Friday was a story about the DC class that chats versus the DC class that matters. The experts failed the president Joe Biden en masse, while elected officials remained silent or stood by him.
In 2017, as Biden was plotting his first campaign against then-President Donald Trump, he began looking for an elite outlet to publish a piece about his response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The article – “We are living in a battle for the soul of this nation” – found a place in The Atlantic.
Biden is known as a regular cable TV viewer and is particularly fond of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He watches “all morning” when he can, according to a person familiar with his habits, and when he can’t, assistants monitor the show and sometimes brief him on what was said. The admiration is mutual. In March, co-host Joe Scarborough stated: “I think he’s better than ever – intellectually, analytically.”
When it comes to his media diet, Evan Osnos, author of a Biden biography, once noted that Biden loves “what we would call the classics” — including the New York Times, where Biden “pays a lot of attention to the columnists.” Biden spent hours briefing Tom Friedman on the Afghanistan withdrawal, and Friedman and other Times columnists were regular guests at off-the-record sessions with the president.
In the Obama era, while the First Family kept much of the Washington press at bay, Joe and Jill Biden hosted an annual summer party on the lawn of the vice president’s mansion, where he would compete with reporters and their children in water pistol fights.
But yesterday, after his disastrous debate on Thursday evening, it was the same TV hosts, columnists and media bodies who abandoned Biden one by one.
After dispelling his debate performance, Scarborough said this is now “the last chance for Democrats to decide whether this man we’ve known and loved for a long time is up to the task” of running for re-election. (Notably, his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski did not join him.)
Six articles appeared in the Atlantic calling on Biden to step aside. Tom Nichols wrote, “Biden had one job – don’t look old and confused – and he failed,” and “it’s time to think about the unthinkable.” Ron Brownstein said: “The prospect of the party simply marching forward with Biden as if nothing happened last night seems difficult to imagine.” The headline of a piece by Franklin Foer, author of a favorable best-selling account of Biden’s first two years as president, was: “Someone needs to take the keys away from Biden.”
The New York Times dripped a new column or editorial from morning to night on Friday crucifying Biden for his performance in the debate and calling on Democrats to swap him for a new nominee. Actually, Nicholas Kristof kicked things off just minutes after the debate ended. “I hope he returns to his debate performance on Thursday night and withdraws from the race,” he wrote.
In the morning, Paul Krugman, one of Biden’s staunchest defenders, jumped on the bandwagon. Krugman’s headline – “The best president of my adult life must retire” – matched the tone of all these pieces: praise for his service, followed by an urgent demand that he abandon the race.
Several people I spoke to about Biden’s relationship with the press said it was undoubtedly Friedman’s betrayal that would sting the most. His piece set a new standard for presenting his decision as made more in grief than anger. Friedman wrote that he sat in a hotel room in Lisbon watching the debate and that he actually cried. He then wrote a column telling his old friend that he should “drop out of the race.”
By noon everything had been said, but not everyone at the Times had said it. The final blow came on Friday evening, when the entire editorial board spoke out about it. The council said Biden had been “an admirable president” but that he was “taking a reckless gamble” and “the greatest public service Mr. Biden can perform now is to announce that he will no longer run for office.” On social media, Biden’s aides derided the piece.
“The last time Joe Biden lost the endorsement of the New York Times editorial board, it worked out pretty well for him,” Cedric Richmond, one of Biden’s campaign co-chairs, said in a statement.
Biden’s relationship with the elite media has always been a key to understanding him. One thesis of Foer’s book, for example, is that Biden both craves the admiration of DC’s opinion elites and has long used their frequent dismissal of him as fuel for his political rise. (In this way, he’s not so different from Trump.)
After all, it was Maureen Dowd of the New York Times who crippled Biden’s first presidential campaign with her reporting on his plagiarism. Despite that bumpy history, Biden has never given up on the Times — including Dowd, who has known and psychoanalyzed her Irish compatriot for decades — even though the paper’s columnists have all now given up on him.
Dowd delivered her heartbreak Saturday morning, and as usual it was the most devastating of all: “He is selfish. He puts himself first over the country. He is surrounded by opportunistic enablers. He has created a reality distortion field where we are told not to believe.” which we have clearly seen, is infuriating. He says he is doing this for us, but he is really doing it for himself.
Unlike Ivy Leaguers Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the liberal media establishment — increasingly a product of America’s top schools as Biden has aged — has never been entirely won over by Biden. He was written off in the 2020 primaries, and the Biden team wasn’t happy about it. Any media embrace of Biden since Trump’s post-Jan. 6 political resurgence has been conditional.
“Mr. Biden has said that he is the candidate with the best chance to confront and defeat this threat of tyranny,” the Times editorial board wrote Friday. “His argument is based largely on the fact that he defeated Mr. Trump in 2020. That is no longer a sufficient reason why Mr. Biden should be the Democratic nominee this year.”
There are other longtime skeptics who were ready to turn on Biden if he showed signs of being unequal to the task. The four former Obama administration officials who host the influential podcast “Pod Save America” joined the effort early Friday morning, with an episode in which hosts Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett called on Democrats to have an open debate about the merits of an open convention. Their former colleagues David Axelrod and David Plouffe, who personally vetted Biden for Obama in 2008, joined the chorus hours later. “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, who was lambasted by liberals in February for ridiculing Biden’s age, was praised by some of the same critics yesterday for his sharp post-debate commentary.
Biden isn’t known for being a big Substack reader, but if he were, he’d see some of his former top defenders making similar points: Joe Klein (“He should resign ASAP”), Andrew Sullivan (“For God’s Sake, Withdraw”), Nate Silver (“Joe Biden should retire”). And so it goes with other media personalities and outlets he respects most: David Ignatius, The Economist, the Washington Post editorial board.
The Biden campaign, like the candidate himself, has been built on the idea of earning media validation — if you can — while always being prepared for betrayal. By far the most common response to criticism from Biden staffers is that they’ve been underestimated before.
And yet one of the most frequent conversations we’ve had with more self-reflective Biden officials this year has been about whether their history of outsmarting the experts has made them dangerously unwilling to consider any criticism.
History shows that Biden aides will privately brood over the media mess, while publicly rolling their eyes about how it doesn’t matter. And it shouldn’t.
What is surely more telling is that Biden won the endorsements of Clinton and Obama on Friday, that he delivered a well-received speech, that polls showed only minor movement in the race, and that no elected Democratic official has called for Biden to withdraw from the race.
Brzezinski said Saturday morning that she understands why. She is an early riser and was up later than usual because she was dealing with the fallout from yesterday’s show last night.
“I stayed up late listening to everyone panicking on the phone and calling Joe. And I literally just shook my head and said, ‘These people need to get diapers,'” she said. “It was a bad night. And it’s not the end of the world. Joe Biden has come back from much worse. The pattern of his life is that he comes back from the worst. I mean, if you all think he should drop out, then you haven’t listened and you haven’t looked at this life.”
“I’m not running away,” she added. “Of all his media allies and friends, I’m not even close. Not even close.”
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