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.

Bari Weiss is even more straightforward about the media’s gaslighting role:

It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “fake news,” and, most recently, “cheapfakes.”

Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him -- by then a former president well into his eighties -- of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance? 

What Now?

Whether Biden willingly withdraws or not, his poor polling suggests the Democrats are in a very tough position, and I see no bright choices available to them.

A couple of days ago there was a rumor that Barack Obama was in a private meeting with Biden urging him to withdraw. But Obama scotched that in a tweet reiterating his support and dismissing the debate as a “bad night” which anyone, even he, could have had. (I guess he’s hoping for yet a fourth term running the country, albeit once again under cover of a vastly diminished Biden.) I see no indication of his willingness to withdraw.

The truth is if Biden doesn’t willingly withdraw, the Democrats are in big trouble, and even if he does -- at this late stage -- they still are. The problems are legal, political, and financial.

The Heritage Oversight project has set their sights on three contentious swing states where they believe taking Biden off the Democratic ticket would not allow anyone else to replace him: Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. 

Wisconsin does not allow withdrawal from the ballot for any reason besides death. 

In Nevada, no changes can be made to the ballot after 5 p.m. on the fourth Friday in June of an election year or 'a nominee dies or is adjudicated insane or mentally incompetent.' 

If Biden were to withdraw less than 60 days before the election [in] Georgia his name will remain on the ballot but no votes will be counted. 

In Texas, the two party's nominees have until the 74th day before the election to withdraw from the ballot. Some states, like South Carolina, do not allow candidates to withdraw for political reasons.

If he does not withdraw, Nate Silver is right -- he “will have to survive what will be both relentless media coverage and unsparing Republican attacks against his age on every slow news day between now and November.” (The media, after all, has been exposed and must try to cover its nakedness.)

Charles Lipson points out more reasons the Democrats are facing a deluge.

① Pres. Biden has already won enough votes to clinch the nomination. That means you cannot get rid of him unless he agrees to step down. Or Jill Biden does.

② There is no coherent party leadership to force him out, much less pick a replacement.  That’s a big change from the two parties’ structure a few decades ago.

③ Because there is no consensus replacement, there would be a fight at the convention. That would hurt Democrats up and down the ballot.

There are multiple plausible contenders. Even if Biden drops out, it will be hard to coalesce around a single replacement candidate. A fight for that spot would be extremely damaging to the party’s chances up and down the ballot in November, and it would be even worse because it comes so late in the cycle.

④ As VP, Kamala Harris is heir apparent, but she's unpopular. Really, really unpopular, even in her party. The dreadful number two in the White House stands in the way of an effective replacement. She will naturally demand to step up as the presidential candidate. But she is a constituency of two: herself and her husband. The rest of the party, indeed the rest of the country, doesn’t want her. They loathe the prospect. They’d rather send her to Central America to find the root causes of the immigration crisis… and have her stay there.

⑤ Replacing Harris would alienate a crucial Democratic constituency.   If the Democrats manage to figure out a way to ditch Kamala as the nominee, they will pay a very heavy price. They will surely lose a constituency they must have to win: black women voters. They won’t vote for Trump; they won’t vote at all. It doesn’t matter that Governors Whitmer (of Michigan), Shapiro (of Pennsylvania) or Polis (of Colorado) would all be stronger candidates than Kamala or Joe in the general election, if they had won a fair primary fight months ago. That didn’t happen. Joe stayed in and nobody could force him out. (Did Obama try? Seems like he didn’t, or at least didn’t try very hard.) Mr. Slick Hair from California is a sure loser. And a convention fight would be a bloody mess, yielding only a Pyrrhic victor.

Under the 12^th Amendment Newsom and Harris can be on the same ticket only if the California voters pick one of them -- of course, as a practical matter the vice president -- from another state, which means a Republican and that seems unlikely.

As to finances, Biden has hosed in a lot of campaign cash, but he can’t turn that over to any other candidate, only to a super PAC, so any new contender would have to ramp up fundraising fast and would be fishing for it in a rather dry river.

The New York Times ignored the debate entirely on its front page, maybe to spare its loyal readers further shame, but the editors asked Biden to withdraw. It’s five months to the election, seven months to the inauguration, during which the nation’s enemies must certainly smell weakness.

A major campaign charge by the Democrats against Trump is that if he wins, he’ll be a dictator, instituting lawfare against his enemies, censoring the media, and engaging in intelligence meddling. Wherever did they get that idea? (From them.) To the contrary they should find some relief in that the Supreme Court just reduced the power of the executive in LoperBright Enterprises v. Raimondo, restoring legislative actions to the Congress, and in Fischer v. U.S. excised the power of prosecutors like Jack Smith to prosecute people for prosaic conduct using “novel interpretations” of the law.