The Biden-Replacement Operation
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When I reached the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville via text near the end of last night’s presidential debate, his despair virtually radiated through my phone.
“I tried, man, I tried,” Carville wrote to me.
A few minutes later, when the debate was over, we talked by phone. Carville has been one of the loudest and most persistent Democrats arguing that President Joe Biden was too old to run again. Carville, who managed Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and is still, at 79, an influential political analyst, had tempered that criticism lately—though more out of resignation than conviction. His apprehension about Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump had never really diminished in my previous conversations with him, but he’d seemed to accept as inevitable that the party would not reject a president who wanted to seek a second term.
But last night, Carville, like other Democrats I spoke with, sounded almost shell-shocked, as he searched for words to describe Biden’s scattered, disoriented, and disjointed debate performance.
“What is there to fucking say?” Carville
