Give Joe Some Room

If it's time to withdraw he will--and in the process perhaps reshape our politics

I said two things in yesterday’s newsletter—that I was feeling ‘existential angst’ at the prospect of the debate, and that this year’s contest was the election of our lives. My guess would have been that I’d feel the same today—that we’d witness an inconclusive 90 minutes that would change nothing about the race and keep us suspended in the kind of limbo/dread that’s been the mood of people who care about the country and the planet for many months now.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the tectonic plates shifted. And in ways that open up the possibility not just of decisively defeating Trumpism, but of pulling the country out of the polarized death spiral we’ve fallen into. But it’s going to take a while to play out, I think—time that we should grant Joe Biden, who’s at one of those hard, interesting, decisive points that come in the course of a life and of a nation.

What happened of course was that Biden looked feeble. Yes, Trump lied with his usual feral energy, and yes the CNN moderators were utterly inept. But both those things were givens. What wasn’t a given was Biden’s performance. He lacked the agility and the poise to handle Trump’s onslaught, and it wasn’t close. The single easiest question for Biden should be abortion—polling shows people detest the end of Roe. But here’s how Biden handled it:

“I supported Roe v Wade, which had three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.”

That’s not okay.

I’m a Biden supporter, I helped write Third Act’s endorsement of Biden, if Biden is the nominee I’ll work as hard as I can to make sure he wins—I spent yesterday afternoon planning out campaigning trips to Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania in the final weeks of the election, because I think older voters will be key, and that we can rally them to defeat Trump. (And nothing I write here speaks for Third Act, or anyone else but me). An ineffective Biden would be a hundred times better (and a hundred times less worse, which might be more important) than any version of Donald Trump.

But again, that’s not enough. Politics is about changing people’s minds, channeling their intuitions, organizing their moods. Communication is the main tool for that. And Biden is no longer a consistently effective communicator. He’s got good people around him, he can and has made wise decisions, I am not worried about the operation of the Republic under his care. But clearly he can no longer count on his ability to rally Americans. He can no longer reliably summon people to action, appeal to their better angels, let them share a vision of a workable future;

There’s no shame in that. Most people never have that ability. Biden himself has never been a great speechifier, but across his long career he has always been able to communicate an effective in-your-corner regular-guy I’ve-got-this message. He’s been reassuring. He’s been a father figure, trending towards cool grandfather. But eventually you’re a great grandfather, and your hard-working days are behind you. Which is fine. You still have plenty to contribute, but that contribution is in the form of counsel, not leadership; it’s in the form of support, not of dominance.

He’ll be reluctant to admit it, because we all are reluctant to admit, even to ourselves, the things we lose as we age. (One of the odd secrets of aging is that you really don’t feel older from the inside). And perhaps he doesn’t need to admit it yet—we can wait a few days for the polling data to emerge, and perhaps it will show nothing. But I doubt it.

And I think Biden will get this. He’s a patriot, he’s spent his life in service, he clearly understands that the country is more important than any person. So he will steel himself to the task of watching the tape of last night’s debate, and he won’t make excuses. And then he may say ‘I’ve done my part well—I rescued America from Trump and from covid. And now I have one great duty left, which is to pass on the reins. So I’m freeing up my delegates to choose someone else.’ That’s not easy to do—save for the sad example of LBJ, no one’s ever really had to. It will take courage, and self-knowledge, and it will take time. But there is some time, thank heaven. Give him some time. It’s not that far from someone deciding that they need to leave their home and move into a retirement community; it’s an admission that one time is past and another coming.

But there’s the chance for this to be not just a defensive decision, but a proud and game-changing one—perhaps our best chance for getting out of the wearying rut of our contemporary politics.

Let’s say those delegates (perhaps with a bit of prodding from Biden) choose someone who America doesn’t know particularly well. There’s plenty of possibilities, but just for the sake of the argument my choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, because she’s progressive and normal at the same time, and because she’s very popular in her upper Midwest state. She’d carry it, and likely she’d play well in the demographically similar states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and that will be that.

But there’s more. She, or someone like her, could be an actual new voice—a new chance, a new door opening. And it feels like that is what we desperately need—our politics have grown stale and brittle and carping; the same people at the forefront. (That’s why, by the way, I think it would be noble of Kamala Harris to take a pass too—we need something new). Whitmer, for instance, could say—’these MAGA guys literally tried to kidnap and kill me. But I stood them down easily, and I didn’t let it get to me. Because we have work to do.’ That would be exciting. We need exciting. We need new. We need a door out of the emotional prison that our country has become. And now we have, unexpectedly, a moment that might give us that door.

It’s not like we won’t have time to adjust to someone new—our current news cycle guarantees we’d know all about a Whitmer or a whoever within days, and we wouldn’t have time to grow tired of her before November. She or someone like her would unleash the energy of the possible, at a moment when in fact we have huge possibilities. On energy, for instance: Biden has done a beautiful job of working the IRA through Congress, but the polling shows he’s never managed to make its importance sink in. He couldn’t explain its power last night, couldn’t summon people to a future that runs on the sun. That’s a crucial task, a way of giving young people hope as they face a daunting future. Not just young people—really, most Americans keep saying they’d like a fresher choice for our future. Suddenly there’s a moment when that could happen.

People keep saying ‘Biden won’t step aside, so we need to support him.’ And if he doesn’t we must. But the very thing that make him worth supporting—an old-fashioned commitment to something more than himself—is the thing that may convince him (and his wife, who actually loves him) to do the bold and interesting thing. To do the thing that could mark a new moment in our political life. If Biden chooses to stay in, so be it—I’ll work my heart out for him, and ungrudgingly. But even if he manages to win, we’ll still be stuck in the same poisonous paralysis we inhabit now. Someone sometime has to break us out of this stalemate, and it might as well be that right man for this moment, good old Joe Biden.

Trumpism is selfishness—that is its parts and that is its sum. With a powerful act of selflessness Biden can break the evil spell that selfishness has cast. It would be a remarkable thing for an old man to do, and a hell of a way to cap a career that began in the 1960s. Ask what you can do for your country!

In other energy and climate news:

The day’s other bad news—though perfectly predictable—came this morning when the Supreme Court gutted the administrative state. Its thoroughly corrupt ruling in the Chevron case (Clarence Thomas had been on the other side, until he took up with billionaires) means that we’ll need a far more engaged Congress to have any chance of making the laws we need. (One more reason for a breakout from the closed system our politics has become). To quote the Times:

The decision is a major victory in a decades-long campaign by conservative activists to shrink the power of the federal government, limiting the reach and authority of what those activists call “the administrative state.”

The court’s opinion could make it easier for opponents of federal regulations to challenge them in court, prompting a rush of new litigation, while also injecting uncertainty into businesses and industries.

“If Americans are worried about their drinking water, their health, their retirement account, discrimination on the job, if they fly on a plane, drive a car, if they go outside and breathe the air — all of these day-to-day activities are run through a massive universe of federal agency regulations,” said Lisa Heinzerling, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University. “And this decision now means that more of those regulations could be struck down by the courts.”

+Here’s a model of good investigative reporting, from Joan Meiners in the Arizona Republic. She’s covering plans for a new gas-powered peaker plant in the Mohave Valley, and it’s a fine example of digging enough to really understand the issues in play

+You know who’s a smart person? Cory Doctorow, who has been relentlessly explaining how big tech ‘enshittifies’ its products for years, downgrading their function in the effort to make more money. Now he turns his gaze to EVS

An EV is a rolling computer in a fancy case with a squishy person inside of it. While this can sound scary, there are lots of cool implications for this. For example, your EV could download your local power company's tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking. You can start them with your phone. Your repair technician can run extensive remote diagnostics on them and help you solve many problems from the road. New features can be delivered over the air.

That's just for starters, but there's so much more in the future. After all, the signal virtue of a digital computer is its flexibility. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing complete, universal, Von Neumann machine, which can run every valid program. If a feature is computationally tractable – from automated parallel parking to advanced collision prevention – it can run on a car.

The problem is that this digital flexibility presents a moral hazard to EV manufacturers. EVs are designed to make any kind of unauthorized, owner-selected modification into an IP rights violation ("IP" in this case is "any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers or competitors")

EVs are also designed so that the manufacturer can unilaterally exert control over them or alter their operation. EVs – even more than conventional vehicles – are designed to be remotely killswitched in order to help manufacturers and dealers pressure people into paying their car notes on time…

This is "twiddling" – unilaterally and irreversibly altering the functionality of a product or service, secure in the knowledge that IP law will prevent anyone from twiddling back by restoring the gadget to a preferred configuration

The answer, obviously, is not internal combustion engines. The answer is good technology designed and regulated so that it helps people and the planet.