During his rambling July 8 call-in to MSNBC’s Morning Joe, President Joe Biden railed against the “elites” in his own party who have been calling for him to step aside since last month’s catastrophic debate performance. In the interests of further shoring up his newfound populist bona fides, Biden’s next move was to take questions from a small group of his elite donors on an exclusive phone call.
The gulf between Biden’s rhetoric and his actual behavior — though certainly nothing new for a man whose self-styling as the scrappy, Amtrak-riding guy from Scranton has always clashed with his long-standing proximity to corporate interests and Wall Street — was nonetheless particularly striking in this case.
On both sides in the ongoing Biden saga — notwithstanding the president’s recent contention to the contrary — the underlying dynamic has been one of politics via elite parlor game: numerically minuscule factions consisting of donors, influencers, celebrities, and multimillionaire politicians carrying out palace intrigues largely independent from any democratic process.
Not since October 2021 has Biden fielded questions from voters in a public town hall. As president, he’s assiduously shied away from non-scripted or potentially critical interactions of any kind, be they interviews or news conferences. In April, well before the disastrous June 27 debate meltdown that precipitated the New York Times editorial board’s call for Biden to suspend his reelection bid, a statement from the newspaper noted the extent to which he has “actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists” throughout his term as president.
(In a shameless shifting of the goalposts, various campaign surrogates are now trying to spin last night’s shoddy press conference as a great triumph because Biden belatedly fielded a handful of unscripted questions while managing the odd stretch of coherence.)
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There is still no policy page of any kind on Biden’s campaign website (merely an “Issues” section mostly devoted to past legislative achievements and anti-Trump messaging). He’s found room in his schedule for opulent fundraising events at private mansions and estates on both coasts but has reportedly not attended a full meeting with his own cabinet in nearly a year.
Despite Biden’s contemptible assertion that his campaign has received the legitimate backing of primary voters, Democratic elites effectively ensured it was a primary in name only. In states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina, the few rivals Biden did have were simply not allowed onto the ballot, while in Florida, the party canceled its primary altogether.
The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, did away with primary debates entirely before he had even announced his desire to run for reelection — and with them any expectation that the sitting president might actually have to defend his record in a public forum.
Americans are, in effect, being asked to support a candidate who rarely addresses them without a teleprompter, is more visible to donors at lavish fundraisers than he is to journalists, and is seeking their votes without even specifying what he intends to do if reelected (to say nothing of one who has long exhibited clear symptoms of cognitive decline). If Joe Biden is an enemy of “elites,” we might as well start calling Donald Trump a blue-collar son of toil.
There is, however, a grain of truth in the president’s comically absurd framing of the current effort to remove him. Last year, polls made it abundantly clear that a broad majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, were concerned about Biden’s age and didn’t want him to run in 2024. This made no difference as long as the necessary alignment of donors and Democratic power brokers was on his side — and it has now taken these same elites a matter of days to achieve what more than a year of polling and the opinions of tens of millions of Americans could not.
For the first time since Biden’s debate trainwreck two weeks ago, it has begun to feel genuinely plausible he might be compelled to step aside. With their cryptically ambivalent statements of support — and much more categorical statements in backrooms — party grandees like Nancy Pelosi appear to be moving against him. Donations from the Rolodex of millionaires and billionaires upon which the president has largely based his campaign’s fundraising efforts look set to dry up fast.
Perhaps nothing, however, has seemed to catalyze opposition to Biden more than the recent New York Times Op-Ed by George Clooney (who less than a month ago cohosted a swanky Hollywood fundraiser that brought in a record-setting $28 million) calling for his exit from the race. Since the publication of Clooney’s piece, it has emerged he spoke to none other than former President Barack Obama beforehand, reportedly fueling resentment on the part of Biden and his campaign team that the former president has been secretly coordinating the growing efforts to oust him.
Whether that’s really the case or not, it’s a ridiculous situation that should have people asking how and why backroom intrigues and personal resentments among such a tiny sliver of the wealthy and powerful are now helping determine political events in the world’s most powerful nation.
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But it’s also emblematic of a rotten and insular party culture beholden to wealth that had thoroughly conquered the Democratic establishment before the Biden era had begun.
For obvious reasons, mainstream politicians of every stripe have long solicited donations from the rich and the support of the famous and well-connected — an instinct that has increasingly predominated among Democrats since the days of Bill Clinton. But during the Obama era, the institutions of wealth and celebrity were practically elevated to the status of official party doctrine. This style arguably reached its apex with Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose 2016 campaign for the White House openly reveled in its proximity to fame and organized money while (much like Biden today) offering voters a breathtaking lack of policy or substance.
Having experienced both a shocking defeat at the hands of Donald Trump and two unexpectedly strong insurgent challenges from Bernie Sanders, events since 2016 have only encouraged Democratic elites to double down on their alliance with large donors and desire to limit popular involvement in the political and electoral process.
The upshot, as the absurd saga of Joe Biden has made so embarrassingly clear, is that the levers of power inside what still officially calls itself the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly controlled by a loose network of ultra-wealthy donors, celebrity influencers, and multimillionaire politicians who have successfully insulated themselves from meaningful democratic pressure.
To those who host and attend the chic fundraisers through which many powerful Democrats now finance their campaigns, the actual business of politics is more or less seen as the exclusive purview of those with the means or status to get a seat at the table. For rank-and-file liberals and activists, there are instead the bread and circuses of celebrity, infotainment, and political fan culture: airbrushed candidates with inspiring personal back stories to invest in; partisan clickbait to post; podcasts that encourage mindless deference to the Good Guys of Team Blue to listen to and share with friends and family.
Surveying political events of the past decade or so, it becomes difficult to escape the conclusion that the liberal elites who so reflexively frame every election as an existential referendum on democracy itself are in fact deeply contemptuous and afraid of the very thing they claim to be fighting for. Until Joe Biden gave a debate performance so bad that the omertà could no longer be maintained, much of the party seems to have been willing to let a historically weak campaign go full steam ahead, consequences be damned.
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That an op-ed penned by a single celebrity fundraiser has appeared to have more of an impact on the viability of Joe Biden’s candidacy than the overwhelming majority of public opinion is a bleak statement about what actually lubricates the cogs in the lumbering Democratic machine — and the gilded political culture that has so irresponsibly brought us to this point.
