biden’s failures. But Democrats are entirely out of power, unable to lead or legislate. All we can do is debate and persuade. What better thing to debate than that which we actually control, the fate and future of our own party? What better time to self-reflect and improve?
Original Sin: “Harris lost the three key “Blue Wall” states by a total of roughly 230,000 votes. If she had beat the margins of 1.44 percent in Michigan, 1.73 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.87 percent in Wisconsin, she would be president today.
[...] If Biden had not run for reelection, or if he had acknowledged his decay and changed his mind about it in 2023, what would have happened?
If history is any guide, a competitive primary and caucus process would have produced a stronger Democratic nominee, one who had more experience with debates and taking questions from reporters, one with a more cogent and precise answer as to why they were running, one with time to introduce themselves to the American people. Past flip-flops on issues would have been addressed, policy proposals would have been fleshed out, winning messages would have been formed. The nominee would have figured out a way to respectfully but forcefully distance themselves from the unpopular incumbent president and forge a new path, representing change. Would that candidate have been able to do 1.5 percentage points better in Michigan, 1.8 points better in Pennsylvania, and 0.9 points better in Wisconsin?”
I’ve framed this post as being about the sin of unconditional love. However, there’s another motive here which can equally explain these behaviors: A desire to exercise and maintain control. Biden’s inner circle could only maintain power if Biden himself was re-elected, and that could have led to the same demands of blind loyalty.
Reading Original Sin, however, I get the sense that Biden’s advisors were true believers in the man, people who really did love him and believed he would be the best candidate to go against Trump again. I think the desire to maintain control, while relevant, was secondary.
For a different view, though, read this post from a former White House policy advisor. I disagree with her thesis but found her perspective interesting all the same.
Related: the ideological Turing test and the mirror test
Also I would like to note: I should not criticize Biden for breaking his promise to be a one-term president, because as I recently learned, he actually never made such a promise.