No doubt there are a lot of Democrats who are scratching their heads, last night and this morning, wondering what just happened. How could it have happened to the good, virtuous people? There are lots of ways to answer that question but one that occurs to me this morning is the one that many of us on the right have been talking about for the past two years. 

For me it really started in September of 2022. That's when President Biden was hosting the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, a meeting which had been prompted by four co-sponsors of a bill. During the meeting Biden sought to than them personally.

“I want to thank all of you here including bipartisan elected officials like Representative McGovern, Senator Braun, Senator Booker, Representative…Jackie are you here? Where’s Jackie? I didn’t think she was going to be here,” Biden said.

As you may remember, Rep. Jackie Walorski had been killed in a car crash almost exactly eight weeks earlier. Biden's White House had released a statement on his behalf which began "Jill and I are shocked and saddened by the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski." And yet, Biden had somehow forgotten and thought she might be in the room.

Various explanations for this embarrassing lapse were offered. Some claimed he'd been referring to a different Jackie, but none of those explanations held up or made any sense. 

The official White House response to reporter's questions was almost as embarrassing as Biden's mistake. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked multiple times to explain it and just shrugged it off as insignificant.

Reporter, referring to Biden calling out to the late Rep. Jackie Walorski: "I have John Lennon top of my mind just about every day, but I'm not looking around for him anywhere."

Jean-Pierre: "When you sign a bill for John Lennon as president, then we can have this conversation" pic.twitter.com/ZA9LM1t4NU

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) September 28, 2022

Here's what I said about all this at the time.

In this case the White House looks completely broken. They can’t deny and they can’t explain but they still don’t want the media to run with this because it looks really, really bad. It is inexplicable apart from the thing they don’t want to talk about.

This was followed by nearly two more years of evidence that Biden was declining. Even if you believed he was capable of running the country at any given moment, the idea that he had another four years in him was a bigger fantasy than The Lord of the Rings. And yet, for nearly two years, Democrats shrugged it off and denied everything.

This was the big lie.

Democrats have branded that phrase as an anti-Trump reminder of Jan. 6, but for most of the last two years they were telling their own big lie and hoping everyone would go along with it. The big lie was that Biden was fine and would be fine far into the future. As the evidence kept piling up that this wasn't true, Democrats resorted to ever more defiant denials, i.e. he's fine behind the scenes and claims to the contrary are a media fixation.

Think about what Democrats might have done with this time (nearly two years!) if they hadn't quickly settled on lying to the American people. They could have come up with a plan for Biden to step aside and for a semi-normal process to choose his successor through the primaries. But the big lie about Biden's mental fitness allowed them to sidestep all of that month after month. The primaries concluded with Biden as the candidate and I really think Democrats would have kept lying about his condition right through the election if not for one thing: They were clearly losing.

You can lie all you want but at some point the bulk of the American people decided to believe their own eyes. Biden was not okay and many Democrats were not going to vote him in for another four years. It was clear for most of 2024 that Biden was losing because of the thing Democrats had forbidden everyone to speak about.

And there was another problem which I (and many others) wrote about over the past year. One of the reasons no one was eager to push Biden off his perch was the fact that his clear successor was VP Harris. As a potential replacement, she didn't have a lot to recommend her. She had done precisely nothing that impressed anyone over he years in office. She had created almost as many gaffes as Joe Biden with her word salad answers that always sounded like she was doing a book report on a book she hadn't read. 

On top of that, she had a clear problem maintaining a staff, with stories suggesting she was a horrible person to work for. But on the other hand, she was black and a woman and that meant she couldn't be passed over for someone else without angering two key constituencies of the Democratic Party. 

In short, Biden was clearly a terrible candidate but I think many Dems didn't feel Harris would be better and any other options seemed politically impossible. All of this, I believe, is why the big lie about Biden's condition dragged on for so long. Some Democrats may have known they were losing but none of the alternatives seemed all that appealing.

And then in the first ten minutes of the presidential debate, Biden said this:

Biden loses train of thought, stumbles on words for 30 seconds during debate with Trump.

Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/KGo96yupzM

— AF Post (@AFpost) June 28, 2024

The big lie collapsed in front of the entire world. It was difficult to believe Biden could still be president at all. The idea that he had another term in him was just laughable. Despite this, it still took several weeks before Biden finally agreed to step aside. The big lie had been going for so long that it seemed no one around Biden could tell him the truth.

And as we all know, the result was a rushed process in which Harris was just appointed the candidate. And for a few weeks, Democrats were feeling some genuine joy because the boat anchor had finally been taken off their necks. Now at least they had a chance of winning.

But the old denials were soon replaced by new denials. Again, I and many others noticed that Democrats were still running the same basement campaign for Harris that they had been running for Biden. The imperative of keeping the candidate out of the spotlight was still the same, only the reason had changed. With Biden it was to avoid what happened in the debate. With Harris it was to avoid her embarrassing non sequitur answers where she seemed clearly out of her depth.

So in lieu of a real candidate we got this manufactured PR campaign: Brat summer and Joy and whatever else Harris was coasting on all summer. Last night we learned that it didn't work. Harris was never a good candidate. This had been obvious for years to everyone. But it was something else Democrats weren't allowed to say.

I honestly don't know if there was a Democrat who could have beaten Trump this time around. What I do know is that Joe Biden was never going to do it and Kamala Harris was unlikely to do it, especially in a campaign reduced to about three months. If the blue team ever had a real hope of winning this race it would have required them to tell the truth a lot sooner and more often. They needed Biden to step aside in 2023 and they needed to have a real primary where their voters selected the candidate who seemed most capable of winning.

So for all the Democrats wondering how last night happened, a big part of the answer is that the party did this to itself by lying too often and for too long. This didn't just happen to Democrats, they earned it through their own choices along the way. They shouldn't be allowed to forget it or to pass the blame onto anyone else.