EXTRA: Joe Biden is only 11 in dog years

Mar 03, 2024

Hi! How's your weekend going? Awesome.

I try to keep this newsletter very different from the typical "I have opinions, listen to me!" that you can get anywhere. However, on the weekends I'm going to try look back at the week and give you some thoughts that hopefully you'll find original and perceptive.

In that spirit, here's a news flash you won't see anywhere else:

Joe Biden is old

One unappealing thing about Twitter/Threads/Whatever is that on a given day you get a tiny fraction of the news followed by a pack of mad dogs attacking somebody for it. The news in the past month has been that Joe Biden is old. Jon Stewart talked about it; Ezra Klein talked about it; and the Times started publishing articles on the mental state of elderly people like, oh yeah, Joe Biden.

And the outrage erupted immediately. Cancel Jon Stewart! Cancel your Times subscription! Biden's not old! You should be saying Trump is old! Shut up!

This is a lot like when Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell did an ad in which she said, "I'm not a witch." That's not how you get people to stop thinking you're a witch.

In future newsletters we're going to talk concretely about what image is and how it's made. But since it's upon us, let's take a look at how Joe Biden's image works.

Biden was already old when we got him elected in 2020. It was not a secret. And by the way, he's older now. And the thing about an image is, if it's true to the person, the person is going to keep on being it. Al Gore will keep being stiff. George Santos will keep being a liar. Joe Biden will keep being old.

What this means is that we got into this situation with our eyes open. We've had four years to prepare for "Biden is old" and the best response anybody's got is "Stop saying it"? Like it would have somehow gone under the radar if not for some misguided pundits who went off the reservation?

Biden's age is a problem for three reasons, the third of which is the most important to look at now that it's too late to change anything else:

1. Democrats decided not to go with someone else in 2024.

2. Everyone can see he's old.

→ 3. He has no other image competing with just plain "old." ←

Let's address each of these points.

1. Well, it's too late to pick someone else. God, how I wish for a candidate who is fresh and exciting, but I don't make the decisions.

2. The people who make the decisions have kept Joe in a safe room for almost his entire presidency. If he's still capable of getting out there and rubbing elbows with people (while trying not to sniff their sweet, sweet hair), they haven't let him. This was a choice.

3. It's a four-year malpractice by Democrats that they haven’t developed a different image for him. The way to combat the image of old Biden is not to argue with it, because you can't, but to fill the space with a competing image.

How would we do that? (And don't say, look at the legislation he passed!) Well, let's look at Biden's strengths AS A PERSON. Not as a government functionary, as a person. We actually know what these are — he's a regular guy, and he's been through a lot of tragedy so he's strong in empathy. The Biden persona is right there — Regular Joe. We should always be calling him Regular Joe. "He called Trump a sick fuck. That's Regular Joe for ya." "He prayed with the families after a mass shooting. These are the times we see the Real Joe."

Most recently, Fox News attacked Biden for going on Seth Meyers ("like a celebrity") and grabbing ice cream with him at Van Leeuwen in Manhattan. Seth Meyers has actually made "Joe Biden loves ice cream" a bit of a meme on his show. It's a pretty Regular Joe proclivity, loving ice cream, and it makes you think, this is something he should be out there doing. He should be known for it. In fact, what Biden needs to do is go to all 50 states between now and November and have an ice cream with the other regular folks in every one of them. Jackson, Mississippi. Fairbanks, Alaska. Ames, Iowa. A friend calls this "Scoops With Joe." He needs to do Scoops With Joe more than he needs to go to fund-raisers and give speeches.

Here's something to keep in mind over the next eight months — if you're complaining about Biden's image at this late date, it's because, even though everybody could see it coming, nobody did anything about it.

"Daddy died a MAGA"

Jess Piper is highly visible on social media and writes a Substack reporting on how things are looking in deep-red Missouri. This column of hers was a really heartbreaking departure. Here are some excerpts:

My dad and I grew apart quickly — like, lightning speed. Every time I talked to him, he ranted about dead people voting or some deep state scheme. My dad was sick with a chronic illness, but I could barely talk to him without getting off the phone feeling sick myself.
I started avoiding him and skipped visits even though I knew his health wasn’t the best — that’s on me and I still regret it. I just couldn’t stand to see his brain rotting in front of me and his new political opinions on everything from abortion to immigration enraged me. We used to talk about his dogs, his travel, and his work. He was now ranting about locking folks up and welfare abuse and pedophiles. I couldn’t deal with it so I didn’t.
As he lay dying, he asked me to read to him. He wanted to listen to Moby Dick — a book he meant to read, but never did. I read it to him.
He apologized between chapters for a lot of things that were out of his control when he was a young father and I was a child. I forgave him everything and apologized for not being there like I should have been ... and then came the torrent of tears over what had happened to us during the Trump years.
This is where I’ll say that I was just disgusted at his political apologies. I begged him to stop. The internet and Facebook are ridiculous things to talk about when you have only hours left.
Stop, daddy. It doesn’t matter. But, he knew it did matter.
My last memories of him leave a metallic taste in my mouth — bitter bile in my throat. I loved him deeply and it was reciprocated, but his skewed world view at the end of his life tragically confused his legacy and his loved ones, and that is the saddest thing I can say.

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

I came to read Gawker somewhat late, because I only thought of it as gossip journalism for a long time — until I started reading Hamilton Nolan. Nolan was one of several writers taking advantage of Gawker's loose reins and willingness to try things, and his coverage of subjects like poverty, work and prison — let me rephrase that: people in poverty, people at work, and people in prison — was unmatched by any other journalist anywhere.

These days I see Nolan's columns in The Guardian, and just now noticed that, in keeping with everyone having a Substack now, he has a Substack. It's here:

I tell you this partly just because I'm excited to have discovered it, and partly to recommend his really smart explanation of the present and future of journalism.

How Things Work

Public Funding of Journalism Is the Only Way

In April 2007, Conde Nast launched a splashy, glossy, prestige-dripping business magazine called Portfolio. They hired big name writers and spent $100 million on the project. In 2008, the magazine’s web staff was laid off, and the monthly publishing schedule was reduced. By May of 2009, Portfolio was dead. It wou…

a year ago · 103 likes · 46 comments · Hamilton Nolan

From the article:

The death of the online media industry, which has now reached its irreversible phase, is not a case of an industry transforming so much as it is a case of an industry disappearing. The journalism jobs currently being slashed at what seems like every single publication in America are not migrating into jobs at publications that utilize some new form of technology. They are just going away. “Creative destruction,” so beloved by economic theorists, can be scary but beneficial in the long term. This is not that. This is just destruction. The reporters being laid off now are not going to go get jobs at an intriguing news startup in a few months. They are going to get jobs outside of journalism, because the journalism jobs have simply been eradicated.
So next time that you wonder, “What happened to all the nice newspapers and magazines and perhaps even websites that I remember reading from my halcyon youth?” just imagine Google and Facebook and Amazon as three vampires, sticking a straw into the media business and sucking it dry. The tech platforms figured out how to insert themselves between the news producers and the news audience. The ad money that used to fund news now goes to the tech companies. They took it and now the news companies don’t have it to hire journalists with. That’s why your local paper sucks and your favorite website is dying. When you pull back, it’s pretty simple.
This is not a case of publications dying because they weren’t good enough and consumers made the independent choice of moving their dollars to new and better publications, which flourished anew. No. This is the attack of the middlemen. I must admit that I kind of admire the cleverness of the big tech companies in figuring out how to extract all of the revenue from journalism without actually making any journalism. Smooth move. Also a problem. Did you see the problem? That’s right: the places that make the journalism are not getting the money and therefore they stop making journalism and the places that are getting the money instead do not make journalism. So where does that leave journalism? Nowhere. Which is to say, the place we are rapidly approaching now.

Having spent about three decades in newspapers and web myself, I have many thoughts about what's happening to journalism as well. Let me condense them down to this one.

I started thinking 25 years ago about what happens when you take the money out of journalism, because that’s what was happening. The old model was what I call a "pull" model of journalism. Consumers paid money for the newspaper, or turned on the news, and the editors tried to respond to that by providing content that the people would probably want to read.

If you take away all the money, what's left is "push" journalism. What does that look like? It's a slightly different idea from the total obliteration that Hamilton Nolan describes. It means that the information environment created will be pushed out there by people who have a reason for doing so. There are a limited number of reasons the people do that: a corporate agenda, a political agenda, or a personal passion which someone will work on without pay.

(It just occurred to me now that the New York Post, where I worked for many years, is published by Rupert Murdoch for all three of these reasons, which is why it's still there.)

I think we have an assumption that we live in a sort of rational national mental space. With a fringey fringe, yes, but you know, we don’t live in an atmosphere of unchecked lies. But the more the ethical middle wears away, the more the fringey fringe is going to shape people's mental space. We can already see this happening.

And since this newsletter is ostensibly for candidates and campaign professionals, as you think about how your job is going to work from 2024 forward, just never assume that people are living in a shared factual environment ever again. Our approach is going to have to change as that happens.

Quote of the week

"Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita are not good humans and they've sold their soul, but they're good strategists. And so they are taking one of Trump's biggest vulnerabilities and they're running right at it and saying, 'You know, he's not the chaos guy. He's the guy that's going to restore stability to the world, he's going to restore stability at the border, provide stability on crime, on the economy.' And that's how they're running."

— Sarah Longwell, The Secret Podcast

THE KEY

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