Whew!

I'm still amazed at how quickly this year's campaign timetable is moving. I've been saying for quite a while that even in years where Democrats lost the presidential election badly, McGovern in 1972, Dukakis in 1988, or Kerry in 2004, opinion pieces on how badly the Democrat campaigns were going didn't start to emerge until after the summer party conventions. Rush Limbaugh used to speculate that this was because the big-name reporters who had the inside info wanted to keep it secret until they published their own books as post-mortems after the election.

By the same token, the defining images of the failed campaigns, like John Kerry windsurfing in the photo above, didn't come out until fall; the Republican ad featuring him turning with the wind came out in September 2004, as did the September 1988 film of Dukakis riding an Abrams tank. The extended drama of Thomas Eagleton's electric shock treatments took place in late July 1972 following the Democrat convention; he eventually withdrew as McGovern's vice presidential running mate on August 1.

As of the middle of March in this election year, though, we're already getting doom-and-gloom insider stories and op-eds. Just this morning:

In a private meeting at the White House in January, allies of the president had just told him that his poll numbers in Michigan and Georgia had dropped over his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Both are battleground states he narrowly won four years ago, and he can’t afford any backsliding if he is to once again defeat Donald Trump. He began to shout and swear, a lawmaker familiar with the meeting said.

. . . For months, Democrats have watched the 2024 campaign unfold with rising alarm as the sitting president struggles to gain ground against his defeated predecessor. Frustrations rippling through the party have reached the top, with Biden at times second-guessing travel decisions and communications strategies that have left much of the electorate clueless about his record, interviews with nearly 20 lawmakers, present and past administration officials and Biden allies show.

As of yesterday,

There have been various solutions proposed to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Joe Biden looks like a loser heading into the 2024 election. One idea proposed by NY Times columnist Ezra Klein was for Joe Biden to stand aside and let the Democratic Party choose a successor at an open convention.

. . . In the same piece in which he proposed the open convention, Klein also addressed the other problem with his plan: Kamala Harris.

. . . Which brings us to another proposal to save Biden's chances that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday. Columnist Kathleen Parker argues that Biden's chances would improve if Harris would simply agree to step aside.

. . . This isn't the first time a columnist has made this suggestion. David Ignatius suggested it as a back up plan to Biden himself stepping down last September.

As of today, Real Clear Politics is running a poll-average November electoral map that shows Trump beating Biden 219-215 with 104 tossups.

Yesterday, the Trump campaign released a second ad purporting to be for Visiting Angels, showing Joe being shepherded into a Michigan campaign stop as though he were in need of assisted living. This was based on a clip that's been out since his Michigan visit on Thursday:

What do you do when Biden is so confused? Not only do they have to guide him around, but they have to choreograph his every move including with his "cheat sheets." He needed the notes for even reading the simplest of remarks with the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

. . . The cheat sheets not only had his remarks to make, but they also had things like Varadkar's name, his official Irish title (phonetically spelled so Biden would know how to pronounce it correctly), and they even had a picture of him so Biden could identify who he was.

The sheets also had similar descriptions and pictures of other participants in the meeting, including the Irish ambassador to the U.S. and how to pronounce their names.

That's wild that he needs such a detailed description of the Irish leader, given he's met with Varadkar multiple times in the past, including last year around St. Patrick's Day. He needs pictures to be able to identify who he is? What does that say about Biden at this point? . . . The level of scripting is intense and concerning.

Since the State of the Union, it looks like Joe's handlers had been trying to implement a modified version of Nate Silver's prescription, impromptu public appearances combined with longer press interviews, but it looks as though the hyper-scripted campaign events are starting to backfire if Trump can turn them into devastating campaign ads. Clearly a basement campaign isn't going to work this year -- the risk is there will be Kate Middleton style rumors that he's missing in action.

But proof-of-life appearances aren't going to work if they backfire this badly. And this is only March. I simply haven't lived through a presidential campaign year where things have looked this bad for one side so early, and even his own side is acknowledging it.