Biden Debacle Update

6/29/24

Some important information has emerged since the debate fiasco. The following are excerpts from 2 articles. One is from The Wall St. Journal, the other from The Intercept.  In the latter, Akela Lacy asks, "Can Anything Stop the Democratic National Convention from being a Biden Coronation?" She writes:

People have been talking behind closed doors about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline for the past several years. After the Wall Street Journal published a story earlier this month raising concerns about Biden’s health, Democrats slammed the article, deflected the criticism, and characterized it as a hit piece. But after his performance in the first presidential debate on Thursday night, party operatives were no longer able to hide the problem. 

Now, as Democrats scramble to assess the damage, the question has turned to how – or if – the party will address Biden’s candidacy crisis at the Democratic National Convention in August.

“They’ve just been trying to skate to the general election with as minimal exposure as possible to the public. And now it’s blown up on them,” said Thomas Kennedy, a former delegate to the Democratic National Committee who resigned in January over Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “The delegates knew, the electeds knew, the donors knew, obviously the staffers know,” he said. “Everybody knew.

Efforts to raise concerns within the DNC about Biden’s health have been definitively shut down for years, Kennedy said. One DNC member who suggested that another candidate should run in 2024 said he was attacked by other members and faced with a vote to remove him from the committee. “That’s the sort of pushback that any sort of — not just dissent, but any sort of mentioning of this topic — has been happening for two years,” Kennedy said. 

Biden’s campaign, for its part, made clear on Friday that he has no intention of backing down. Asked about his debate performance, campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt emphasized that Biden would not be stepping down and pointed to the campaign’s $14 million fundraising haul after the debate and a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Friday. “He just gave a very forceful speech at a rally in NC with a fired up crowd,” Hitt wrote to The Intercept. In comments made on Air Force One on Friday afternoon, Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler doubled down: “Joe Biden is the nominee,” Tyler said

Current and former delegates told The Intercept there is little chance that the DNC would change course. The convention, the delegates said, would likely follow the same pro forma processes that have sidelined reform efforts and with them, the party’s progressive wing. The convention has already moved the vote for the presidential nomination online, weeks before the actual convention is held in person in Chicago.

There are mechanisms to allow for an open convention to nominate another candidate, but the party has avoided that option as a last resort and it would be too late at this point, said Nadia Ahmad, a DNC member in Florida. Biden would have to decide to step aside on his own accord. Or, delegates would have to organize themselves quickly to commit to another candidate. Given that the nomination vote will take place ahead of the convention, Ahmad said that any open nomination process would have to take place online too, which is unlikely.

“There’s definitely an appetite for what I would call the combustion factor,” Ahmad said. “People are willing to burn things down to maybe get them to work. That’s where you see the rise of a third party.” 

The convention has long stopped serving as a place for democratic decision-making, she added. “The Democratic Party is more invested in trying to maintain control than it is in trying to win an election in November.”

Another DNC member who requested anonymity to avoid reprisal said the debate only emphasized what progressives have been saying about the DNC in recent cycles. “Unless Biden withdraws, the convention is a stage managed coronation.” 

Kennedy noted that the days of action-packed political conventions are far behind us. “These are not the conventions of 1968 or 1972 that we read about,” he said. “They’re just highly choreographed top-down affairs where there’s not a lot of room for political maneuvering or opposing sides, or anything that strays away from the establishment. And the delegates are carefully chosen and funneled in a way that they’re part of the party machinery and hackery.” 

Days before the debate, the New York Times published a story about how the president was battling “misleading videos” showing his age-related deterioration. Very quickly into the debate on Thursday evening, Biden’s campaign was battling on another front: how to stop the bleeding as coverage swirled about how the performance would affect his chances at winning the November election. During a routine, post-debate call with surrogates last night, campaign staff acknowledged that the debate was rocky, according to a source who attended. By the next day, the party apparatus was back to normal messaging.

***

The WSJ article, "The World Saw Biden Deteriorating. Democrats Ignored the Warnings." , paints a picture of mounting apprehension about Biden's fitness for office both domestically and internationally-- esp. in recent months. It suggests that the Democratic Party's decision to overlook these concerns will have significant consequences not only for the upcoming election, but also global politics. 

Many European officials expressed worries about Biden's focus and stamina prior to the recent presidential debate. These concerns were echoed by some Democrats whose warnings went unheeded by top WH officials who instead have engaged in attempts to control all discourse around Biden's inability to function normally. Here are some excerpts-- with some examples highlighted-- from the long article which is behind a paywall.

European officials had already been expressing worries in private about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate, with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer. There were real doubts about how Biden could successfully manage a second term, but one senior European diplomat said U.S. administration officials in private discussions denied there was any problem.

The White House disputed the characterization that Biden has stumbled on the world stage. “Foreign leaders see Joe Biden up close and personal,” said National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson. “They know who they are dealing with, how effective he has been, and how important his leadership is on the world stage.”

Diplomats described Biden’s performance at the Group of Seven summit in Italy in mid-June as mixed, with Biden appearing physically frailer than in the past but alert in many of the most important discussions.

Biden missed the summit’s dinner party in a medieval castle, an off-camera and less- scripted part of the summit in which leaders often exchange views more candidly. He was the only G-7 leader not to attend the meal; the White House told reporters in advance he wouldn’t be there because it would be a “jam-packed two days” of meetings. Biden instead held an event with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and had a news conference.

The next day, Biden followed through on his plans to forgo a Swiss peace summit on Ukraine to attend a California fundraiser instead, frustrating Ukrainian officials who had organized the conference in Switzerland directly after the G-7 in the hope that Biden would come from Italy. 

Top White House officials disputed any portrait of a president slipping during his European trip, which included 12-hour days chock-full of meetings. “He didn’t miss a beat,” said Daleep Singh, the deputy national security adviser for international economics who participated in meetings with Biden. Singh said that there has been no change to the “forceful and substantive rigor” that Biden brings to meetings with foreign leaders....

“The reading in Europe is that this has been an unmitigated disaster,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome and a former adviser to the EU’s foreign-affairs chiefs, referring to Biden’s attempts to reassure voters worried about his age. European officials and prominent commentators, she added, “have been talking about it. It’s something that has been known, always, that his age is his main Achilles’ heel.”

In the hours after Thursday’s debate, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters that the Democrats have a problem.

“I was afraid of this. It was to be expected that in a direct confrontation, in a debate, it would not be easy for the president,” said Tusk, who has known Biden for years. Asked what he thought of proposals to replace Biden with another candidate, he said: “They definitely have a problem. The reactions have been unambiguous.”

Norbert Röttgen, a senior lawmaker in Germany’s center-right main opposition party and the former chair of its parliament’s foreign-affairs committee, said on X: “The Democrats must switch horses now.” Slovenian former Prime Minister Janez Janša said he bet months ago that Biden would no longer be on the ballot in November. 

When Biden was in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day in June, he struggled. During a bilateral meeting in Paris with Zelensky, Biden spoke so softly that reporters brought in to document the meeting between the two men couldn’t initially hear the American president. Zelensky, a non-native English speaker, could be heard clearly.

During the brief exchange, Biden flubbed when explaining what the Ukrainians would do with a new tranche of $225 million in funds that the U.S. was sending. Biden told Zelensky that money was “to help you reconstruct the electric grid.” Officials traveling with the president explained that the money was actually a series of munitions including air defenses that could protect the electric grid, among other targets, and not for rebuilding the electric grid.

Back in Washington for a brief time between his trips to France and Italy, Biden appeared at a Juneteenth concert at the South Lawn. Video footage of the event showed him clapping noticeably out of time to the music. He needed assistance from the person seated next to him when it was time for him to get up. 

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, when asked about his awkward behavior at the event, dismissed the question. “That is just not a health issue,” she said.

[After describing Jill Biden as a "strong supporter of her husband's decision to run" the article continues]Biden’s top aides insist publicly and around various Washington dining room tables that the president is mentally sharp. As recently as May, one aide in frequent contact with the president insisted that there has been absolutely no change in his performance. And, when confronted with evidence that Biden is deteriorating, the White House pushes back hard, including when The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Biden showed signs of slipping in negotiations with congressional leaders. In February, before the Hur report was released on the probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents, White House lawyers sought to strip references about Biden’s memory from the report. The White House team of communications officials labeled Hur’s comments on Biden’s memory as “gratuitous” as they expressed relief that he wasn’t recommending criminal charges against Biden.

The WSJ then turns to the complaints and concerns of Biden donors, many of whom saw him fumbling and flubbing his lines during fundraisers and meeetings. 

At a September 2023 fundraiser in New York, Biden retold the same anecdote twice—leaving at least one attendee shaken and worried about his age. In February, Biden used a teleprompter at a fundraiser in Los Angeles, and questions were screened in advance, according to a person familiar with the matter—frustrating some donors...

During a May fundraiser in Washington state, Biden appeared to lose his train of thought as he talked about Israel and at one point paused for five seconds before continuing, according to a pool report from a journalist who attended. Biden said: “The cease-fire would begin tomorrow. It all has to do…you know, we’ve not…anyway, I guess I shouldn’t get into all this about Israel but…”

Some major Democratic donors have sat this race out, believing that the ticket might change or that Biden is too old, according to two people familiar with Biden’s fundraising operation. So far the money has come in at such a fast clip that those naysayers have been ignored.

These articles, and other emerging information indicate a crisis not only within the Biden election campaign, the DNC, the down-ticket elections which will take a hit along with the reputation and credibility of the party, but also the confidence of political actors on the world stage. Though the WSJ focused on the EU and its member states, it is doubtful that other major states in the world are not similarly shaken by the state of affairs described above. With urgent policy decisions being made daily in multiple regions of the world with cascading effects of great magnitude, any already-existing doubts and fears within the international community will almost certainly be greatly accentuated by the fact that all of this has now exploded into public view and consciousness in US mainstream media. The curtain has been pulled back. Things have been said and seen that cannot be unsaid and unseen. How this will affect policies such as those concerning Israel, Ukraine and China-- just to take 3 obvious examples-- is not yet clear. But it is, I think, fair to say that not only American domestic politics, but International Relations will be dangerously offset by the live-streaming trainwreck that is the Biden Administration in this historic moment. We're all in uncharted waters now. 

***

Here is a transcript of what Biden said Thursday night when asked a simple question on on of his strong points relative to Trump-- i.e. abortion.

"President Biden?"

"It's a terrible thing, what you've done.

The fact is that the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe when it was decided, supported Roe. And that was--that's-- this idea that they were all against it is just ridiculous. 

And this is the guy who says the states should be able to have it. We're (ph) in a state where in six weeks you don't even know if you're pregnant or not, but you cannot see the doctor and have your-- and have him decide on what your circumstances are, whether you need help.

The idea that states are going to do this is a little like saying  we're going to turn civil rights back to the states. Let each state have a different rule.

Look, there's so many young women who have been--including a young woman who was just murdered and he-- he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by a-- by--by an immigrant coming in, and they talked about that. But here's the deal, there's a lot of young women who are being raped by their-- by their in-laws, by their-- by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by--just-- it's just--it's just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it. 

And they tried to arrest them when they crossed state lines.

Bash: Thank You.

(Source: Politco's  Meredith McGraw post of final CNN transcript)