Zorn: Who's right in the Biden fight?

We'll never know for sure

7-11-2024 (issue No. 149)

This week:

• We will never know if Kamala Harris would have been a better candidate for president than Joe Biden

• Last week’s winning tweet

• Let’s make “MAGA Sharta” happen

• News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked on Chicago renaming a school for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the media’s aversion to good news and the Republican head fake on abortion rights

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• Mary Schmich — When your father dies

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week

• Quotables — An extra-long collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately

• Re:Tweets — The winning visual tweet and this week’s contest finalists

• Good Sports — The Sox have a bit of breathing room now

• Tune of the Week — An oldie but goodie from “The Bear” soundtrack

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

We will never know if Kamala Harris would have been a better candidate for president than Joe Biden

It looks to me right now as though the feckless, dithering, gaslighting Democrats — for whom I will always vote — are not going to persuade diminished octogenarian President Joe Biden to yield the top of the national ticket to his vice president.

I’ve certainly been having my say about this subject —

• What everybody now knows about Joe Biden

• Biden shat the bed, so don’t patronize those of us now wetting it

• Why the seven best arguments for Biden staying in the race fail

— and I’ve included a number of well-turned arguments in an expanded “Quotables” section today.

Put simply, my view is that Biden has been a very good president, but he’s no longer the strongest Democrat to run against Donald Trump. Does any serious person doubt that?

Too many voters think he’s too old and too cognitively fragile to effectively serve the next four years to create significant positive enthusiasm for his candidacy, and relying for votes simply on fears about Donald Trump (“Trumpschmerz,” as the coinage has it) appears to be a losing strategy, as the polls show the battleground states slipping away from Biden.

If all these elected Democrats now pledging their loyalty to Biden were to be administered truth serum, my guess is 95% of them would acknowledge that, given a mulligan, the party would choose a younger candidate.

One bit of evidence of that was the off-mic comment of Illinois Gov . JB Pritzker this week, who said “I don’t like where we are,” in reference to Biden after making unambiguous public declarations of support for the president.

The contrary view is that it’s too late in the process and too potentially divisive to pressure Biden out of the race. He has the pledged delegates to win the nomination at next month’s Democratic National Convention, and his supporters should ignore the age issue and train their fire on the appalling prospect of Trump’s return to the White House.

Both factions are accusing the other of either deliberately or witlessly giving aid to Trump, which ratchets up the intraparty tensions and belies the obvious truth that Trump is thrilled to be running against Biden — see Tim Alberta’s Atlantic article, “Trump is planning for a landslide win, and his campaign is all but praying Joe Biden doesn’t drop out.”

History suggests that it is too late to change candidates — that fractured parties that don’t give their campaigns much runway lose in November.

But the party is already fractured, and no amount of telling voters to forget what they saw in that debate June 27 and concentrate on Trump’s grotesque character flaws and shocking intentions is going to generate the grassroots energy necessary to defeat him.

And throw out the history books. They were written in more normal times. This campaign will receive unprecedented amounts of attention because the differences are so stark and the stakes so high. And those who are remembering too much of the past are doomed to be defeated.

I admit that a depleted and diminished Biden might beat Trump and serve out a full second term with distinction. That won’t prove wrong my contention that Vice President Kamala Harris — the most likely person to take Biden’s place at the top of the ticket — would be a stronger candidate and perhaps even a more effective president. Just as a Harris defeat would not vindicate those who now want to stay the course with Biden.

No one now convinced they’re right is likely to change their mind the day after the election.

We can run only one experiment here.

Last week’s winning tweet

My wife asked me if she had any annoying habits and then got all offended during the PowerPoint presentation. — @BattyMclain

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

Project 2025 = The MAGA Sharta

I don’t know whom to credit for rebranding the ominous, Trumpian plan for the future “The MAGA Sharta,” but let’s make that happen, shall we?

Quoting Judd Legum’s Popular Information:

Project 2025 is a radical blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The plan calls for withdrawing approval for the abortion pill, banning pornography, slashing corporate taxes, abolishing the Department of Education, replacing thousands of experienced federal workers with political appointees, imposing a "biblically based… definition of marriage and families," and placing the Justice Department and other independent agencies under the direct control of the president. 

Of Trump’s recent effort to distance himself from the unpopular, theocratic nightmares of this dismaying document — “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” — Legum notes:

Of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project 2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump administration and transition. In other words, while Trump claims he has "nothing to do" with the people who created Project 2025, over 81% had formal roles in his first administration. … In October 2017, Trump was the keynote speaker at a Heritage Foundation event, where he praised the organization as "titans in the fight to defend, promote, and preserve our great American heritage." He credited the organization with helping him confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch and "ending the war on beautiful coal." Trump said that he needed "the help of the Heritage Foundation" to advance other priorities, including large tax cuts. He concluded by expressing his "gratitude" to "the dedicated scholars and staff at the Heritage Foundation."

Now, in an effort to win the White House a second time, Trump is playing dumb.

News & Views

News: “Chicago’s Christopher Columbus Elementary School renamed to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg”

View: Pick a better hero. I will never not be furious with RBG for hanging on to her seat on the U.S. Supreme Court when she was old and infirm. Her stubbornness deprived President Barack Obama the chance to name a progressive successor, so when she died at age 87 during the Trump administration, we instead got youthful conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett, who is joining in the effort to undo every good thing Ginsburg did.

Clinging to her seat was an act of selfish and ultimately destructive vanity by an ailing octogenarian the likes of which we haven’t seen since, well, I guess we’re seeing it right now.

If Donald Trump wins in November and the Republicans take control of the Senate, look for at least one aged conservative justice to retire and allow Trump to cement a conservative majority on the court for another generation.

News: “July 4th gas prices expected to hit lowest level in 3 years”

View: I seldom pile on “the media” in this publication because I think the vast majority of reporters and editors are smart, honest, fair people who do their best under a lot of pressure to put events into perspective and present fair, factual arguments.. But it’s impossible to deny that if gas prices were spiking, we’d be subjected to freak-out level coverage.

Same is true for most other positive developments. Huge job growth under the Biden administration — including the longest streak of unemployment under 4% in more than 50 years; illegal border crossings plunging to four year lows; violent crime falling, historic highs in the markets, inflation rates back to slightly below normal and so on. Will any journalist deny that news outlets would be shrilly trumpeting the bad news if these data points were moving in the other direction? And that they give very short shrift to positive news?

Is it because reporting good news is boring? Because it seems partisan?

News: The Republican platform attempts to minimize the party’s opposition to abortion

View: Don’t be fooled by this rhetorical sleight of hand:

Republicans Will Protect and Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States, on the Issue of Life

We proudly stand for families and Life. We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights. After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People. We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).

Though for the first time in 40 years the party platform omits a call for an unpopular national abortion ban, that call is implicit in the invocation of the 14th Amendment when it comes to embryos and fetuses, and the nod to letting the states decide is merely a headfake.

As University of Texas law professor Liz Sepper wrote, “There is no universe where embryos have constitutional rights and IVF can still happen on any scale.”

In “Don’t fall for the GOP’s platform lie,” Jessica Valenti writes:

It’s a tactic to win over women voters who are pissed off about abortion bans, and to get press coverage that makes Trump look as if he’s the “reasonable” Republican on abortion rights.

It doesn’t change a single thing about what Trump would do if elected, nor does it mean that there’s an actual rift between his campaign and the anti-abortion movement. This is political theater …

Even if journalists didn’t catch on that the platform supports national restrictions, any reporter covering this issue knows that Trump doesn’t need a national law to ban abortion across the country. The plan — which conservatives have explicitly admitted on paper — is to use the Comstock Act to enact a national backdoor ban and federal agency takeovers to make abortion impossible to get in every state.

They also have to realize that Trump would absolutely sign a national ban should it cross his desk no matter what the platform says! We all know that what Trump promises never dictates what he actually does.

Charles Davis at Salon adds:

The Republican platform exists to get the party through the next four months; to provide the Trump campaign a thin veneer of centrism, and potentially a few more votes, even as it signals to the base that the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and the national right to choose is just the start. But don’t take the liberal media’s word for that: It’s what the base is saying too.

“The platform allows us to provide [a] winning message,” Marjorie Dannenfelse, head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement, referencing the group’s efforts to reach voters in swing states. “The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”

Land of Linkin’

• Wednesday’s episode of “The Gist” podcast, includes “a three-way 1950's ‘Meet The Press’-style conversion between (host Mike Pesca), journalist Eric Zorn of The Picayune Sentinel, and Tom Chittum, Senior Vice President of ShotSpotter, the audio detection technology that's been criticized for not providing police accurate enough information.”

• Chicago Magazine’s Edward McClelland suggests that the city rename Washington Park for Harold Washington. After all, George “Washington was one of the most prolific enslavers in American history. … Washington was the wealthiest man in the Thirteen Colonies. Much of that wealth derived from the 300 workers enslaved on his plantation.”\

• Cathy Young at the Bulwark: “Did ‘The Media’ Hide Biden’s Aging? Don’t buy that bogus narrative—reporting on Biden’s mental acuity wasn’t hard to find.”

• In “Biden has a weak hand: Democrats don't know how to spot a bluff,” Nate Silver lists seven reasons why the Democrats should call the president’s bluff. He writes, “Biden isn’t even trying to convince anyone that he’ll run an effective campaign against Trump. Instead, he’s just telling Democrats they don’t have a choice — so any further criticism will only enable Trump and make the situation still worse. Notwithstanding that this is exactly the sort of thinking that got Democrats into trouble in the first place, I don’t think this argument should persuade anyone.”

• I have previously posted a link to Name Grapher — the online tool formerly known as Baby Name Voyager — but I resurface it today in response to a tweet I saw that said, “No one under 30 is named Larry. This is a fact.” It is not a fact, but it is almost true. Same for the name “Donald.”

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ Daily Beast chief content officer Joanna Coles: “I’ve seen Joe Biden up close. Nobody can deny his decline.”

■ Newsweek speculates on what a Kamala Harris presidency would look like.

■ Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich asks why news media aren’t reporting on Trump’s growing dementia.

■ Popular Information: “What Trump doesn’t want you to know about Project 2025.”

■ Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow envisions how the Constitutional Convention of 1787 really went down: “We need to leave some room in there for a future court to restrict bodily autonomy, voting rights, and intrusive regulations on well-intentioned men of commerce. And gifts from grateful wealthy citizens should be totally legal.”

■ Media columnist Simon Owens: Substack’s becoming a hotbed of local news experimentation—witness two newspaper columnists whose newsletters are generating more income than they made at their old jobs.

■ Actor, comedian, Chicago native and Columbia College grad Jay Johnston faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty to interfering with cops trying to protect the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Mary Schmich: When your father dies

My former colleague Mary Schmich posts occasional column-like entries on Facebook. Here, reprinted with permission, is a recent offering, a reposting of a 2019 column:

When your father dies.

Let the phrase settle for a moment. What words do you hear next?

For anyone whose father has died, finishing the sentence is apt to be easier than reciting the alphabet.

“When your father dies” is the opening phrase of one of my favorite poems, “Shifting the Sun,” and it came to mind recently after a colleague’s father died, just before Father’s Day. It begins:

When your father dies, say the Irish
You lose your umbrella against bad weather

In the next few verses, the poem, by Diana Der-Hovanessian, recounts how different cultures frame what’s lost when your father’s gone for good.

 When your father dies, say the Russians
He takes your childhood with him

That refrain — when your father dies — has been running through my head since I reread “Shifting the Sun” the other day, and I’ve found myself finishing the sentence in different, though less poetic, ways.

Like this:

When your father dies, it doesn’t matter that other people’s fathers have died, that fathers have been dying since human time was born. What matters in the moment of his death is that he was your father. Your one and only. Your loss is unique, profound, yours alone.

When your father dies, people say many things to you, much of it the same thing. Sorry for your loss. Condolences. May he rest in peace. You will not remember words. You will remember kindness.

When your father dies, if you weren’t there with him, you will carry that knowledge forever like a permanent hole in your pocket. You will get used to it, but you’ll always know it’s there.

When your father dies, even if you were with him, you will think of all the things you meant to say, to ask, things you may have said and asked a million times but you’ll want to say them just once more.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Why? What? When? Who exactly are you?

When your father dies, you will remember that time, maybe more than one, that he made you so mad.

When your father dies, you will worry about your mother, who, you are likely to learn, is more resilient than you gave her credit for. This assumes she’s the one left behind, as mothers so often are.

And when your father’s gone, you’ll see your mother from a different angle. You’ll see more clearly how your father helped her, hurt her, made her less and more than she would have been without him. You will see more clearly her power over him.

When your father dies, the small particulars of his life, the kind you barely noticed when he was alive, grow into revelations.

The smell of his aftershave. The style of his boxer shorts. How neatly he arranged his loose change on his bureau before he said his prayers at night.

When your father dies, even if he was grand, you realize how small he was, how human.

When your father dies, you will become more intrigued by the life he built from the childhood he was given.

When your father dies, you have to adjust your place in the world, in your family, your sense of who you are performing for. You wonder if you can. You can.

When your father dies, you discover how others — say, your brothers and sisters — saw him differently.

When your father dies, you start to know him better. “Oh,” you think, a long time later, “now I get it.”

When your father dies, you take to noticing how much you’re like him. It’s not all good, but it’s how you keep him with you.

When your father dies, you wonder what he would be like if he’d lived longer, what he would think if he could see you now. You hope he would be proud.

When your father dies, you will grieve and then, one day you’ll notice your grief has dried up. You may spend weeks with no conscious thought of the man who was once at the center of your universe. You will be relieved and your relief may feel like betrayal.

But every now and then, when the sky is a particular shade of blue, or you spot a man with a familiar build on the street, or you hear the chatter of a ballgame on the radio, you will feel a knot in your chest, and to no one in particular, you’ll say, “Dad.”

Minced Words

Host John Williams invited me, Brandon Pope, Cate Plys and Austin Berg onto this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” to discuss the situation with Joe Biden, proposed redesigns of North Michigan Avenue, violence in Chicago, Proud Boys in blue and the Republican veepstakes. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Read the background bios of some regular panelists here.

Quotables

A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately.

The best way to stay healthy is to have a judgmental doctor — @prufrockluvsong

If he does not (step aside), it will be Biden’s age, and not Trump’s moral and ethical void, that will dominate the rest of this most important campaign and sully the president’s historic legacy. — David Axelrod

Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say that I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. — Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri

I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out. — Donald Trump, on his first NATO summit meeting

(Biden) is absolutely daring the party to try to get rid of him. Positively Trumpian about his crowd sizes -- and what that means. Defiant bordering on arrogant. — Chris Cillizza

Manafort/Jailed, Navarro/Jailed, Weissleberg/Jailed, Cohen/Jailed, Bannon/Jailed, Giuliani/Disbarred. All at the behest of a convicted felon. A convicted felon who is the leading candidate to become President of the United States. What the actual fuck! — Rob Reiner

The fighting spirit and pride and courage that served the country so well four years ago to help Joe Biden win will bring the ticket down this time. He just has to step down. He can’t win. My colleagues need to recognize that a dismissive letter is not going to change any minds. — U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Chicago

I think this race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country. Joe Biden was nine points up at this time last time he was running. Hillary Clinton was five points up. This is the first time in more than 20 years that a Republican president has been up in this part of the campaign. Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide and take with him the Senate and the House. And so, for me, this isn't a question about polling. It's not a question about politics. It's a moral question about the future of our country. And I think it's critically important for us to come to grips with what we face if, together, we put this country on the path of electing Donald Trump again. — Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado

The Democrats can’t keep telling us that democracy itself is on the ballot and then run a candidate whose argument is “as long as I try real hard it’s OK.” — Megan K. Stack

If you don’t like our religion then we don’t want you in our country. — Donald Trump

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character. — Joseph Heller, “Catch-22”

So in summary: Biden refused to say he’d take a cognitive test, refused to say he would consider stepping down if key allies asked him to, said the polls are fake news, and that he wouldn’t fret if he lost as long as he tried his best. This is all Trumpian bullshit. Just madness. — Tyler Austin Harper

[On Trump saying “I wish them well” at the end of his denial that has anything to do with Project 2025 (the MAGA Sharta, remember?) and that he finds some of their proposals “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal": It’s like in WWII when Churchill famously said, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the seas, we shall hope the best man wins.” — Seth Myers

In the two weeks since the debate, it’s the arrogant and small Joe Biden we’ve seen most — hanging on, bragging, defensive, angry, weak. Who else but him? he wonders aloud. Only God could change his mind, he tells us. The stakes for the country are all that matter. The stakes for Joe Biden are beside the point. But it’s worth saying just the same: Joe Biden can leave office as one of the greatest presidents in our lifetimes, who defeated Trump and put his country first at every turn; or he can leave a stubborn old man who allowed hubris and insecurity to destroy his legacy and perhaps our democracy with it. We all have our best and worst selves, scrambling over each other, battling it out in the moments that define us. Where is the Joe Biden we elected? Where is the statesman? — Jon Lovett

Biden’s interview answers are consistent with everything else we’ve seen from him since the catastrophic debate—denial, selfishness, and appalling judgment. — Mona Charen

Getting a lot of “Prigozhin stopping short of Moscow” vibes from Congressional Democrats right now — Dan Amira

Suffering the near-term indignity of stepping down will allow (Biden) to avoid the long-term indignity of being remembered as one of history’s great fools. — Franklin Foer

Remember when Democrats were stunned that so few Republicans had the courage to publicly express what they really thought of Trump and what he was doing to the country and their party? — Eyal Press

I view myself as a bridge, nothing else. There’s an entire generation of leaders (who) are the future of this country. — Joe Biden, March 2020

It is now obvious that Biden has in no way internalized the disaster toward which he is defiantly ambling — Mark Leibovich

The key question is, when that call comes at 2 o'clock in the morning, which candidate will be immediately ready to coddle our enemies, undercut the freedoms of all Americans but women in particular, and abandon decency and democracy? The only man capable of that is Donald Trump. — Neil Steinberg

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The reference is to the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (not the Ninth Symphony, as my poll question errantly said).

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• If I tell you, "Wow, that's crazy," there is a 96% chance I wasn't listening to a word you said. — @nayele18maybe

• I’m sorry I couldn’t hear the story about your camping trip over the sound of my air conditioner. — @Rollinintheseat

• Kicked out of IKEA for scaring people by spinning around in the office chairs exclaiming, "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" — @BrickMahoney

• I’m the reason the strip club has a sign that says, ‘No Outside Sandwiches.’ — @MoMohler

• If humanity is so smart, how come it took 6,000 years after the wheel was invented for someone to put them on a suitcase? — @nikalamity

• PSA: No one wants to see your iPhone photos of fireworks. — @itssherifield

•  Some women seated next to me are gossiping in French, they obviously think I’m some dumb American who doesn’t speak French, and they are correct. — @anylaurie16

• I wonder if the original printing press was always out of magenta. — @funnysnarkyjoke

• "Why buy expensive fireworks when you can make your own with ordinary household chemicals?" I said, and the other patients in the ER agreed. — @JohnLyonTweets

• Wicked Witch: “I’ll get you, and your little dog too!” Toto: “Da fuck I do?” — @dmc1138

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

Usage note:

To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media. And I will continue to call the platform Twitter if only to spite Elon Musk:

On this issue and perhaps this issue alone, I am with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett:

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Good Sports

The No-No Sox

As long as the race remains close — which it may not — I will offer you comparison standings of the 2024 White Sox with the 2003 Detroit Tigers and the 1962 New York Mets, teams that have defined futility for more than 80 years, and the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, the worst team in baseball’s modern era (20th century on).

After 95 games:

The 1916 Philadelphia A’s played a 153-game season and finished 36-117. Out to another decimal place, that’s a winning percentage of .2353. The Sox play in a 162-game era. If they go 38-124, that will be a winning percentage of .2346. So the magic number of victories needed for the Sox to end up with a better winning percentage than the 1916 A’s is now just 12. They’re now on pace to lose 116 games, but starting to get some breathing room in the effort to avoid a history-making 121 loss season.

But they might well trade away today’s top talent in an effort to obtain promising prospects — All-Star pitcher Michael Kopech, who threw a very rare "immaculate inning” on Wednesday, is rumored to be on the block. If he goes, who knows how low this team can go?

If and when the Sox have at least a three-game lead over this ignominious field, I’ll discontinue this weekly feature.

Tune of the Week

The eighth episode in the recently released third season of “The Bear” on Hulu concludes with the sweet, over-the-top 1960’s hit “Baby I Love You” by the Ronettes.

It’s unapologetically sappy and has the familiar drive and basic chord structure of hits from that era.

I can't live without you, I love everything about you
I can't help it if I feel this way
 I'm so glad I found you, I want my arms around you
I love to hear you call my name
Oh, tell me that you feel the same

The single reached No. 24 on the charts — not quite as popular as “Be My Baby,” the signature hit of the group that consisted of Veronica Bennett (later known as Ronnie Spector), her sister Estelle Bennett, and a cousin, Nedra Talley.

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Note: I’ve been opening up Tune of the Week nominations in an effort to bring some newer sounds to the mix. I’m asking readers to use the comments area for paid subscribers or to email me to leave nominations (post-2000 releases, please! Help me combat my weakness for old songs!) along with YouTube links and at least a few sentences explaining why the nominated song is meaningful or delightful to you.

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