It was never clear who the intended target audience was for Jill Biden’s White House memoir, It’s Everyone Else’s Fault But Mine — er, excuse me, View from the East Wing. As I wrote last month, “almost everyone in America is ready to leave the Biden presidency — a failure on many levels — in the rearview mirror and focus on the copious problems of the here and now.” And our Vahaken Mouradian jumped on the grenade of reading it so the rest of us wouldn’t have to, concluding the book “adds up to something less than the sum of its many terrifically banal anecdotes. It adds down… The book is a war of attrition against the senses. Surrender; negotiate an international treaty against enriching weapons-grade tedium.”

Republicans were unlikely to buy it, and neither were Democrats. Even former Biden staffers were left fuming, contending the book “is rewriting history, unhelpful to the Democratic Party and tone-deaf.”

The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of release, with  but dropped off the chart entirely in the second week; Nate Silver observes, “it debuted at #1 on the NYT due to astroturfed bulk orders (not my opinion it got the infamous † indicating this) and is now *completely* off the list 2 weeks later. Very rare for a “#1” to fall that fast. Virtually no one except political reporters are actually reading it.”

The Bidens desperately want Joe Biden’s legacy to be more than his ugly, embarrassing departure from the 2024 presidential race. It’s far from clear that the Democratic Party will ever want to have that conversation; they sure as heck don’t want to have it in the summer of a midterm election year, less than two years after Biden left office.