No, the Democrats were not Trying to Sabotage Biden when they Agreed to Debate
Explaining what really went on, based on my own personal experience working with an aging senior principal.
Note:
The first part of this newsletter is a viral Twitter post I did earlier today— but because it really took off, I’m going to expand upon it here at much greater length for my Substack readers.
There's a take on this debate I've heard from a lot of folks on the right, that is tempting and understandable, but completely wrong-- one that says that the Democrats knew Biden would bomb this badly and scheduled the debate early so they could move him out of the way.
Nonsense.
Most of the people closest to Biden who would have been making these decisions are Dem apparatchiks, but more specifically, they are Biden apparatchiks. They wouldn't enjoy anywhere near the same power and access with his successor. For better or worse, their fates are tied to Biden specifically. They had the debate early because they knew that while Biden was not in great shape, they had drunk the Kool-Aid and convinced themselves, at least to some degree, of the lies they have been telling for years to the American people about his mental state.
They thought that if they worked with the most favorable rules, on the most favorable network with the most favorable moderators, and gave Biden a full week to prep, they would be able to get through it and even if they didn't "win" it would be far enough from the election that voters would ignore a mediocre performance. They were not counting on what a disaster it would be to have Biden fully unmasked 1:1 vs. a competent and energetic opponent. Yes, Biden's performance was such a disaster that it's tempting to think "this was all planned" but that's only if you ignore the levels of self-deception, lying and magical thinking that have dominated the Democrat party for years now. That's what was exposed on the debate stage last night.
Let me expand on this a bit further based on my own personal experience. First, I should say at the outset, I have a bias against conspiracy theories— not that conspiracies don’t exist (they absolutely do) but that conspiracy theorizing tends to be behavior from people outside a system that they are frustrated that they have no control over. It’s not a winner’s way of looking at the world. At a human level I’m sympathetic, but at a practical level, it’s a form of taking out frustration and it rarely leads to the political results we want. At the very least, before we grab on to a conspiracy theory, we should see if we can’t find a non-conspiratorial take that would explain the facts better. Mine is above.
Second, as those readers who know a bit about my background are aware, in an earlier time in my career I spent almost a decade working very closely with the late Secretary of State George Shultz at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. At the time I joined Hoover he was 88 years old and by the time I left he was 98. So I have a lot of personal experience in working with an aging principal.
Shultz was in many ways a remarkable man— Reagan’s Secretary of State for most of his term in office, Shultz was one of two people in U.S. history to hold four cabinet positions, he had been a power player from the days when he had been a member of the Council of Economic Advisors in the First Eisenhower Administration to the day he died at age 100, in the earliest days of the Biden administration. I was privileged to work with him and I learned a tremendous amount from him.— so please don’t read any of the following as a sign of disrespect.
Shultz was a super-ager in many ways. At age 93 President Obama asked him to lead the U.S. Delegation at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral— he had worked closely with Thatcher while he was Secretary of State. Shultz took a cross country flight from California to D.C. and then hopped immediately on a military plane that took him and the rest of the delegation to the UK, where he had 45 minutes down-time before having to head to 10 Downing Street to pass on his condolences in person to the Prime Minster. It was a schedule that could have taxed a man decades younger, yet Shultz handled it with aplomb. He also continued writing and speaking right up until the day he died.
But while Shultz often had the energy and acuity of a man decades younger (I obviously haven’t spent time with Biden, but I would imagine that Shultz’s abilities in his mid-90s were likely at least equal to Biden’s in his early 80s) he was not immune to father time. My job when I worked with him was to put him in situations where he would be in the best position to succeed. And he almost invariably did succeed. That meant making sure we were writing on the right topics, briefing him extensively before big meetings, making sure the topics were moved to subjects that he was familiar with, and making sure that he was meeting with the right people in ways that would advance our agenda. In the earlier days, Shultz had to rely less on this sort of prep, but as he got into his mid-to-later 90s it was more important.
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Now Secretary Shultz had a support system, including multiple administrative staff, to help him, but the sort of assistance he got would be absolutely trivial compared to what Biden has as President of the United States. As President, everything Biden does is choreographed, every action he takes is the result of extensive pre-briefing. Every day, Biden has thousands of people working overtime to overcome his decline and hide his shortcomings.
Like Shultz as he moved into his mid-to-late 90s, Biden likely has good days and bad days. On a good day, I am sure Biden can offer reasonably acute advice on issues, at least by his lights, based on his many decades of experience. On his bad days, much less so. But when you’re in the reality distortion field of the White House, it’s easy to pretend that the bad days aren’t really so bad, especially when the media is working overtime to cover for you. THIS IS WHY THE BIDEN CAMP DIDN’T REALIZE THAT THEY WERE WALKING INTO A BUZZ SAW WHEN THEY AGREED TO DEBATE TRUMP.
Because Shultz was absolutely capable of long stretches of acuity and sagacity well into his mid-to-late 90s, it would have been easy for me to overestimate how well he might have done in a true rough-and-tumble debate at that age. And I imagine something similar went on with the long-time Biden loyalists who made up his senior advisors. They like Biden, they are loyal to Biden, and they knew that he could often do at least minimally acceptably with the entire machinery of government out there supporting him. As a result, they forgot how bad he’d look to normal people left 1:1 with no support network.
Secretary Shultz was still a significant player in national and global affairs to his dying day. But if he wasn’t doing as well on a given day, that wasn’t a big deal. Officially, he was “retired” and you could take advantage of the many good days without worrying so much about occasional bad days. But Joe Biden is the current President of the U.S. We need him to be at his best EVERY DAY. And he’s clearly not capable of it.
But his inner circle was in denial of that and that’s why they have put themselves, and America, in a catastrophic position.
Best take on this debacle. What do you think happened during the week-long debate prep? Look forward to seeing leaks as the blame game escalates. As it relates to Shultz, how much do you think his age affected his judgment to invest his money and reputation into Theranos?
Good take, and it makes sense, but I do think you are being overly gracious to Joe Biden.
He’s been a terrible decision maker and an intellectual lightweight his entire career. There were not going to be many good days for Joe Biden regardless of the state of his advancing dementia.
His apparatchiks are terrible at running the country because they seem mostly focused on what are, frankly, bullshit issues like being pro-trans and using the full weight of the federal government to come down on domestic foes of the regime while getting outplayed constantly in the international court of affairs.
Ex: I think they genuinely thought Ukraine was going to beat Russia, and two years later they’re stuck escalating towards WW3 because they’re not bright enough to take the L and work on a peace deal.
I have zero sympathy for Joe Biden. His team, like most Democrats, likely underestimated Trump and overestimated Joe’s ability to create new thoughts or remember the talking points they’d drilled into him. They may have also been expecting help from the moderators like they got in spades in 2020.
Instead, Joe had to stand all on his own, and without security guards and a mob of Democrat journalists and pundits to keep him upright, he looked like the small and feeble man he’s been for decades.