President Biden, Vice President Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas
UPDATE: Wednesday, Jul 17, 2024 · 3:31:39 PM +00:00
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Dem
I want to point out a possible explanation (besides the cold and being stunned by the constant lies and non-stop cross-talk from Donald Trump when it was President Biden's turn to speak) and that is his stutter. I find that this is likely to be a physical manifestation of his stutter which is less under control now.
How so? President Biden has to respond to a question and he's under time pressure. He hears cross-talk. He's trying to think of how to respond and his answer involves a word or more which might give him trouble. Then he has to try under pressure and time constraints to come up with an alternative way of saying his answer, maybe a circumlocution. So, while he is trying to come up with this alternative way of answering the question, his mouth was open.
It's just a possibility. There are other reasonable explanations.
The Washington Post in an email notification made it clear that they are going to continue their nearly four year campaign to choose the Democratic Party's nominee for president. They never address the fact that Democratic Party primary voters are the ones who actually choose the party's nominee for president. They just ignore that fact. The argument that President Biden is in cognitive decline has been demonstrated to be false over the last three weeks. President Biden is competitive in polls despite having been trashed by democrats in Congress and the media. That the polls aren't better is driven by the media's relentless four year campaign against him.
1. Are we supposed to ignore the fact that President Biden won the Democratic Party primary?
2. From now on are we going to say to candidates who win their primary that they only get to be on the ballot in their election for the office they are pursuing if they have very good polls? Is that what we are saying?
3. When the media coverage drives the polling, then are we to reward them so that they get an outcome that they wanted when it's not what voters chose?
4. Do we let George Clooney choose the nominee? Is that how this is supposed to work?
5. Do we let disloyal democrats who hate democracy determine who the nominee is?
It's now the middle of July. We don't have any evidence from polling taken as a whole that Vice President Harris would be better. Her job approval rating is negative 14. Contrary to fact polling is often better than when the potential candidate is in the race. Polling in July is not good at predicting the outcome of the presidential election.
While it's too early for polls to tell us what the outcome of the presidential election will be, it's simply too late from a practical perspective to jettison the Democratic Party primary voters' choice and go with whoever the political insiders want. A brand new campaign in the middle of July? Don't get confused - Vice President Harris would be starting over in terms of staff and a campaign. She might have access to the money, but her argument would be different than President Biden's argument because she wins with different voters than he does. They would be two very, very different presidential candidates.
I don't see how this works. What is President Biden supposed to say? "I'm ending my campaign because polls in July say that I can't win, polls driven by a four year campaign against me?" or is it, "I decided that I wanted to spend more time with my family?" It's utterly unrealistic.
Nor am I convinced that Vice President Harris automatically gets the nomination if President Biden doesn't because she not only didn't win the Democratic Party primary, but she didn't even run in it. Furthermore, if it's the polls that are why we are shit-canning the Democratic Party primary results, then you can't pick her or anybody else because nobody is clearly winning.
What's preventing us from winning? Unity. Shit-canning the Democratic Party primary results is not, in my estimation, a good way of achieving unity. You risk losing a lot of votes that might surprise you because some people might not like trashing democracy in this way. President Biden has legitimacy and credibility as the nominee because he won the Democratic Party primary. So when those trashing him accept the choice of the voters, then we can have a unified party. If anybody else is chosen, we never get unity because the person who's the nominee didn't win the Democratic Party primary. So those who disagree with the choice (of Vice President Harris for example) because she has bad polls have no one decisive reason to back her, the decisive reason being winning the Democratic Party primary. The fantasy politics, think the political version of fantasy football, people who are basing their choice of who they think should be the nominee on polls in July can't choose Vice President Harris because she can't win either because her job approval rating is negative 14.
People demanding President Biden show them how he wins (the party unifies around the guy who won 87% of the Democratic Party primary votes, the party promotes the accomplishments of the Biden Harris administration, puts Vice President Harris as center stage and leans into her, and exposes the reasons Donald Trump is disqualified) haven't shown us that Vice President Harris can win or how she wins.
What follows is not a negation of what I wrote above. What I was trying to say and failed obviously to make clear is I can understand why some people would prefer to be the nominee. However, she SIMPLY DID NOT WIN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY PRIMARY. Therefore, she cannot be the nominee. Some people on the other side of this think that those of us who know President Biden must be the nominee don't recognize certain things that are true. I recognize that President Biden's polls aren't great, but they're not bad either, especially considering the media feeding frenzy and attacks from democrats. The real poll problem is the one poll that won't move - 70% of voters think President Biden is not necessarily optimally positioned to the grueling rights of this job and then some percentage wrongly have doubts about his mental health. Those doubts are a result of (1) ignorance (2) a four year media campaign against him (3) his actual age (4) his gaffes [this is stupid for several reasons. One, gaffes simply are not evidence of cognitive decline, two he has had these gaffes since at least 2000 and nobody then suggested that he was in cognitive decline and if they had, mental health experts would have ridiculed them, and (3) I strongly suspect that his gaffes are a product of his stutter even though he denies this.].
None of this is an attack on Vice President Harris. On balance in an alternate universe, I would prefer that she (had won the Democratic Party primary and thus have earned the nomination) was the nominee because she is a far better and stronger speaker, debater, and campaigner and the media's four year campaign against President Biden has been wildly successful. She has some chance at moving some numbers that President Biden can't. I am not sanguine (hope that I am using that word correctly) about his chances of overcoming a four year campaign against him with his age, appearance, and stutter. Reality isn't always obvious to most people. She may not improve her job approval rating, but she might. So, it's not her. She was my first choice for the Democratic Party nominee for president in 2020. It's the fact that President Biden won the Democratic Party primary and his broader reach and his greater chance of success in Pennsylvania, the most likely tipping point state. He can win because he's running against Donald Trump, but we need unity behind the nominee and it's not obvious that we can get that needed unity with any other potential nominee, not even Vice President Harris. If President Biden isn't the nominee, then our one and only chance for unity is Vice President Harris. If it came to that, then I would recommend Big Gretch Governor Gretchen Whitmer as her running mate for obvious reasons.
That number doesn't mean he can't win because he's running against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and his running mate is incredibly accomplished and very smart and a very good communicator.