Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Project 2025 and beyond

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

Kyle Tharp and Lucy Ritzmann /FWIW:

Project 2025 breaks through

Just about everyone online is talking about the latest Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to take over the federal government

Digital staffers will tell you that content about Project 2025 performs very well on social media, with freaked-out younger users on Instagram and TikTok often hitting the like and share buttons en masse. As a result, the Biden campaign told Semafor in March that they were seeing solid signs of engagement and would make it a centerpiece of their digital messaging strategy moving forward. More recently, a Washington Post analysis found that mentions of Project 2025 among progressive influencers have “skyrocketed” in the past month.

David Rothkopf/The Daily Beast:

At That Nato Presser, Joe Biden Left the Biggest Question Unanswered

Yes, he made a gaffe or two, but President Biden did fine at the NATO press conference. However, he failed to produce resounding proof that he is the best candidate to beat Trump.

But [the gaffes were] all superficial. It was exciting to the media because they were eager to use this press conference to move along the narrative that Biden was not up to the job and that his stumbles would lead his party to dump him and seek a different candidate. But sadly for the cable news networks and others in the press who were frothing at the bit to describe a doddering president being torn apart by the sharks of the media that just didn’t happen.

Biden did just fine. He showed an extensive knowledge of foreign policy issues. He displayed a solid memory and a good command of facts. If you were grading the event, you’d probably give him a B, taking points off for his presentation, which was pretty lackluster, and the fact that he also did not put the story of whether he should be the candidate to rest once and for all.

Within moments of the end of the press conference, one of Congress’ most respected and knowledgeable members, Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, called upon Biden to drop out of the race. Others followed.

Jon Allsop/Columbia Journalism Review:

The Biden Rorschach test

The die appeared to be cast. But the presser continued and Biden seemed to grow into it; he rambled at times but was, at the very least, not the Biden of post-debate caricature. He took questions for the best part of an hour; many were about his mental acuity, gaffes, and electoral prospects, but others concerned small matters like global security, whether Ukraine should be allowed to fire US weapons deeper into Russia, and the war in Gaza. David E. Sanger, of the New York Times, asked Biden about the relationship between Russia and China. His colleague, the media reporter Michael M. Grynbaum, noted that “rather than ask directly about Biden’s fitness,” Sanger appeared to have “asked a complex policy question to see how the president handles details on his feet.” Dylan Byers, a media reporter at Puck, suggested that it was “also possible that the nation’s preeminent, Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign policy & national security correspondent with 40+ years in the field wanted to use a NATO summit to ask a substantive foreign policy question of a president who rarely takes questions in public.”

Brian Beutler/”Off Message” on Substack:

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures, And The Biden Question

How to think about uncertainty when contemplating drastic action.

Like every losing campaign, the McCain people knew there was an outside chance something exogenous and earth-shattering might unsettle things. (As it happens, when global financial markets collapsed a couple months later, McCain took the bizarre step of “suspending” his campaign to make a big show of flying back to Washington like an unsummoned superhero.)

But if a campaign requires an act of god to win, it becomes little more than a placeholder. Its candidate and campaign staff and volunteers are left to hope something bad happens, which creates perverse incentives in and of itself.

So in late August, McCain did something drastic. Erratic even. He passed over every credible running mate on his short list, including outside-the-box contenders like Joe Lieberman, in favor of Alaska’s then-governor Sarah Palin.

Steve Benen/MSNBC:

Great economic news overshadowed by debate over Biden’s fate

All of the recent economic news has been heartening, though it's been overshadowed by the debate over President Joe Biden's electoral future.

The news not only offered fresh evidence that the United States has succeeded in getting inflation under control, it also opened the door to the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates in September, giving Americans a boost ahead of November’s election.

Not surprisingly, the White House was eager to tout the good news. President Joe Biden issued a statement that read in part:

“Today’s report shows that we are making significant progress fighting inflation. Overall prices fell last month, after staying flat in May, and core inflation is the lowest in more than three years. Prices are falling for cars, appliances, and airfares, and grocery prices have fallen since the beginning of the year. Thanks to my economic plan, wages are rising faster than prices, we’ve created 15.7 million jobs, and communities that were left behind by my predecessor are making ‘a remarkable comeback.’”

That quote at the end of the paragraph was in reference to a New York Times report, published this week, that read, “America’s so-called ‘left behind’ counties — the once-great manufacturing centers and other distressed places that struggled mightily at the start of this century — have staged a remarkable comeback.

Ron Brownstein/The Atlantic:

DEMOCRATS TURN TO THEIR DEPUTY LEADER

Even if Kamala Harris remains Joe Biden’s running mate and does not become the nominee, Democrats are realizing they need to improve her image.

“The reality is Kamala was tapped by Biden as his partner on the ticket and a new standard-bearer for the party, and her role as the VP on the current ticket is more critical than ever, so investing in her is a no-brainer,” the group writes in a new strategy memo.

Way to Win has channeled more than $300 million to liberal groups and candidates since its founding in 2018, and has also emerged as an important source of ideas for Democrats (for instance, encouraging the party to center its 2022 campaign on Republican threats to Americans’ freedoms). The group’s plan reflects a wider belief among Democrats that Harris will loom large in the race whatever Biden decides. As the party tries to dig itself out of the hole that Biden deepened with his dire debate performance, it is belatedly growing more aware of the need to buttress the vice president’s public standing.

Emile Chabal/Foreign Policy:

The New Meaning of France’s Anti-Fascism This week’s elections show the country is doing more than simply replaying battles from its past.

After a period of relative quiescence, everyone has started talking about fascism again. This is, in part, due to the threat of a second term for Donald Trump, which has reactivated a highly polemical “fascism debate” in the United States. But there are plenty of other actual or quasi-fascists elsewhere. The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is the leader of a genuine neo-fascist party. In Latin America, Argentina’s Javier Milei has picked up where Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro left off. And, in India, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party was reelected in June, albeit with a much-reduced majority.

By contrast, much less has been said about anti-fascism. Most commentators and journalists—and even many academics—seem to have accepted that anti-fascism belongs to the 20th century. Which is a little strange. If fascism is real, why not its opposite? And what happened to all of those historical memories of fighting fascism, above all in Europe, but also further afield?

Fortunately, we still have France, the only country that continues to talk about anti-fascism in a consistent and meaningful way across the political spectrum—and one of the few places where this talk translates into a hard electoral reality.

The explanation for this anomaly lies in the concept of the so-called front républicain (republican front). This refers to any coalition or alliance that is designed to keep the far-right from power.