I see little sign here that the liberal establishment truly acknowledges the failures that led to the Biden election debacle. There must be a reckoning
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othing is more insufferable than someone saying “I told you so”; so please forgive me for being insufferable. On 29 September 2023, after a couple of months spent in the US, I published a column that was well summarised in its Guardian headline: “Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0”. We can never definitely say “what would have happened if …?”, but there’s a very good chance that had Biden cleared the way for a Democratic primary in autumn 2023 the strongest candidate could have defeated Trump. The entire world would have been spared the disaster now unfolding.
“No use crying over spilt milk,” you may say. Yes, but it’s always worth learning lessons for the future. I’m back in the US now, and a recent poll for the Wall Street Journal found that 63% of voters hold an unfavourable view of the Democratic party. To put it mildly, the Democrats have a way to go.
So what, given all that is happening and everything we now know, are the right lessons? The point of mentioning my old column is not to boast of some special insider insight into Washington high politics; the point is precisely that I had none. It was just obviously crazy to put up a visibly old and frail candidate who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. For comparison, the leaders of the Soviet Union who we think of as the epitome of decrepit gerontocracy were, at their respective moments of unlamented demise, 75 (Leonid Brezhnev), 69 (Yuri Andropov) and 73 (Konstantin Chernenko).
