A few Biden updates

With the prospects of President Biden’s remaining in office still uncertain despite his insistence that he’s not going anywhere, here are three updates:

• The Wall Street Journal posted a five-byline story Monday night headlined “How Biden’s Inner Circle Worked to Keep Signs of Aging Under Wraps.” It’s a well-reported reprise of a piece that the Journal published a month ago that was widely dismissed at the time because of its reliance on partisan Republican sources. Now that earlier article looks prescient (free links).

• What you might call a mini-feeding frenzy broke out Monday afternoon when The New York Times, CNN and others reported that a specialist in Parkinson’s disease had visited the White House eight times over the past eight months. Hours later, the story looked like a cautionary tale in not getting ahead of the story, as we learned that the doctor had almost certainly been called in to see other patients, and that his service at the White House goes back a dozen years.

• Josh Marshall is always worth reading when you’re trying to make sense of complicated political stories. On Monday he wrote that he’s less sure than he was a week ago that Biden would step aside, mainly because, well, he hasn’t stepped aside. “By the end of the weekend,” he wrote, “I was back to near total uncertainty about where any of this was going.”

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2 thoughts on “A few Biden updates”

  1. This may be a good lesson in humility for the major media sources. Just because they are utterly certain that Biden won’t/can’t/shouldn’t be the nominee and are using their giant megaphone to say that, Biden himself would ultimately have to be the one to decide to forgo the nomination — and the more he’s bullied the more he’s going to dig in his heels. The past 48 hours have been bizarre, with multiple figures proposing weirder and weirder methods for coming up with a new nominee, as if we haven’t already had primaries to elect delegates. Everyone is terrified that Trump will win, but *no one* knows the sure-fire way to prevent that from happening. It’s possible that nominating Biden is the only way to stop Trump and it’s possible that nominating Biden will totally ensure Trump wins. WE DON’T KNOW. That’s why I wish everyone (especially those privileged with a NYT column or a regular gig on CNN or MSNBC) would sit back for a second and ask “What if I’m wrong on this?” If Biden and the people around him conclude that he needs to exit the race, I trust them to make that decision and the likely next step is that Kamala Harris becomes the nominee. But then brace yourselves for the media frenzy about how she’s terrible and we need a different nominee.

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