On the Coalition of the Willing – Christian Lorentzen in LRB:

“The debate last month between Biden and Trump was painful to watch because it reminded us that someday we’ll all die. In retrospect Biden’s advanced age was a political asset in 2020. By contrast with the sneering and erratic Trump, given to mocking the disabled and insulting anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, here was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered terrible personal tragedies: the death of his young wife and infant daughter in an automobile accident in 1972; the death of his eldest son from brain cancer in 2015; the crack addiction and wastrelsy of his surviving son in the years that followed. Broadcasting a socially distanced campaign from his Delaware basement, he appeared gentle and forgiving, the ‘designated mourner’ in Fintan O’Toole’s phrase, just the man to heal the country after the devastation of the pandemic and the four-year reign of the American berserk. To see Biden that way was to forget his decades in the Senate as an arrogant opportunist, an inconsistent warmonger and a plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the world, especially the zones under American protection or subject to US (or US-sponsored) might. There, it seems, the emperor has no brain.”

(…)

“The hero of Ward’s book is Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who is said to have memorised the capitals of the world by the age of ‘ten or thirteen’ (a little late in the game by my lights) and knows the lyrics to every Billy Joel song by heart (a detail rarely omitted, for some reason, when he is profiled in the press). After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, which as her top wonk he took personally, Sullivan and colleagues started a think tank called National Security Action, which advocated a ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ whose focus would be ‘Russia, Russia, Russia and China, China, China’, that is, the abandonment of Bush’s war on terror and ramping up of Trump’s reindustrialisation and trade war. They would be like Trump, only progressive, and in favour of freedom, though less often at the barrel of a gun, at least a gun held by an American soldier. One of Whipple’s key sources is Antony Blinken, a habitual punner who plays guitar in a DC cover band called Coalition of the Willing, specialising in tunes by the Stones and Clapton.”

(…)

“Abortion is an issue that could win the election for the Democrats in November because people don’t like having their rights taken away. At the time of writing – if the betting markets and obsequious voices on social media are to be believed – Harris is the person most likely to replace Biden. Her downsides include her unpopularity outside her home state of California and her reputation as a dysfunctional manager, something Whipple makes much of.”

(…)

“‘After Trump had unleashed the furies, Biden’s task was to restore as much calm as possible,’ Foer writes. ‘Despite his expansive agenda, Biden managed to get slapped with the label “boring” by friends and critics alike – which is not far from what he aimed to achieve.’ It was a sound footing for the new leader, who is said to have avoided saying his predecessor’s name even in private, referring to him only as ‘the former guy’. In the early months of 2021, he kept the federal government out of local fights over pandemic management – mask mandates, the reopening of schools – and focused on making the vaccine available. ‘America is back,’ Biden told a crowd of diplomats at the State Department on 4 February that year, and he and his staff got on with the business of reversing Trump’s executive orders, rejoining treaties, unbanning Muslims and carrying on the technocratic response to Covid. News channel ratings plummeted, as did news media consumption generally. The vaccines were rolled out that spring. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan was passed by Congress in March: it would cut child poverty almost in half, to 5.2 per cent, until it spiked again in 2022, after the Act’s child tax credit expired. That month Biden’s national approval rating was at 54 per cent. It would linger above 50 per cent until August, when the US withdrew from Afghanistan, and disapproval numbers have outpaced approval numbers ever since.”

(…)

“It’s after the withdrawal from Afghanistan that the histories of the Biden years move to the Democrats’ efforts to pass their domestic agenda and the obstructions of two right-wing Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. With the Senate split 50-50 and deciding votes cast by the vice president, Manchin and Sinema (now both registered as Independents caucusing with the Democrats, neither of them running for re-election) maintained something like veto power over whatever Biden wanted to do. Klain and various congressional allies shuffled their way to Manchin’s houseboat on the Potomac to plead and bargain with him. He grudgingly assented to the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act, as he had to the American Rescue Plan, despite concerns about inflation. The White House and progressive Democrats in Congress worried that Manchin, with his ties to the energy industry, and Sinema, with hers to finance, wanted, in Foer’s words, ‘to whittle it down to an uninspired nub’. In the end, Manchin sank the American Families Plan, but in 2022 he agreed to a nub version, the Inflation Reduction Act, scrubbed of most social benefits but including corporate tax reform, deficit reduction, curbs to carbon emissions and boosts to domestic energy production. A nub is better than nothing.”

(…)

“In 2023 Blinken dressed his son up as Zelensky for Halloween and joined a band in Kyiv on guitar to play a listless cover of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, a song about American poverty, pollution and imperialism. For his part, Sullivan told the New Yorker: ‘As a child of the 1980s and Rocky and Red Dawn, I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes ... and I believe the Ukrainians have one. We’re on the side of the good guy and we have to do a lot for that person.’”

(…)

“The question became pertinent in April 2022 when at a ceremony at the White House to unveil a proposed expansion of Obamacare, the former president was mobbed by admirers while Biden, in Whipple’s phrase, ‘looked a little lost’. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida said: ‘Let’s be honest here. Joe Biden is unwell. He’s unfit for office. He’s incoherent, incapacitated and confused. He doesn’t know where he is half the time.’ ‘This was, of course, false,’ Whipple insists. ‘Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail.’ Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff, told Whipple of a long flight home from Geneva in 2021 during which Biden regaled his jetlagged entourage with old stories, including the one about the time he visited the Kremlin and told Putin he had no soul, until everyone except the president passed out.”

(…)

“Biden has lost the support of the liberal commentariat, with the editorial board of the New York Times and the editor of the New Yorker calling for him to drop out of the race and make way for a younger candidate. Dozens of speculative columns have bloomed, suggesting replacement tickets featuring various governors and even Harris running with Barack Obama as her vice president –not technically a violation of the constitution. Biden, who has long believed the press unfairly chased him out of the race for the 1988 Democratic nomination after his plagiarism came to light, is unlikely to accept the pundits’ premature obituaries. He has hunkered down with his family, and now Gen X icon Hunter Biden, recently convicted of lying about his drug use on a gun permit application, sits by his side at White House meetings. It’s an astonishing moment in American politics. I preferred the few months in the summer of 2021 when things seemed boring.”

Read the article here.

Yes, boredom is a quality of a decent political system. The Marxists will complain that boredom is just a synonym for technocracy, but we will let that pass.

If Biden will be defeated in November Trump has to thank the Taliban, and George W. of course.

Biden is good at retelling anecdotes from the Vietnam and Jimmy Carter era, which is definitely something to boast about, but apparently not enough to get the liberal commentariat behind you.

They expect a bit more fire.

And Biden is not stepping down because he felt the accusations of plagiarism against him have been unfair.

The American dream with a vengeance, all over again.

And don’t forget the singing. We will go down singing, as decent people do.