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What Is Political Writing For? By Osita Nwanevu
KEVIN WHIPPLE
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OT LONG AGO, THE prevailing opinion among political writers was that Joe Biden would probably never be president. Measured against the other candidates in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary field, it was said, he was too old, too personally and politically compromised, and too removed from the debates of the moment to mount anything more than a vanity campaign. Criticisms from Biden’s ideological opponents on the left and on the right could have been expected—but doubts about his viability as a candidate ran deep even among his natural allies in the centrist press. The Atlantic ran anxious pieces about his debate performances and criminal justice record. Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian argued that Biden would struggle to gain traction in a newly “unsentimental and unforgiving” Democratic Party. “Biden’s competition wouldn’t be a lone independent socialist,” he warned. “The Democratic field is expected to be historically large and is likely to feature more than a few candidates with nearly pristine records on the issues that animate the party’s foot soldiers.” And at the New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni all but begged Biden to stay out of the race. “His
party can’t get enough of the word ‘progressive,’ but he’s regressive, symbolizing a step back to an administration past,” he wrote. “Don’t get me wrong: That’s infinitely preferable to the indecent present. But it’s a questionable campaign slogan.” That consensus overestimated the extent to which the ideological and cultural arguments driving online conversation would matter to a majority of voters. While those discussions were influential among a highly engaged portion of the Democratic electorate, it should have been obvious to more analysts that a much larger share of voters would respond to the shock of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump by opting for the most traditional and sociopolitically uninteresting candidate available. The fact that I, recently a Web-first staff writer at The New Yorker and the New Republic, happened to gauge the priorities of the offline electorate correctly hasn’t been of much comfort to me in the time since. As with Trump’s victory in 2016, the outcome of the 2020 Democratic primary and Biden’s ascent to the presidency raise deep, existential questions about who and what political punditry—and online political writing in particular—is supposed to be for.
