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The Democratic party establishment more generally (DNC is too narrow) - particularly lawmakers and friendly journos who told lies like "he's the sharpest he's ever been" despite it being basically impossible that was what they were actually experiencing when meeting him in-person.

Biden's team doesn't get to do a cover-up if journalists and Democratic party leaders were covering and speaking about him the way they are now - which they could and should have been all along.

Moreover, of everyone on the list, the Biden team is the only one whose literal job it is to spin things in the best way possible for their candidate. I don't begrudge them their actions at all. They are literal (not in a pejorative sense) political hacks. We shouldn't have expected anything different from them.

Journalists and other Democratic party leaders, though? They deserve nothing but our contempt for this.

https://youtu.be/0pb6xXuU5wM?si=dBJ-plIGVs1KCFzJ

seems it was a pretty leaky coverup but the leaks didn't get enough signal-boosting to become common knowledge among everybody involved

The decline was there for those with eyes to see it - those who pointed it out were just vilified as GOP shills until it became completely undeniable.

who was vilifying them as GOP shills? Who was reporting on the vilification without the context that the vilified were right and the vilifiers were wrong?

For a fairly easy example, you could look at the reaction to Robert Hur's report on Biden, in which he concluded it would be difficult to convict Biden of intentional mishandling of classified documents because he presents in person as a "well meaning elderly man with a poor memory". Left and center-left media absolutely excoriated Hur as a MAGA devotee and obvious political actor, when in reality he was just... a lawyer doing his job and reporting honestly what he found. shrug

The imbecilic primary system

What did you have in mind? I think if there was a runoff between the top 2 candidates, that might have helped a little, but not enough.

If you really must keep the presidency the way it exists now, at the very least have one nationwide primary much closer to the general election.

I don't think it needs to be closer to the general election, but absolutely it should be nation wide. It's dumb that the parties select a candidate representative of the average member of their party, instead of representative of the general pubic.

national ranked choice voting, no primaries, no parties, and anyone with 500k petition signatures can get on the ballot?

I find it hard to talk about how to reform the US system because I think most of the things about it are bad (which I think is consistent with what we see, that lots of people think the country is not too far from civil war and everyone is deeply dissatisfied).

That said, what I would do if I had a magic wand is:

• a new Constitution that more strongly protects individual rights and upholds good governance;

• all elections are coordinated by a federal body (the actual votes are still conducted locally, of course);

• the House, not the Senate, is the more powerful part of Congress;

• flexible-list proportional representation;

• keep the weird electoral college for tradition's sake, but nobody elected that way can be allowed anywhere near actual power;

• executive power needs to be accountable on a continuous basis, not just once every four years, to the people via its standing representatives in the House - they must be able to remove the chief executive with a simple majority, for whatever reason they please.