February 2023. This is the moment they decided to ignore popular will and hold a coronation of a damaged and declining candidate. They depended on Trump being worse to manufacture consent for a historically unpopular candidate.
I keep thinking through all the arguments to keep Biden on the ticket and they all seem to concede that he shouldn't have run in the first place, which means I was right when I accused Dems and the White House of having zero strategy other than saying "it's still early" until it was too late.
So basically a diffuse group of actors, some of whom are relatively powerless (the DNC, liberal activists), some of whom (“the media”) focused relentlessly on Biden’s age, “manufactured consent” how, exactly?
I mean, really, the blame just kind of falls on Biden and his inner circle. He wanted to run, they didn't discourage him from running, and every other choice is just downstream of that.
I also think there's an issue where even people in the know probably felt mostly fine with Biden's vigor in 2022 and 2023 and that the debate represented an actual shift in his abilities. Maybe conflict in the Middle East has worn him out. Maybe the campaign is getting to him. But rapid declines 1/
