For those who watched post-debate responses from top democrats and pundits in real time last night, there was a near-total consensus that Biden is incapable of pulling this off. I'm not talking about Republican responses now. Nor am I referring only to the chattering class. I'm not talking about Biden's fairweather friends here, but those who have been his biggest champions, and claim to "love" him. Starting at the very Biden-friendly NYT (which almost never has a mean word for Biden), we find 2 of Biden's friends and favorite columnists begging him to drop out now. Some of these pieces read like eulogies.
Nicholas Kristof writes:
President Biden is a good man who capped a long career in public service with a successful presidential term. But I hope he reviews his debate performance Thursday evening and withdraws from the race, throwing the choice of a Democratic nominee to the convention in August....
[Notably skipping over the usual next step which is discussing the VP at such a time he continues]There isn’t time to hold new primaries, but he could throw the choice of a successor to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Democratic Party has some prominent figures who I think would be in a good position to defeat Trump in November, among them Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Gina Raimondo, the secretary of commerce. And there are many others.
My phone has been blowing up with texts from people saying, as one put it: “Dear God. What are we going to do?” Another, also a fan of Biden, texted: “It’s imperative we change horses.” But Democrats have been reluctant to say this out loud and undermine Biden. So it will be up to Joe and Jill Biden to make this choice themselves.
This will be a wrenching choice. But, Mr. President, one way you can serve your country in 2024 is by announcing your retirement and calling on delegates to replace you, for that is the safest course for our nation. https://www.nytimes.com/202...
In a similar vein, Biden's close personal friend, Thomas Friedman wrote a column this AM entitled "Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He Must Bow Out of the Race." The article opens like this:
I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep. I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime, precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.
The Biden family and political team must gather quickly and have the hardest of conversations with the president, a conversation of love and clarity and resolve. To give America the greatest shot possible of deterring the Trump threat in November, the president has to come forward and declare that he will not be running for re-election and is releasing all of his delegates for the Democratic National Convention.....
Biden has been a friend of mine since we traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan together after Sept. 11, 2001, when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, so I say all of the above with great sadness.
[In his conclusion, Friedman sounds more honest than those pretending Biden's family, staff and handlers were really "shocked" and "surprised" last night-- they've been denying leaked warnings from off record Democratic insiders for months. He concludes:]I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, it’s time for him to keep the dignity he deserves and leave the stage at the end of this term. https://www.nytimes.com/202...
Morning Joe is--famously--Biden's favorite show. He watches it whenever possible. Joe Scarborough, a Biden confidante and friend, spoke poignantly and tactfully as possible on the matter. Among other things, he said that based on what he saw, Donald Trump will win "unless things change." After praising Biden's first term to the high heavens, he matter-of-factly posed the question, "If [Biden] was a CEO and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America, any Fortune 500 corporation in America, keep him on as CEO?” Then asking if it was time for top Dems to tell him he needs to bow out, he said after praising Biden more, “These are hard questions, but the fact is, friends, failure is just not an option in 2024.”
Over at CNN, top establishment voices rose to urgent fever pitch as CNN Chief National Correspondent, John King kicked off the post-debate discussion sounding utterly shocked. Foregoing niceties he shot straight to his point:
Anderson, this was a game changing debate Right now as we speak there is a deep, wide and very aggressive panic in the Democratic party. It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now. It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers. They think the president's performance was dismal, will hurt other people in the party down the ticket, and they're having conversations what they should do about it.
Sitting at that CNN roundtable were heavyweights, and old Biden friends like former chief Obama advisor and strategist, David Axelrod, and former Biden communications director, Kate Beddingfield. Both agreed with King's assessment. "I can't disagree with anything I just heard," Axelrod said. Then former Obama advisor and Biden confidante, Van Jones spoke. He claimed to be in great "pain" after watching Biden's "performance" saying:
That was painful. I love Joe Biden. I worked for Joe Biden. He didn’t do well at all. He did not do well at all!
I love that guy. That’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can. But he had a test to meet tonight to restore the confidence of the country and of the base. And he failed to do that.”
We’re still far from our convention and there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward. But that was not what we needed from Joe Biden and it’s personally painful for a lot of people. It’s not just panic, it’s the pain of what we saw tonight. (fr. CNN transcript of post-debate roundtable)
Erin Burnett, who recently interviewed the president with soft-ball questions (and he did not look very good there!) behaved frantically, raising her voice and demanding an answer to the question: "HOW could he be so obviously unprepared. They grilled him for days, he knew all the questions that were going to be asked [I wondered if she meant that literally or not] and THIS is the best he could do?!?"
Mike Wallace answered the question, "The question answers itself, he did the best he is capable of doing. He was incapable tonight, on the biggest of stages, that he sought. And with all of that preparation, he was incapable of doing better than he was, and you can’t come back from that,” Wallace answered Burnett.
When Rachel Maddow, at Biden-friendly MSNBC, asked Obama's former campaign manager, David Plouffe how he read the reportedly panicky signals from the "donor class," Plouffe didn't waste words stating that, "It's kind of a DEFCON 1 moment."
Then he made a strange transition saying, "At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what people like me say. It matters what the voters say now." While that interesting observation has some truth, all these top insiders (like Plouffe, Axelrod, Van Jones, Scarborough, Friedman, Kristof to say nothing of the pundits like John King, Erin Burnett, Nicole Wallace et al.) surely know that these cutting soundbites ("DEFCON 1 moment;" "painful panic;" "made me weep;" a" CEO would get fired if he acted like Biden did;" etc. etc. )-- that all these quotes from his most ardent supporters and friends HAVE A SIGNIFICANT INFLUENCE ON WHAT VOTERS THINK.
Biden's fans turn to media pundits like Joe Scarborough,Nicole Wallace and Rachel Maddow. I already quoted Scarborough. Here's a summary of the first 2 minutes of reaction over art NBC involving an opening exchange between Nicole Wallace and Rachel Maddow as quoted in a Variety article on the post-debate coverage:
In the first minute of post-debate coverage, Maddow cited Biden’s weak voice and “halting delivery” and said it must have “put a shock into the campaign.” In the second minute, Nicole Wallace reported that Democratic insiders were having “frank conversations.” Maddow asked her: What do you mean? The “conversations range from whether he should be in this race tomorrow morning, to what was wrong with him,” Wallace said.
Variety attributed these cutting remarks to admirable "honesty." But are these instant reactions to the debate across multiple platforms in real time consistent with the behavior of top Dems that WANT to convince voters that Biden is the man for the job?
Plouffe is right that if all the voters who tuned in and heard all the after-debate spin somehow act like Biden is just fine now, then yes, Biden might recover. But if he wants them to feel encouraged, would such an experienced campaign manager sit there on national TV and earnestly say to these potential voters that they've just witnessed a "DEFCON 1 Moment?"
Think about it. These are pros. They are friends, former advisors, strategists, confidantes and Biden proponents we're talking about. Surely they have to know that they have now provided a hefty supply of toxic soundbites to last the Trump campaign from now to the election. The clips of Trump lost in mid-sentence are already viral. But what a stockpile of quotes from top Democrats we will probably see coming from the other side.Does anyone else feel that maybe all these folks aren't quite as "surprised" and "shocked" as they act? Some of this feels stage-managed to me.
Friedman's column (see above) intimates something like this when he writes that family and insiders "had to know" this would happen. I don't know if Friedman was really out of the loop or not as he states when saying he was unprepared for what he saw; and that it made him weep. But as bad as Biden's "performance" was, the hours worth of high profile freakouts on display last night, and in the morning papers etc. will not simply fade into the thin air. These damning analyses, soundbites, pleas for Biden to step down will be dispensed liberally by Team Trump.
Something about all of this seems very odd. Was this trainwreck really so spontaneous and shocking to all the insiders as we're asked to believe? Maybe. I'm left with a lot of questions and nagging doubts, though. We may never know. What is certain is that as bad as the debate itself was, it very quickly became a "shocking trainwreck" according to the very people paid to sell Biden to the public. And while it seems Biden won't be talked out of the run, the damage that has been done will probably effect not only Biden's chances, but the credibility of the Democratic Party which refused all our pleas to run real primaries, and now openly talk about foisting potential "Biden replacements" on all of us. One must bear in mind that we're being told all of this is being done to "protect democracy." But appointing a replacement at the 11th hour without a primary does not sound very democratic. Nor do I think his performance, or his "inability to run effectively" was a top-secret. There were lots of inside Dems who spoke to various media outlets off the record months ago, including a devastating expose (NOT opinion piece) in the WSJ that I read. I also read a transcript of a recent Time interview, where accompanied by several aids, and with notes, Biden's words in text form sometimes defied grammar and logic.
I'm left with lots of nagging doubts and unanswered questions.
(Note: This was originally written as a comment on another page here. It has not been edited. Sorry for any typos or errors)
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