More than enough blame to go around

It seems increasingly likely that President Biden will bow out of the 2024 race, under extreme pressure. It's a damn mess, and there's plenty of blame to go around.

The media

The chatter around Biden's age is deeply unfair and represents the media once again doing the bidding of Republicans. Republicans have spent Biden's entire time in office trying to paint him as incoherent and impaired. Meanwhile, Biden has put together an extremely successful presidency, showing that this story has – at least through his first three years in office – been a partisan fiction. Anyone in the media presenting this as an organic upswelling of concern has to reckon with that long record of Republican attacks centered on exactly this issue.

Biden misspeaks (billion vs. trillion) and immediately corrects himself and it's headline news, used to bolster the idea that he's cognitively impaired. Even though every single one of us comes out with misstatements like that on the regular, and the swift move to correct them shows that Biden is aware of what he's saying. 

The double standard is alive and on steroids, meanwhile. I'm no expert, but as a layperson, if the public statements of one of the presidential candidates suggest cognitive impairment … well, it's not Biden.

High-profile Democrats

Anyone who was in a position to try to influence Biden's decision to run for reelection two years ago, or one year ago, and did not strongly convey to him that he should not run and would not have their support, needs to shut the hell up. You had your chance and you didn't take it and turning around way too late in the game is on you.

If the big-name Democrats now trying to push Biden out have serious reason to believe he has shown a rapid decline over the past, say, year, they've still radically mishandled their response with the successive waves of vague, hand-wringing leaks that have done absolutely no one in the party any favors over recent weeks. If somehow Biden has had such a rapid decline that he is genuinely incapacitated but no one could possibly have foreseen it, it still needed to be a closed-door discussion. And if no one had the fortitude to be as forceful in private as that moment required, again, that's on them. 

Biden has reportedly not responded in a friendly way to attempts to pressure him privately to drop out. (So surprising, right?) But if you're a Democrat in Congress or in some other way a powerful person whose reservations the media is eager to quote, suck it up. Either stand by the guy because you know that regardless of the media coverage he's fully competent and the attacks are unfair, or be extremely clear with him in private that you do not think he's up to the job. And if he won't listen, have the integrity to be straightforward in your public statements, under your own name.

The Biden campaign

The campaign had a window of opportunity to lock down elite Democratic support and get the party to move in a unified way to shut down the media narrative. It failed at that. Granted, the campaign faced a media establishment frothing at the bit to find a way to cover for Donald Trump and create controversy around Democrats, as well as high-profile Democrats willing to go along with that. But changing the story on things like this is part of the job of campaigning. It has not been confidence-inspiring to watch the response over the last several weeks – publicly in the media or what we can discern about the unsuccessful efforts to pull the party together behind Biden.

President Joe Biden

He almost certainly shouldn't have run again, however competent a president he currently is. Once he decided to run, he needed to have a strong plan to deal with exactly the narrative he's now not dealing with very well. 

Biden could have acted as a transitional president, making room for new stars to rise. He should have solicited input from a wide range of Democrats about what to do in 2024 and taken it seriously, without defensiveness. 

All that said, right now what he faces is the absolute brokenness of U.S. political media and cravenness on the part of many members of his own party. It's genuinely unfair given his accomplishments as president and the ongoing public evidence that he is significantly sharper and more coherent than his opponent.

And for the record ...

Anyone pushing an open convention or a secret committee consisting of Oprah and whoever else to come up with a new candidate should sit right down. If it's not Biden, it must be Vice President Kamala Harris.