For weeks now, everyone in the country has been asking the same question: Is it Joever? Ever since Joe Biden's alarming performance in his debate with Donald Trump on June 27, the movement to get him to exit the presidential race and make way for a new Democratic candidate has only intensified. Biden's donors have abandoned him, his political allies continue to get more bold in their calls for him to step aside, and every day the question grows more urgent: Is it Joever??
The media coverage of all of this has been quite maddening, but in a way that is almost comforting in its familiarity. Every day brings a new set of vague and contradictory reports from beltway insiders. We're told that Biden is "soul searching" and "appearing to accept" that he can't continue the race, only to then be told that "no decision has been made" while Biden himself insists that his campaign will resume shortly. The latest report from The New York Times has Biden puttering around his beach house with COVID-19 while seething over how many of his political allies have abandoned him, and cites "people close" to Biden who say the President is "increasingly accepting that he may not be able to [continue], and some have begun discussing dates and venues for a possible announcement that he is stepping aside." Two paragraphs down, from that same story:
Yet Mr. Biden bristles at pressure and those pushing him risk getting his back up and prompting him to remain after all. Two people familiar with his thinking said he had not changed his mind as of Friday afternoon.
The New York Times
This is just political reporting delivered in the style of sports reporting. What these reporters are bringing us—second- and third-hand estimations from unnamed sources of what's going on inside of an 81-year-old man's head—is no different than the slop that Adrian Wojnarowski, Shams Charania, and Fabrizio Romano serve up whenever they turn what's fed to them by agents, front-office underlings, and various hangers-on into reports about free agency, trades, and player transfers. The uncanny language of the sports scoopster has even begun to seep its way into stories about Biden, due to the syntactical gymnastics that need to be performed in order to conceal sources and hedge every assertion. Though we haven't yet gotten anything worthy of a Shamsy nomination from those on the Biden beat, headlines like "People Close to Biden Say He Appears to Accept He May Have to Leave the Race" demonstrate a lot of potential.
While we are still waiting for any of these reporters to stick their neck out with a definitive, un-hedged report—who will be brave enough to go Jon Morosi on us and insist that Biden is on a flight to Toronto?—others have stepped up to provide another important ingredient to the scoopsters' saga: takes.
In sports, there's a symbiosis between the take-slinger and the scoopster. Part of the reason ESPN wants Adrian Wojnarowski on TV saying things like, It is my understanding, based on conversations I've had with people in the front office, that the Golden State Warriors are seeking to make alterations to the roster ahead of the 2024-25 season, with an eye towards maximizing their window of contention, is so that Kendrick Perkins can then immediately turn to the camera and say, If the Golden State Warriors want to be serious about winning, what they need to to do is trade Steph Curry and Draymond Green to the Phoenix Suns for Kevin Durant and Devin Booker.
The New York Times, having recognized the importance of this vaguely-sourced-report-to-uninformed-opinion alley-oop, turned a segment of its opinion page today over to none other than West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. Under the headline "How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats," the man who once created a show premised on the question, "What if a news anchor was a Republican who had swag?" laid out his big, bold idea for saving not just the Democratic party, but the country itself.
The problem in the real world is that there isn’t a Democrat who is polling significantly better than Mr. Biden. And quitting, as heroic as it may be in this case, doesn’t really put a lump in our throats.
But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.
At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.
Aaron Sorkin
OK! Let's hear him out:
Does Mr. Romney support abortion rights? No. Does he want to aggressively raise the minimum wage, bolster public education, strengthen unions, expand transgender rights and enact progressive tax reform? Probably not. But is he a cartoon thug who did nothing but watch TV while the mob he assembled beat and used Tasers on police officers? No. The choice is between Donald Trump and not-Trump, and the not-Trump candidate needs only one qualification: to win enough votes from a cross section of Americans to close off the former president’s Electoral College path back to power.
Aaron Sorkin
This is a masterful performance. Skip Bayless goes to bed every night praying that god will grant him the ability to come up with a sequence of words as powerfully deranged as, "Does Mr. Romney support abortion rights? No. Does he want to aggressively raise the minimum wage, bolster public education, strengthen unions, expand transgender rights and enact progressive tax reform? Probably not. But..." Stephen A. Smith would cower in the face of an opinion this ill-conceived and confidently delivered.
Hopefully, for all of our sakes, the question of whether or not it is Joever will be settled in the next few days. If this drags on, however, then the political media must be prepared to provide us with the depth and style of coverage such a story demands. I want Sorkin, James Carville, and Shannon Sharpe seated at a desk, debating the merits of Aaron Rodgers becoming Kamala Harris's running mate, and I want it yesterday.
Update (2:56 p.m. ET): It's Joever!
