Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, the new tell-nothing tell-all by former Joe Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, is framed in the introduction as the patriotic diatribe of a once-loyal Democrat who’s now “free to speak for myself” and “eager to say what I think,” thanks to a dramatic decision:
After being a party insider for 20 years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent.
Just a few pages later, however, Jean-Pierre claims she noticed something wrong with Biden only once, during his infamous debate performance last June 27. “Whoa . . . he must be sick,” she deadpans, then reframes Independent as an answer to a book she hasn’t even read:
CNN anchor Jake Tapper kicked off the debate. He later wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, Original Sin . . . accusing [Biden] of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.
It’s all entertaining stuff (the “technically” is hilarious). Jean-Pierre announces she’s finally free to tell the truth, but begins by declaring that Tapper’s Original Sin—another book marketed as “the full, unsettling truth . . . told for the first time”—was wrong not because Tapper was lying about how long it took for him to notice Biden’s problems, but because Biden never had any problems to notice.
Jean-Pierre is generating significant negative internet wattage this week, battered everywhere for insisting she never saw anything concerning in Biden’s private behavior. In a wild exchange with Gayle King of CBS, she doubled down on a book passage claiming she didn’t even see an issue with Biden before the critical debate, even though she traveled to it with him on Air Force One (“Maybe I was too nervous . . . to notice whether or not he was sniffling?”). Apparently, that trip was a rare instance in which Jean-Pierre not only didn’t talk to Biden on the plane, but didn’t have conversations with anyone who did. “I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game,” she wrote, “until he began to speak at the debate.”
Independent reads like an oxygen-deprived sequel to Tapper’s book. The humorous premise of Original Sin involved Tapper’s sources insisting Biden “stole an election” because if he’d stepped aside earlier, the party might have had a “robust primary”—exactly the scenario they spent years fighting to avoid, savaging Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and smearing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the arms of Trump. The CNN man insisted “insiders” who had a “better window into Biden’s condition than the general public” saw things that “shocked them” before last June’s debate, when the truth finally became obvious even to the media. But according to Tapper, the problem wasn’t that insiders lied, but were lied to. His first chapter was titled “He Totally Fucked Us,” a quote about Biden by Kamala Harris aide David Plouffe.
Never mind that the world could see Biden was in drool-cup mode as far back as 2019, or that Special Counsel Robert Hur made it legal record that Biden likely couldn’t be convicted because a jury would see him as incompetent, an “elderly man with a poor memory.” No, the problem was “Biden fucked us.”
That was funny as hell, but Jean-Pierre just one-upped Tapper by insisting nothing was wrong with Biden and that—get this—the real problem was that the press undermined the president, and not after the debate, but all along! “Pretty much since the day he’d stepped into the White House,” Jean-Pierre wrote, “the press had taken every opportunity to imply Biden was too old or mentally unfit for the job.” She is referring to the same press corps that insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack” for four and a half years, while he was serially sternum-poking voters, staring into space, walking off set in the middle of interviews, and turning every public ceremony into a potential Chevy Chase routine:
Still, the idea that nothing was physically wrong with Biden was merely the introductory absurdity of Independent. Scenes like the bit with King will get the viral energy, but the book purported to have a larger purpose, and that is where the real hilarity lay. Jean-Pierre, in her “Declaration of Independence” introduction, announced herself free to level criticisms at the Democratic Party that “defined my life.”
What criticisms, you ask? I made a mental top-10 list of guesses during the introduction, and the only one I got right was “Will say some shit about Nancy Pelosi.” The rest? It’s like one of Kevin Spacey’s diaries from Seven, only the author is on the loose and getting green-room invites:
Take the titular premise that Jean-Pierre is now an “independent.” In Chapter 3 Jean-Pierre argues, seemingly sincerely, that the two-party system in America is flawed compared to the “range of parties” offered in European parliamentary democracies, where a person can identify as anything from a Communist to a “far-right Rassemblement National.” In America, the closest thing to such diversity is the ability to register as an Independent, which she hails:
While some of those alliances may garner only a few seats in the legislative body, the fact that they are viable parties offers an option to a vast range of voters, whether they are socialists or citizens with protectionist, even xenophobic views. Given that the United States lacks such variety, registering as an independent may offer many the purest, most authentic political fit.
A few pages later, Jean-Pierre says that as much as “I completely get” the frustration with entrenched parties, she’s not looking to add new options, and is only choosing Independent status as a way to more effectively influence/aid Democrats.
Being an independent does not necessarily mean you need or want to vote for a third party. . . . In fact, I want to encourage people not to. While I completely get the frustration many have with both the Democrats and the GOP. . . in my lifetime I’ve watched third parties hand the White House to Republicans twice. . . . We have to be realistic about the fact that choosing a third-party candidate who has little to no possibility of garnering enough popular or electoral votes to win the office can result in a more dangerous dominant party claiming victory.
