Conventional wisdom is dead – fire the political operatives.

I have a particular disdain for political operatives. The job does not require a particular educational background and official credentials, like medicine, law, or blogging. So they justify their existence by buttering up the right people—and generating “conventional wisdom” based on what happened in past elections. What’s possible, what’s not possible. What’s a good idea, what’s not a good idea. But you can’t do that anymore. Changes in social media and how people use it make every election different than the last. I’m not sure why more people aren’t aware of the role media plays in elections. It’s an American historic touchstone that people formed their opinions of the Kennedy-Nixon debate based on whether they saw it on TV or heard it on the radio (the hottie and the nottie! in my generation’s parlance ((actually Kennedy looked like a potato)).

Social media makes everyone feel fat and lame, but it also cracked Israel’s propaganda for the first time ever. I’ve always been informed and on the left on the issue, almost all of my friends are lefty Jews with a particular ownership of the problem. Many were raised Zionist and had to fight to gain moral clarity on the issue. But despite being more informed than possibly 90 percent of Americans there are things I never knew that have shocked me. I didn’t know about Israeli prisons, for one thing. Besides the unfathomable and gruesome brutality of Israel’s war, is the fact that countless times a day we’re battered with images on social media, both from Palestinians and Israeli soldiers who for reasons that are unfathomable to me post war crimes to their dating profiles. Abu Ghraib roiled the nation for months. We learn about worse things than Abu Ghraib every single day. Oh yeah, besides Rachel Dolezal-ing a person without dementia, Joe Biden owns a catastrophe that, I’m pretty sure, will be viewed as the 21st century Holocaust. People have pointed out that it happened under his watch because he lives in 1967, and now people have pointed out that perhaps maybe he hasn’t been quite as forceful in meetings with Netanyahu as the administration claimed.

The conventional wisdom on the Biden catastrophe is that the least risky option is to keep him on the ballot. At this point, the conventional wisdom goes, it’s too close to the election to sell another candidate. I … guess? That may have been true in 2008 and 2012 and 2016. But all the people being floated as possible challengers—Whitmer, Newsom, etc.—cut a powerful image: youth, vigor. Run them. Make them hire young people who are on (shudder) TikTok. Some influencers have millions upon millions of followers. And, because they don’t look 100 years old, they’d be more natural for the medium and it’d look less like patronizing pandering.