What Now that the Gaslighting is Over?

In the famous psychological drama, Gaslight, it took a Scotland Yard detective to prove the heroine had been driven half-mad by a gaslighting husband. All it took for us to see how we had been deceived was a CNN debate. Who was the villain? How much was the American public the victim of gaslighting designed to dispel the notion that President Biden was mentally and physically unfit to hold the office of president? Let me count the ways.

The Villains

Jeremy Carl is on target about some of the villains. He says the party apparatchiks, and more specifically the Biden apparatchiks, were responsible for agreeing to the debate under terms they thought would be sure to help in hiding Biden’s decline:

They wouldn’t enjoy anywhere near the same power and access with his successor. For better or worse, their fates are tied to Biden specifically. They had the debate early because they knew that while Biden was not in great shape, they had drunk the Kool-Aid and convinced themselves, at least to some degree, of the lies they have been telling for years to the American people about his mental state. They thought that if they worked with the most favorable rules, on the most favorable network with the most favorable moderators, and gave Biden a full week to prep, they would be able to get through it and even if they didn’t “win” it would be far enough from the election that voters would ignore a mediocre performance. They were not counting on what a disaster it would be to have Biden fully unmasked 1:1 vs. a competent and energetic opponent. Yes, Biden’s performance was such a disaster that it’s tempting to think “this was all planned” but that’s only if you ignore the levels of self-deception, lying and magical thinking that have dominated the Democrat party for years now.

(Agreeing to split screen coverage really helped disclose the choice was between a vigorous candidate and one on his last legs.)

To be sure, they were hardly alone in hiding Biden’s decline. Both Nate Silver and Bari Weiss have additional candidates.

Nate Silver says:

Biden has been graded on an incredibly generous curve, like after his substantively fine but poorly-delivered State of the Union address. And the White House has been playing hide-the-ball, from Biden’s declining to do a Super Bowl interview to reducing the number of debates from three to two to using executive privilege to block the release of the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur — who concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and was pilloried for it, even though Hur had been appointed by the White House’s own Attorney General, resistance hero Merrick Garland.

White House staffers who unskew the polls showing Biden trailing, charlatans selling you “hopium,” columnists who predicted (!) that Trump was going to drop out of the debate (!!) — if you’re a Democrat, you should be angry at these people for putting you in this predicament. The same goes for special interest groups who insisted that Kamala Harris ought to be VP — against Biden’s initial instincts — even though she’d just run one of the most underperforming campaigns in primary history. Without that, Democrats would have a better set of options, or Biden might not have run again in the first place.

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