THE WORST THING WE READ™

West Wing-ing it

Indignity Vol. 4, No. 124

Tom Scocca

22 Jul 2024 — 4 min read

Joe Biden Wraps Up the Drama

THE WORST THING WE READ™

YESTERDAY MORNING, I woke up and saw that the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin had published an opinion essay in the New York Times. The conceit was that after weeks of pundits and Democratic donors floating various schemes for replacing Joe Biden by turning the Democratic National Convention into a political pageant for aspiring candidates, and of other people saying that was the sort of cornball fake-profound plotline Aaron Sorkin would have dreamed up for The West Wing, here was Aaron Sorkin to tell the readers what kind of plotline he would actually dream up for 2024. It was like Marshall McLuhan showing up in Annie Hall, if the point of

the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall had been to showcase what an idiot Marshall McLuhan was. Here was Aaron Sorkin's big idea about what the most dramatically and politically satisfying move would be for the Democrats to make, as of the morning of July 21, 2024: the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney. I still have the tab for the story open somewhere in my browser, but I'm not looking at it because the thought of looking at it made me shut my computer and get up from my desk and go sit on a bench by the water in the park. Apologies for the pencil but I didn't see any other way of doing this. What I remember from reading the piece was that Sorkin, in proposing that the Democratic

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