CLEVELAND -- People all over the country are wringing their hands and asking the same question:
How’d we get here?
How, in a nation of almost 342 million souls, did our choice for president devolve into a contest between a doddering old guy and a man whom many consider to be a dangerously unhinged blowhard?
It’s a question with a thousand theoretical answers, but I’ve got a couple of observations:
For one thing, our news media failed us, miserably.
The men and women who run our newspaper and broadcast newsrooms, the people who are supposed to be dedicated to bringing us the facts “without fear or favor,” in the words of New York Times patriarch Adolph Ochs, generally forfeited that responsibility. Too many of them became dedicated instead to protecting President Joe Biden, in the name of making sure that Donald Trump would not win another term in the White House.
That was never more clear than in the aftermath of the Trump/Biden debate on CNN 17 days ago.
Since then, Biden’s performance has been variously described by these very news operations as disastrous, alarming, catastrophic, painful, decrepit and infirm, among much else. Biden supporters, in the press and elsewhere, are shocked and dismayed. They have been running for the exits, as a rising cacophony of progressive voices demand that Biden step aside – or be thrown aside.
My question: Where have they been?
Biden, as I write this, is having none of it, insisting that he simply had a bad night and is fully capable of charging on.
But I’ll tell you the truth. I could not force myself to watch the debate – in the same way I look away when I pass a car crash. I knew what would happen. Trump would embarrass his supporters by filling the air with lies and bombast. And Biden would appear so pitiable that all I could do would be to hope that none of the country’s enemies were watching.
I did record it, though, for later viewing, in case something happened that required watching, and later saw enough to convince me that I’d been only partly right.
Trump, for once, generally allowed his opponent’s performance to speak for itself. And Biden was even worse than I expected. All you could do was feel sorry for the man.
Advancing age is one thing. What we saw June 27 was something else. What that is, we still don’t know – but it was someone clearly incapable of doing the job of president. If you’ll forgive me, the thing that comes most powerfully to mind is the old Casablanca cliché: How on earth could anyone have been “shocked?”
I’ll tell you how. Because the newsfolk didn’t do their jobs. People who had been paying only tangential attention, relying on their news sources to tell them if the misgivings about Biden’s age and mental capacity were anything more than partisan sniping, were surprised at how much he appeared to have deteriorated, because they didn’t know. And they didn’t know because their news sources didn’t tell them.
It’s not whataboutism to observe that if the candidate who is failing both physically and mentally had been someone most journalists didn’t like, it would have been the big, ongoing story for the last two years. They would be hammering away at his failure to hold press conferences, his shuffling gait and the diminishing acuity that seems clear. But Biden’s political allies were in full denial, writing it off as physical ailments and a long-term speech impediment, and most of the media let them get away with it.
Exhibit A is a piece published July 4 on the New York Magazine’s Intelligencer website by Olivia Nuzzi, the magazine’s Washington correspondent. In it, she chronicles what she has seen while covering the White House and talking to Biden’s handlers … how he reads from a teleprompter for even informal gatherings, is whisked away before anyone can ask him questions, how he sometimes cannot engage in even the simplest conversations and fails to recognize people such as Nuzzi herself whom he has known for years. And the concern over who is actually making presidential decisions.
The piece is behind a paywall so you might not be able to access it, but it only costs $4 for a trial subscription. If you’re among those who don’t think Biden should drop out, or if you plan to vote for him anyway, it’ll be the most important four bucks you spend this week.
We should have been seeing this information for the last many months, if not the last couple of years. Shame on the reporters who saw it every day and kept it to themselves until it was on full display June 27.
If they had not, chances are there’d be some more functional – and more electable – Democrat running for president.
My second observation is about Trump.
You might recall that, in the aftermath of Trump’s surprising (to some) victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Editor Dean Baquet, both since retired, combined on a mea culpa basically apologizing for missing the biggest story of the election.
“Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” they asked, before pledging “to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.”
Those questions echoed through newsrooms around the country, but I’m not sure many of them made good on their promises to try to better understand what moves people who don’t live on the coasts or in other bastions of the cultural elite.
The attraction of Donald Trump, flawed though he is, is no mystery.
He gives strong and outraged voice to the many millions of Americans who see unchecked immigrants streaming across our borders, who worry about our diminishing military strength, who worry about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, who are suffering from the inflation caused by the massive COVID giveaways, who think it’s crazy to let biological boys play on girls’ sports teams and use girls’ bathrooms, who resent placing sexually explicit books in children’s libraries, and who are smarting under the many other liberal policies unleashed by the Biden administration.
If you want to know why such a man as Trump, crude and loutish though he is, enjoys widespread support and has a chance to regain the White House – that’s why.
And despite the vows of Sulzberger, Baquet and others to do better, that’s the piece that so many journalists and other critics keep missing: Addressing those issues is more important to so many in the heartland than worrying about the dangers of another Trump presidency that so many on the left fear.
If Nikki Haley had been elected to address those sensible issues as the Republican nominee, this race would be over. Regrettably, she will not, and it isn’t.
So that’s how we got here. Biden vs. Trump. For now.
There’s a lot of blame to go around, but here’s what I think: Biden is the only Democrat Trump can beat. And no matter what he says now, it’s hard to imagine that Biden will still be the Democratic candidate come November.
Republicans had their chance, and they blew it. Will the Democrats blow theirs?
Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
To reach Ted Diadiun: [email protected]
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