This afternoon, we had a very spirited conversation with journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the authors of Original Sin — a conversation that we realize a lot of readers of The Ink didn’t want us to have (we know, because you told us so before and during the event).
The book, Tapper and Thompson made very clear, may be about Joe Biden’s decline and the effort White House insiders made to hide it, at a terrible cost to the country, but it’s about something bigger. And that’s not just the problem of our gerontocracy, but on an even larger scale, the failure on the part of both political parties and the media to do the kind of self-reflection that makes growth and progress possible. And if the Democratic Party had been able to come to that kind of reckoning, Tapper and Thompson argue through reporting, we wouldn’t have Trump in office now.
As Tapper told us, “A party that is only able to criticize the other side but not look within itself is one that is going to have a hard time winning independent voters or winning back disillusioned Democrats. And you can’t win an election that way.”
Say what you will about the book’s timing, or whether Republicans need to take a look a Trump’s own cognitive or personality issues — but that’s a “different wing of the hospital,” as Tapper put it. And with the Democratic brand in decline and the country desperately in need of a strong opposition party, we might just as desperately need to have the conversation that Original Sin is trying to occasion.
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More conversations this week!
Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, June 11, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for The Ink Book Club (A reminder: this week’s conversation is moving to Zoom; details at the bottom of this post). And on Thursday, June 12, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’re back with political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio.
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