More Democrats Reaching Acceptance

Several pieces turned up over the weekend showimg polite opinion moving through the final stages of grief over the potential November outcome. A major theme is that, even with five months still to go until the election, Joe has run out of time to turn things around. At Roll Call:

The Biden 2020 campaign strategy was simple: portray himself as a seasoned centrist who would bring the country together and return the White House to normalcy. After three-and-a-half years governing with liberal policies to appease his base, that direction for Biden is no longer an option. Independents, who won him the election, now overwhelmingly have an unfavorable view of both the job he is doing and him personally. The majority coalition that elected him is gone, as those critical voters no longer view another four years of Biden as a positive.

So another strategy has emerged, almost by default given Biden’s limited options. It is one that seems oddly familiar, as it mirrors Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign strategy.

. . . Clinton’s campaign focused on driving negative stories on Trump’s personal life rather than policy differences, with one goal in mind: to drive up his negatives. They succeeded. Trump ended the campaign with a 60 percent unfavorable.

. . . Trial or no trial, Biden is in trouble. Channeling Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy isn’t going to fix his problem.

The whole point of the trial appears to have been to resuscitate the Stormy Daniels story, which didn't work in 2016, and it flopped again this year. This piece in Politico focuses on the time it will still take to change the public's mind on the economy:

President Joe Biden is running out of the tools — and the time — he needs to turn around Americans’ gloomy view of the U.S. economy.

. . . Inside Biden’s orbit, the fear is that there’s little new the administration can do to change the perceptions of a stubborn electorate that’s living through an upswing — yet simply refusing to believe it.

. . . The Biden campaign perspective is that the issue is not a matter of policies or even messaging, but time. The president will make gains as more Americans tune into the specifics of the presidential race.

. . . But there’s also a recognition that Democrats have tried nearly every tactic available, and whether voters’ outlook improves en masse in time for November is increasingly out of their control.

But the trend of opinion seems to be moving past the question of messaging and toward the sense that the problem is the candidate:

Veteran top Democratic consultant James Carville says he wishes President Biden wasn’t running for re-election and worries that disenchanted young party voters will sit out the November election because of it.

“It isn’t the choice I was crazy about,” admitted Carville, who played a major role in getting former President Clinton first elected in 1992, on 77 WABC radio’s “The Cats Roundtable” on Sunday.

“I thought that President Biden should not run for re-election,” the political guru said. “But he did — it’s him and Trump — and that’s where I am.”

But the big new event is a piece in The Atlantic, Ruth Bader Biden. The Atlantic is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, Democrat megadonor widow of Steve Jobs, and it's reasonable to surmise this is the consensus view of the Democrat megadonor class:

Bad vibes have been the persistent feature of his campaign. No matter the obstacles Trump creates for himself, Biden remains a comprehensively weak incumbent, weighed down by the same liabilities that burdened him from the start, beginning with the largest, and completely unfixable, one: At 81, he is much too old to run for president.

. . . It is too late for Democrats to do anything about their predicament now, barring some 11th-hour event that triggers an extremely unlikely swap-out of nominees at the Democratic National Convention. Trump and his party keep pushing further beyond the bounds of what would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

. . . Like many people, I’ve made the unwelcome comparison between Biden and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal icon whose legacy was stained by her unwillingness to retire while Barack Obama was still president. Ginsburg’s death, at 87, occurred in the final months of the Trump administration, which allowed him to appoint her successor (Amy Coney Barrett). The Real Time host Bill Maher dubbed the octogenarian president “Ruth Bader Biden” on his HBO program last September. Biden, Maher said, was “the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country.”

Biden’s conduct is far worse than Ginsburg’s, in fact, given the awesome power of the presidency and the havoc Trump could unleash with it this time.

I simply can't imagine that Ms Powell Jobs would allow this to run in The Atlantic without her knowledge and approval -- it's saying flat out that as of this June, a remarkably early point to be making such an assessment, the Biden campaign is out of time to turn things around, and it's Biden's fault. And this feeling is echoing, as we see at the other links here. And the overall listlessness of the consensus is striking.

Look at James Carville's view of the Democrat alternatives in the next-to-last link above:

Carville argued that the Democrats have a deep bench of younger elected officials who would be a better fit for the times than the 81-year-old Biden, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn.

I've noted that David Axelrod calls the idea that Joe would withdraw in favor of a candidate like one of these, possibly chosen at the Chicago convention, a "fantasy", not least because the far left Democrat faction will never support a white candidate, much less a Jewish one like Shapiro, but Hakeem Jeffries is a non-starter to anyone else. The only serious replacement for Biden if he withdraws is Kamala Harris, but this, the single non-fantasy alternative, is the one nobody mentions. Nobody. Ever.

Meanwhile, with a growing and unprecedented consensus even among knowedgeable Democrats so early in the cycle that Biden is going to lose the election, Joe himself looks incresingly frail and unwell. The photo at the top of this post was taken at a French cemetery on the last day of his trip to the D-Day commemoration. His gait is clearly stiff, he's relying on Dr Jill to keep him steady, and somehow his suit doesn't quite fit. Again, I think he's losing weight. Worst of all, he's wobbling through a graveyard.

We're looking at what's turning into an eight-month interregnum, an unprecedented situation. I'm starting to question how he can make it to the June 27 debate.