The Democratic Party is, as the new parlance has it, “emotionally dysregulated” right now. The mood cycles, while predominantly negative, are resetting themselves by the hour.

He’s staying in! is followed quickly by Pelosi is signaling he’s out! Then, just as fast, there’s no way to get him out so we’d better rally behind him. Which is suddenly supplanted by Oh my God, George Clooney has published a savage op-ed saying Biden was out of it at his fundraiser three weeks ago!

It then occured to people that they were listening to the political wisdom of…George Clooney???? True, he was a flawed but noble doctor on ER, but Clooney was the worst Batman, and his last meaningful contribution to America in any way was the pretty good movie Michael Clayton sixteen years ago, a movie he neither wrote nor directed (you don’t want me to list the movies he’s written and directed, because just remembering their names will be enough to put you to sleep, they’re so boring and second-rate).  The mood shifted yet again when the Bidenites reminded everybody else that Clooney is mad at Joe Biden anyway because Clooney’s loathsome if visually formidable wife helped draft the arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court the administration publicly criticized.

Ah, but do we really believe Clooney is the guy who does things rather than the guy you pay, like Michael Clayton? What master is he truly serving? Then came the next conspiracy theory: the Clooney op-ed is really by Barack Obama, using misdirection to send out the Bat-signal (remember, worst Batman ever) to Democrats that they should open the floodgates and try forcibly to wash that Biden man right out of the country’s hair.

At which point, the scenarios started flowing fast and furious: Biden either has to quit today or he needs to wait a week until the Republican convention is over (it begins Monday) so that the GOP doesn’t have four days to take shots at Kamala Harris. (Don’t worry, the GOP is going to take so many shots at Kamala Harris the convention will make the bank-heist scene in Heat look like an episode of Cocomelon.) That week will somehow give Democrats time to organize an event of a kind that has never before happened in American history: A second round of primaries on an accelerated schedule! Only who’s going to organize dozens of primaries in two weeks? Who prints 35 million ballots? Who’s on the ballots? Who’s running? Where will the debates be?

Or they could just make it an open convention! Yeah, that’s a great idea—with 4,000 delegates at the Democratic convention, of whom it is fair to say 2,000 or so think Biden is way too right wing and think Amal Clooney is too soft on Israel. How many ballots would it take to find a nominee to satisfy the actual activists of the party who work for NGOs and labor unions and would like to see the prisons emptied, illegals naturalized, and the Jewish state wiped off the map? In 1924, it took 103 ballots for the Democratic convention to choose a nominee named Davis. Ever heard of him? Of course not. Calvin Coolidge got 383 electoral votes. My dear friend Bill Kristol thinks Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona would be a great pick. Kelly would win going away at Bill’s convention—if we lived on Earth-2047. We don’t. We live here.

OK, so last night (Wednesday), the momentum had shifted yet again to the notion that somehow it is inevitable Biden will not be the nominee. Until this morning, when the dysregulation came back fast and furious. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos-Factos-Abracadabra poll was released showing the race tied nationally at 46, even though it’s still the case that 85 percent of Americans think Biden is too old to be president and 56 percent of Democrats want him to drop out. The race is tied! That’s what the Biden White House will take from this, since we know Biden said it already earlier this week. It’s not. It’s really not. The battleground states are shifting decisively away from him and states that shouldn’t be in play—like New York and Oregon—just might be.

But today’s news, at least until the Biden press conference at 5:30 pm, is going to be, you know, Biden can still win this thing and people really dislike Trump so hmmmm….

The agony here is all on one side. And it’s not my side. It’s being experienced by people who have spent the past eight years bathing luxuriantly in their own self-infatuated sense of their political virtue as demonstrated by their fixated hatred on all things Trump. That fixation either prevented them from seeing or kept them from admitting or gave them the permission structure for lying about the severity of Joe Biden’s condition. Now they are finding themselves in the choppiest political-emotional waters anyone has experienced in politics since the Republican New Hampshire primary in 2016 began to make it clear to non-revolutionary conservatives that our ideas had been supplanted and our understanding of the political rules was outdated. The people who are suffering today actually thought themselves immune from the self-doubts and sense of despair that gripped people like…me.

I was speaking to a friend, a very serious Catholic, who confessed (sorry) that he was enjoying the spectacle so much he felt guilty for his schadenfreude. I asked him whether this was because he thought his emotion did not befit a Christian. He said yes. I said, well, I don’t have that particular problem. I haven’t had this good a time in years. I hope there are another couple of polls to give Biden hope. That will keep all this going, and keep me entertained. Not much good can come out of any of this, so, just as the doctor told the young Alvy Singer when Alvy said he was depressed because the universe was expanding, “we might enjoy ourselves while we can, hah?”

Film still from Annie Hall (1977), © United Artists (MGM). All Rights Reserved.

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