The CNN Interview

I keep returning to Nate Silver's Feburary advice to the White House, in which he warns

[H]e's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong[.]

I'm starting to think that Silver, like Alan Dershowitz, is a highly intelligent traditional Democrat who's sincerely trying to think his position through, and it's a fascinating process to watch. Let's revisit his February position on Biden interviews:

Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre.

Again, he recommended that Biden turn things around:

Over the course of the next several weeks [i.e, in March}, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

. . . This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this.

So he's implying that these interviews, to turn Joe's prospects around, should be roughly an hour long, and there should be maybe four of them. Well, even though the timing was urgent in February, Joe and his handlers haven't done what Silver thought would be needed. Finally on Wednesday, months behind schedule, Joe gave an interview -- but news of it didn't break until Thursday morning, when Stormy Daniels's resumed cross-examination dominated the breathless headlines. It might as well not have happened -- but by Thursday evening, the New York Post editorialized,

The White House rarely allows President Biden to sit down for interviews, and Wednesday’s chat with CNN’s Erin Burnett shows why.

In a brief 17 minutes, Biden told 15 lies — nearly a lie a minute.

From whoppers about the economy to prevarications on Israel, Biden spun a fantasyland of a presidency that voters know is false.

Once people tore themselves away from Stormy Daniels, which did little but keep the ongoing focus on Trump, giving him yet another day of free media, they learned of Joe's claims that inflation was 9% under Trump or that people are reading the wrong polls.

The president, comparing his policies with those of former President Trump, rejected polls that show that voters trust Trump on the economy more than they trust Biden.

During an interview with CNN, the president was hard pressed to construct an accessible story about how his economic policies are affecting real Americans.

“We’ve already turned it around,” Biden said from Wisconsin. “The polling data has been wrong all along.”

David Axelrod seems to be another Democrat who's trying to recalibrate.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” CNN Senior Political Commentator and former Obama Adviser David Axelrod. . . . stated, “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand, all these months later, he went — I thought they spent $25 million, mistakenly, last fall, touting Bidenomics and making the same argument that the President’s making here. It is absolutely true, the world was plunged into an economic crisis and America was plunged into an economic crisis by the pandemic, and we’ve come back faster than almost any other country. . . but that’s not the way people are experiencing the economy. They’re experiencing it through the lens of the cost of living. . . . I think he’s making a terrible mistake. It may not be — if he doesn’t win this race, it may not be Donald Trump that beats him, it may be his own pride.”

It's fascinating that Axelrod, whom Wikipedia says was raised in a liberal Jewish family, should attribute Biden's failings to "pride", which is more often addressed as a sin in a Roman Catholic context. According to Britannica,

Pride, in Roman Catholic theology, one of the seven deadly sins, considered by some to be the gravest of all sins. In the theological sense, pride is defined as an excessive love of one’s own excellence. As a deadly sin, pride is believed to generate other sins and further immoral behaviour and is countered by the heavenly virtue of humility.

But Axelrod's assessment is insightful. It reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities". It's hard to avoid thinking something like this is a basic mover in Biden's character, and I think it's a pretty good explanation for why so much has been going wrong on his watch.

The interview strongly suggests that he's in a bubble, the polls are wrong, he's already turned the economy around, corporations are gouging, and Israel is targeting civilians. And he's going to be stubborn about this -- he isn't listening to reasonable people on his side like Nate Silver, David Axelrod, and Alan Dershowitz. This is disturbing and dangerous.