We’ve had a little time - a week - to process the fallout from last week’s debate. Joe Biden still has some time to come to a decision on whether he should stay or he should go.
I want to say that this feels to me like a setup. It feels like the GOP has been laying the ground work for this for more than a year, claiming Biden “can’t speak two sentences” forever and that this has slowly sunk into the collective consciousness. Now, it’s every where like yet another contagious virus.
But there are two main issues here, and we need to look at them with clear eyes to see the road before us clearly.
We’ve seen from the latest polling that Biden has lost about 3% in the polls following the debate. That could be enough to blow him out in the swing states, but it’s also early enough not to be determinative in 4 months. There’s room to pull it out if he can.
We’ve also seen that VP Kamala Harris is polling better and is only 1% behind Trump without doing any campaigning at all. In fact, Trump is very nervous about the idea of facing off against Harris.
According to the report, the Trump campaign's message to surrogates "was that Biden is the Democratic nominee and Democrats are stuck with him, according to a Republican close to the campaign, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Biden struggled through the 90-minute faceoff, setting off widespread alarm in his party" — but in reality, behind the scenes, they believe it's a real possibility Biden could be swapped out for someone else, and they fear it could complicate their campaign and force a change of tactics from the campaign they wanted to run.
“I’m going to show up and I’m going to campaign whether it’s him or somebody else,” Trump stated in a recent interview. On the other side, former Democratic strategist David Axelrod told the Post, "It sure seems they want Biden to stay on the ticket. They think he’s vulnerable, and they like where they’re at. You can see they are not excited at all about the prospect of him leaving the race."
A hot mic moment revealed today showed Trump on the golf course boasting he had taken "pile of crap" Biden out of the running, but suggesting Vice President Kamala Harris could be a tougher opponent even as he dismissed her as "pathetic." Harris is the only candidate who, if chosen, could use the war chest Biden has amassed; any others would start out with nothing.
If she took over, things could only get better for her from here. We have a viable alternative, and that could get even better depending on who she picks as a running mate.
My first choice would be Gavin Newsom, but that could be problematic since both Harris and Newsom are from California — and I don’t think having two people from the same state is allowed. This would also be a problem for Trump if he picks Rubio as VP.
Even with that question answered, I'm not for switching away from Biden even to Harris who has better poll numbers because, frankly, it's disloyal. It’s cold-blooded. It would be a cut-throat choice that wouldn’t sit well with me or many in the Democratic party. There are only two House Democrats calling for Biden to step back… that’s not many. There are almost 300 Democrats in Congress so his support isn’t crumbling — this is just a minor crack.
We already know that 1) he's a gaffe machine, 2) he's got a stutter and 3) he's Old. All three of those factors could lead to him having moments of articulation that *seem* like a cognitive moment.That happened at least once, perhaps twice during the debate but what he was actually *saying* every other moment was cogent and directly on point. (Also, there was an audio problem with his microphone which made him sound muddled — this issue was corrected on the replay and that made it clear that he was perfectly intelligible and articulate)
Biden on Abortion:
Biden on Immigration: (This is where Trump says “I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, he doesn’t know either — but you can hear him very clearly say “I’m going to continue the initiative to get more Border Patrol and Asylum Officers.” Trump couldn’t hear him due to the Mic problem, not because he did say it clearly, he did. (Again, this why I say “Setup” — this was CNN's technical problem, not Biden’s)
Biden responds to Trump’s wild claims on the economy.
(Biden’s wrong about not having any Troops dying — he did have some deaths in Afghanistan-- but his point is that he doesn’t have any U.S. troops in the midst of combat overseas for the first time in this century. That’s correct.)
Does the media replay these clips? No, they show the bit where he lost his point and ended with ‘we beat Medicare.” That was not an example of how he sounded on every question — it was an anomaly. That was the rare exception.
He *DID* fight back against Trump's repeated lies and touted his own record.
I live-tweeted the debate and many times Biden came back hard against Trump’s lies. Steve Rattner also did a breakdown of the facts.
Trump claimed that all of Biden’s jobs are “Bounce Back” from the Covid Recession - Biden responded to this and corrected the facts. And he’s right.
Trump touted his economic plan including Tarrifs and Joe, correctly, pointed out that this would mean a massive tax hike for the average American. Again, he was right.
Trump claimed that he had improved the Trade Deficit with China, but that’s wrong and Joe said so. Our trade deficit with China ballooned under Trump, it has shrunken under Biden.
Trump claimed that Biden has “opened the border” and he argued back against that. Border Patrol is doing its job better than ever before — apprehending and expelling close to 7 million migrants — and we have far fewer “got aways”, as a percentage of the total, than we previously have had.
The trade deficit with China went UP with Trump and has since come down.
Also, crime is down dramatically — no matter what Nancy Mace lies about.
Biden also deftly pointed out that the only felon on stage, was Trump.
CNN’s Daniel Dake documented 30 Lies by Trump during the debate. I found another 15 more just from my own recollection. Biden responded to many of those and didn’t “just let his lies fly by” as I’ve heard Rep. Tim Ryan claim.
So on the facts, that debate was a slam-dunk for Biden. It wasn’t even close. We should have been talking about all this for the last week. We haven't been.
It's not what he was saying, it's how he looked and sounded saying it - which was deflated and lost looking with a gap-mouthed stare. That's optics, not substance.
He shouldn't get defenestrated for that.
My larger concern is who are these people behind the scenes who are giving anonymous quotes to the press claiming that he's having "more and more" episodes?
First off, they probably aren't a doctor who can recognize whether it's actual cognitive decline or just his stutter re-asserting itself. I think that's a massive betrayal and that person should get canned and pulled away from any National Security work. That on its own is bad. His house is not in order.
This has, as I have been informed, caused a panic spiral among the media. This is from G2geek:
As for the push to dump Biden, that's a panic spiral among the talking heads and the people they influence.
Panic spirals are a thing. They are insidious and stopping them requires being able to stand back, think clearly, and choose what to feel.
‘Choosing emotions’ sounds like a wild idea, somewhere between tree-huggy and impractical and wishful thinking. But it's a real thing. As Markos himself has probably discovered in psychedelic therapy for traumatic stress.
You don't need a skilled therapist and psychedelics to get at the most basic elements of this. Mindfulness and objectivity are as accessible as having ten minutes a day to just sit still and name every category of cognition that goes through your mind during that period. This is a thought, this is an emotion, this is a memory, etc. Learning more emotion-words is highly useful. Spotting all the emotion-words in news stories is highly useful.
In intel world we call that stuff 'cognitive resilience,' and there's a lot more to be said about it. Another term for it is ‘cognitive defence,’ that we abbreviate as 'cogdef.' These are essential skills for this political season.
They have. gone. ballistic. over this. I’ve watched a press conference with Karine Jean-Pierre that was like a live lynching in progress. It was brutal. The press smells blood in the water and they won’t let this go.
He had a physical in February. He spoke at the Watch Party after the debate. He went to Waffle House and spoke to a packed restaurant of supporters. Then he went to North Carolina and did a speech there, and then went to 4 states after that and engaged with supporters.
Let’s be real, many of these WH reporters travel on the plane with him. Many of them were there during these events. They saw them with their own eyes and ears — and yet, they’re still asking “Can we engage with him more? Can we see him more?”
Yeah, this is why Karine Jean-Pierre has an exasperated expression like she’s explaining eating beans to a toddler. They already know this is the case — but they have a narrative to sell. They act like the White House is keeping a secret. Biden is being treated as if he's guilty until proven innocent — while Trump is being treated as if he’s innocent after he’s been proven guilty.
These leaks have caused the media to lose confidence in the White House and what they say. We've gone from it's “a cold”, to its "jet lag" from 11 days ago to whatever. The stories sound more and more desperate, after-the-fact and cobbled together, They sound like they're covering up.
Either they are - or they're not.
If they aren't - it's horrible that they're being cornered into this position and Biden is being harrassed out of the race collectively for a minor petty infraction. (Particularly, considering all the MAJOR infractions of Trump, and yet there he still stands)
The Interview on Friday might help, but he really needs to keep up with that and do a Town Hall facing the people in real-time to help repair the damage IMO. Maybe if he follows that up with some public barnstorming — which, for a change, the media will cover every second off to confirm that he remains cogent — he could pull this out. He just needs to get out in the public and let us see him.
Now I have to engage in some rank speculation here - because this is literally the narrative that the media is feeding us — but it has to be addressed.
If they really *are* lying — yes, I know — and he really is having serious cognitive problems - even only briefly where he recovers in a few seconds - I don't think that, in and of itself, is a justifiable reason for him to step down. I think that’s an annoyance, but at this stage, it’s a fairly minor problem. He is still - as I’ve pointed out from the debate - very high functioning. It may get worse and he might need to step down after winning the election - but that’s a decision for him and his family. At worst, he’s a very long, long way from being incapacitated. That would be years and years away. I don’t think that’s so bad.
BUT LYING ABOUT IT IS!
If the White House has been fucking gaslighting us about this entire thing -- if he really is having cognitive failure as the anonymous sources claim— they *deserve* to lose our confidence, and he should step back because we can't be conflicted about whether we support him or not. We can't afford not to be able to trust him and them. We need to be unified and we need to be motivated. This is the biggest battle, the most important fight facing us next in this century so far. We CAN NOT afford to lose.
Now, I don’t think this is the case. I think this is the narrative we’re being fed by the media based on rumors, gossip and the manipulated misuse of clips and audio which is pretty fucking despicable on its own. That right there is yet another betrayal against our Democracy.
I still trust Joe Biden and his administration — I’m not ready to toss him off the bus, or even ask him to voluntarily depart, based on his age, his stutter or other age-related problems. If he can pass his physical - which he apparently has — then he’s good with me.
If something else is going on — if we’re being strategically bullshitted — then we have to deal with that and I won’t regret moving on to a new candidate if that’s the case.
But if it’s not the case, Biden has my sympathy and my support because just looking at it on the surface, this has been a rat-fucking rail-road job so far.
He doesn’t deserve that, and neither do we. He deserves a chance to try and win back our confidence before he makes any decision. Stay or go.