Why I think Joe Biden decided to run again (and why he can’t really talk about it)

A lot of people expected Joe Biden to be an intentionally-single-term president.

I honestly kinda think he expected to be one, too. I don’t know that, but I have the impression that’s what he wanted to do.

So why’d he change his mind? More importantly, why is it said that he thinks he’s the best chance to beat Trump this time around?

People speculate. A lot of people go straight to evilness. Ego. Arrogance. Things like that. To that, I note he’s the only one to beat him so far, so maybe some of that’s earned. Less unkindly, people suggest the unfinished first term agenda – he says that himself, though people seem oddly disinclined to believe him. You know, the way the Republicans teamed up with Joe Manchin to stop the second half of his climate agenda in particular.

Remember that agenda? The first half in the infrastructure bill that’s done so much good, the second half in the climate bill actually called a climate bill. The one that Manchin joined with the Republicans to end, stabbing Biden in the back? That one. He’s implemented some of it with executive orders, which is good. The Republican Supreme Court keeps trying to end them, but he’s been plugging away at it nonetheless, just like he is with student loan debt, which they also reversed.

But that doesn’t address the idea that he’s the best or only one who can do it. And I think I’ve figured it out.

I think it’s about the massive advantage of incumbency.

It’s real hard to throw out a President after only one term. Bush I got thrown out, though honestly he was as much about being Reagan’s Third Term as anything else, and he lied about taxes, the one thing sure to piss Republicans off. After that, you have to go all the way forward to Trump, who’d mismanaged a pandemic so badly he sent the US into a short-lived Great Depression that we’re really only this year working our way out of.

That’s the kind of thing it tends to take. That degree of a disaster.

An insurrection should have finished Trump off. But it didn’t, did it? Why not?

Because he’d already told them that if he lost, it’d only be through fraud. And they believed it. That’s what held them together; the Big Lie, universally accepted amongst his supporters. The lie, the idea that Trump is, right now, actually the legal president of the United States.

The false idea that Trump is the incumbent in this race.

He’s been running like one, after all. He kept acting like one after being thrown out, using presidential symbols at first, then knock-offs when he got told that was illegal and to cut it out. It’s how he kept the movement together, and it’s how he’s kept them behind him. His insistence that he has the right to keep all those classified documents, his demonstrated belief that he actually has a duties in current US foreign policy, the continued use of symbols of presidential power…

All of it is to dress himself in the mantle of incumbency. Since Biden is in fact the actual president, it only works so well; it’s hard to make people believe you’re the incumbent when your opponent is waking up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Despite that, to some degree, it works. Certainly, with his core supporters. That’s what “TRUMP is my president” means. That’s what the conspiracy theorists drink up en masse.

But it’s also working on all too many of the idiot political press – a political press which is right now covering the race as if Trump were the incumbent, with all the inevitability that generally provides.

Now imagine how much better it would work if he wasn’t running against an actual incumbent.

You can say, “But Trump’s not president! So he’s not the incumbent!” all you want to, and that’s true. But it doesn’t matter. The trick still works; the evidence is all around you.

You can also say “Kamala Harris could be the incumbent, if he’d just resign!” But I don’t think it would count with enough of the people who would be influenced by this kind of bullshit, partly because she wasn’t ever elected president, but mostly because we all know why, no matter how much I want to be wrong about that.

And it wouldn’t count structurally – organisationally, monetarily – much if at all.

Which leaves us where we are. Biden leaving the race wouldn’t just give up the power of incumbency – it’d let Trump assume its mantle. Fraudulently, sure. But that won’t matter. He wouldn’t gain all the social advantages, but he’d gain some. He’d be a massive leader in name recognition against anyone else, and he’d have a sudden striking funding and organisational lead that he simply hasn’t had until now.

Those are advantages he desperately, desperately wants and needs.

But you can’t come out and say that, can you? This isn’t something you can say in the tiny number of words the low-info voter needs. And since you can’t say it that way, I don’t see how you say it at all, not without looking like bait in the eyes of a political press already in the pocket of your opponent and out for your blood, truth be damned. You’ve got to go with other reasons, reasons that maybe ring less true because in the end they aren’t necessarily what actually changed your mind.

I don’t know if this is why Joe Biden decided to run again. I really don’t. But I have a lot of facts – political situation facts, but facts all the same – that all point in that same direction.

I think it might just be because Joe Biden really is the only person who can keep Trump from running – and quite possibly winning – as the (fake) incumbent, with every socio-political and organisational advantage that gives you.

The organisational and monetary advantages are obvious. You don’t have to understand the social advantages to understand that they’re real, too. And like it or not, that’s a lot of advantages.

Joe’s political senses have always been very strong. This just might be the realisation that did it.

I just hope that if he’s pushed out – and to be clear, I will back literally anyone the Democrats put up against Trump, be it Biden or Harris or anyone else, with all the strength I have, which is what every single one of us has to do – I just hope that he turns out to have been wrong.

But there are reasons to think the way he does here, and they are all too real.

Don’t fuck this up, team.

118 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.