The staffers on Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign who played a secret email game still talk about the long threads of internal messages that kept them in stitches during the darkest days of that exceptionally long march to the White House. It’s the kind of thing that is maybe “you had to be there” funny, so it helps to get back there before explaining it.
Biden announced his third run for the White House in April 2019 and enjoyed a brief period as presumptive Democratic nominee until polls started to slip amid questions about his physical and ideological ability to meet the political moment. He then spent the latter half of the year fighting for his political life. Pundits were scoffing and the press was full of quotes from Democrats declaring the campaign doomed. The first weeks of 2020 were somehow worse, with embarrassing caucus and primary shellackings.
The corps of campaign staffers whose job it was to really wallow in all this negative energy — press and political staff among others — started collectively writing their own over-the-top parody doom-and-gloom media reports, line by line, in long email threads. A favorite genre was the “Democrats are concerned” story. They would write the quotes from fake anonymous so-called allies and fake pundits and other “observers.” Veterans of the game recall they got pretty good at it, collectively writing made-up stories that eerily predicted the real thing. That was a real laugh riot for a team dealing with a lot of incoming. The laughter — of the “so you keep from crying” variety — helped keep everyone calm and made the bad stories seem not so bad. It was a game of Mad Libs, with a stoic, band-on-the-Titanic feel.