Colby Cosh: Democrats told Americans the president doesn’t matter — what a mistake

A lot of Americans, and foreigners who love the United States, will be re-reading Tyler Cowen’s now-promoted-to-classic July 17 article on the “vibe shift” that allowed Donald Trump and the Republican Party to win a numerically narrow, but pervasive and thorough, victory in last evening’s quadrennial elections. Cowen, writing in the last hours before President Joe Biden agreed to abandon hopes of re-election, was able to rattle off 19 enumerated reasons that support for Trump had suddenly become more respectable to express publicly — and the list, as Cowen mentioned, was far from exhaustive.

If you cared to list the ways in which Trump is a disgusting and inappropriate president, that list would zoom past 19 items real quickly too. But there was apparently some social permissioning process at work that will bear study, even if “vibes” is a slippery and ill-defined concept, much like the “animal spirits” that economists struggle to incorporate into equations. Actually, come to think of it, it’s kind of funny that a professional economist didn’t call them “animal spirits” instead of “vibes” in the first place.

Anyway, if you have 19 theories to account for something, you don’t really have a theory — and the closest thing to a useful contribution I have for you is a 20th theory to be thrown in the blender with the others. Everyone now agrees that Biden did enormous damage to the cause of his party — and, according to his ideology, harm to America — by refusing to drop out of the 2024 race earlier.

Whatever you make of Kamala Harris as a candidate or as a person, she was probably not really the best of the options available to her party; she didn’t get the benefit of the annealing that a proper primary contest would have provided; and she had only a short time to define herself independently of Biden. Like most vice-presidential running mates, she was chosen in the first place partly because she wasn’t a serious threat to the boss’s moral dominance of the party — which evaporated fast when signs of his physical and mental decline became unignorable.

The punchline is, of course, that he’s still president of the United States right now, today, as you read this. The most dignified way of handling Biden’s problems was thought to be picking an alternative 2024 candidate, once the choices had been narrowed to one individual … and to let Biden finish his term, which has 75 more days left in it. Who’s running the country and making hour-to-hour commander-in-chief decisions? Is it the guy who can’t get through a sentence, or is it his inner circle and his family?

I would put it to you speculatively that letting Biden finish his term may have been a serious mistake in itself, a mistake distinct from Biden hanging on Gollumishly to the 2024 nomination. (And I do attribute this to stubbornness and egomania on the part of Biden, who has the highest “occasions boasting publicly about his brains”-to-“actual IQ” ratio ever recorded.) The “vibe shift” that happened while Biden was tweeting defiance liked a besieged Salvador Allende may have encouraged Americans to believe, or perhaps just to feel, that it doesn’t really matter who is president of the United States. The executive branch, the alphabet soup of agencies and the deep state will trundle onward in largely the traditional fashion no matter what — which leaves Americans much freer to treat elections as vibes/animal-spirit expressive exercises instead of job interviews.

Biden has been treated as a big plush college-football mascot for America, a costume whose wearer’s identity is irrelevant. Did Americans take the hint? The thing is, if that’s what happened, I quite can’t say for sure that the voters are fundamentally mistaken. “The voters were wrong” is a thing we are not supposed to say out loud in a democracy, and time weighs me down with a little more intellectual humility every day.