Biden’s Fitness for Office and Siddharth Kara’s “Cobalt Red”
Greetings friends & enemies, this is the first summer edition of the newsletter. I hope your barbecues have endless ribs and all the best flavors of La Croix.
I want to touch briefly on the controversies over Biden’s fitness for office. Then, talk about the book Cobalt Red and close by encouraging you to read two pieces that I plan to write about in the next edition of the newsletter.
I like Joe Biden as much as I like any politician alive.
In 2008, I rode my bike with a gaggle of friends to see him deliver a campaign speech at a packed Cheney Stadium in Tacoma. This was the peak of the scrappy Uncle Joe era, at one point he dramatically ripped off his jacket as he yelled, “folks, in my neighborhood, where I came from, if ya gotta say something to a man, you look him in the eye and say it” as he ranted about comments the McCain campaign was making to the press.
He was at the top of his game.
In 2016, I met then VP Biden and Dr. Biden as a part of the State Teacher of the Year program. I had an extended conversation with him and his wife during a reception at the vice presidential residence, the Naval Observatory. He was energetic and funny. He mingled, cracking jokes and taking selfies with teachers and their families long after he was scheduled to appear.
The Joe Biden of that October rally and the 2016 reception ain’t the Joe Biden of today.
For reasons explained only by male ego, Joe Biden is 81 years-old, running for re-election, and thinks he should be the President of the United States until January 2029. But most of the country thinks he's too old to continue governing.
This is a known-known.
Three-fourths of the respondents and sixty-nine percent of the Democrats in an August 2023 AP Poll (see below) said as much, but when you point that out, people act like you just tried to cancel the release of an upcoming Marvel movie.
Biden should've announced his intent to be a one-term president after his victory in 2020, but his pride got in the way. In February, New York Times Columnist Ezra Klein wrote a very courageous piece that called a spade a spade, suggesting Biden step aside and not seek re-nomination. It addressed Biden’s clear decline, his upside down polling numbers (currently 37% approval; 57% disapproval), and how he seemed to be hiding from the public.
To that February date, Biden had given only one-fourth as many public interviews as President Obama had by the same time in his presidency and one-third as many as President Trump. You’ll recall Trump was infamous for his executive time (up to nine hours a day) watching cable news and tweeting from inside the Whitehouse. Klein noted that Democrats were telling themselves the more voters saw of Trump, the more they’d like Biden, but he cautioned it could work the other way:
Democrats keep telling themselves, when they look at the polls, that voters will come back to Biden when the campaign starts in earnest and they begin seeing more of Trump, when they have to take what he is and what it would mean for him to return seriously.
But that is going to go both ways. When the campaign begins in earnest, they will also see much more of Joe Biden. People who barely pay attention to him now, they will be watching his speeches. They will see him on the news constantly. Will they actually like what they see? Will it comfort them?
No. People did not like what they saw in the debate performance and did not feel comforted by it.
The reaction in the aftermath is panic by many and denial by insiders and Biden loyalists. This has been covered exhaustively elsewhere but there’s one part I can’t get over: You can't have it both ways. You can’t tell the country this election is to “save democracy” and then run a candidate that three-fourths of the country thinks should be gardening or off building homes with Jimmy Carter. It’s a losing proposition and fails all logic tests and, most importantly, it's a damn good way to lose an election we supposedly can't afford to lose.
Some have compared the public and media response to Biden’s decline to the “but her emails Clinton” frenzy in 2016. I think that's disingenuous. This is about the ability of a clearly diminished man to govern in a pivotal election, something he seems unfit to do.
Of note, Klein put out an episode of his podcast this week that is functionally “The Case for Kamala” that I think is worth your time and attention.
**On Cobalt Red:** In the last edition of the newsletter, I shared my summer reading list. I finished Cobalt Red while we were in Mexico.
Cobalt Red is an incredible book. It is an exploration of the misery driven by the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a key input for nearly all rechargeable lithium ion batteries. The mining techniques are pre-industrial and largely completed using hand tools in open-pit mines and tunnels. The conditions are horrific. Child labor is common practice. Worker daily wages are in the single digits. And accidents in tunnels are frequent and often covered up by the mining companies.
Like the gig workers of wealthier states, the mining firms do not employ workers directly, but instead they operate as independent contractors, often supervised by armed gunmen and mercenaries. Whatever mental picture you have from reading this, it's worse.
Moreover, the great powers have actively destabilized successive governments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The country has had only one peaceful transition since decolonization in the 1960s. This terrible tally includes the torture, murder, and dissolving in acid of the country’s first Prime Mininster Patrice Lumumba by Western backed interests for courting the Soviets during the Cold War (see below).
At some point though, it hit me that this is not a new story.
This book could be called Coffee Red, or Natural Gas Red, or Bing Cherries Red. The story of modern globalization and capitalism is a story of disadvantaged people in less industrialized nations working in extractive industries, making poverty wages, living unhealthy lives, and being exposed to toxins and environments that have been outlawed in wealthier states.
I find myself sitting with that thought more than usual since I finished the book.
Next newsletter, I plan to write about two pieces that I feel went under the radar: teenage influencers with adult male audiences on Instagram and the Pentagon’s anti-vaxx campaign in the Philippines.
Stay cool this week and go Sounders!
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.