Biden clearly does not have dementia. He has some other serious problems, but his mind is there. Once you decode his halting delivery, the ideas behind his positions are sound. You can tell his mind is still sharp, it’s his body that is betraying him.
In fairness, the job of VP is to keep a low profile. Support the President and be involved enough to take over in a heartbeat, but don’t be too visible or else people might think the VP is trying to overshadow the main guy.
The issue (before Thursday) was that the anti-Biden wing of the party couldn’t really demonstrate that the alternatives had any better shot of beating Trump at all. All the reasonable alternatives backed out of any major 2024 challenge precisely because they are young and can wait until 2028 (or even later!) to make their push. Once Biden announced for 2024, it took a lot of the momentum out of finding any Democratic challenger.
There is an assumption, though, that the person Democrats are nominating in 2024 is the same man who beat Trump in 2020. I don’t think we can make that assumption anymore. Biden had his chance to demonstrate that and blew it. He doesn’t get that many more chances. If he continues to blow them, then Trump wins by default. No Democrat wants that.
There is a third scenario which this article doesn’t address. The President has a natural understudy whose only job (other than to show up to the Senate a few times a year) is to take over in case a President can’t do his job anymore. So why are we all acting like it’s some big wildcard?
If any President had a major medical, condition – say, a stroke or heart attack – during a campaign it might be prudent for them to back out not just from the campaign but from the office itself. In that case, there is no question who takes over the ticket because it will be the new incumbent President.
Now, we all know Biden didn’t have any major medical episode. All he has is a sudden case of notgonnawinitis, complicated by inflammation of the opeds. But if he came out next week and said “I had a minor medical issue two days before the debate, my doctors said I would recover fully at the time but now they are not so sure, so I need to back out of all of it”, don’t you think the entire party would immediately (and enthusiastically!) hand the reins off to the vice-president, once they remember who she is?
You know what they say about the size of a man’s platform…
being born in USA", that sort of arbitrary weirdness
The actual requirement is “natural-born citizen”, which doesn’t really have a definition. John McCain was born on a US military base in Panama, Rafael Edward Cruz was born in Calgary, yet both were citizens at birth and nobody contested their status as “natural-born” when they ran for President
Just made a large post on this elsewhere, but the TL;DR is that the party can’t just replace Biden. He has all the delegates from the primaries. Do you really think the party that is campaigning on preserving Democracy can get away with ignoring elections?
Now, it’s possible that Biden gets diagnosed with a severe case of not-gonna-win-itis which adversely affects his health to the point that he has to resign not only from the campaign, but from the Presidency. If that happens, Kamala Harris becomes the 47th President, and has the only real claim to take over the ticket. It has the fun side effect of making Trump reprint all his hats to say “45 - 48” instead of “45-47”.
(The Secret Service better take good care of President Harris, because whatever VP she appoints to take over that role needs to get a majority vote in both houses of Congress, and the House will never do it.)
Trump’s debate performance was awful, but so was Biden’s, and somehow because this country is weird as hell Biden is held to a much higher standard than Trump while also being immensely unpopular.
Trump’s performance as a debater was awful. He ignored the questions put to him, and frequently lied through his teeth. But, you could put a clip from this debate alongside a clip from his debate with Hillary 8 years ago, and not really see much of a difference.
The reason people are freaking out is that Biden’s age was on full display here. His stutter was much more visible, his voice was raspy at times, and he frequently couldn’t finish his thoughts before the mic went off. We also have a long history of his time in government to know how he used to be.
If this election turns into a referendum on Biden’s age, he loses. Even though Trump is only 3 years younger. Trump doesn’t show it.
He still ranted and raved like a crazy person based on what I’m reading.
His ideas and concepts were crazy, but his delivery really hasn’t changed much since we first saw him in debates in 2016. Biden’s clearly has. If you were living under a rock and didn’t already know everything you needed to about these two men, you never would have guessed that only three years separated them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim Jordan pulled his contempt Citation for the AG after this. They don’t need the audio of the Special Counsel investigation to put in attack ads anymore.
The closest thing we’ll get to that is in the polls over the next few days, and the moving forward to the election.
But even then, the numbers don’t have to move very much in order to make a difference. GA has 11 million people, and Biden won there last time by only 11k votes. Do you think a GA poll (much less a national poll) would pick up 11k people there changing their votes, or 22k people deciding to not vote at all (or vote for the brain worm guy instead)? That can all happen in the margins, outside of any ability for the rest of us to detect it.
I watched it all, and Biden did a much worse job than Trump did. Trump lied his way through the whole thing, but we expected that going in. I don’t think Democrats expected Biden to look this feeble.
No, not many people are going to change their vote because of this. But the last few elections have been one with very close margins in a handful of states. It doesn’t take that many people in certain zip codes to decide they can no longer support Biden to turn the election. They don’t even have to turn to Trump, they can go third party or stay home.
I’m not a fan of replacing Biden this late in the process, if that happens for any reason other than Biden’s health then it basically renders all the Primaries invalid, and puts party officials in a position to make the decision, not voters. And let’s be fair: Democrats who were watching saw that Biden was actually able to make his points, and draw a clear distinction between his positions and his opponent. Nobody is saying that the substance of Biden’s performance was wrong, they’re all just upset over the optics of his performance, and his ability to attract those last few voters in PA and WI that he needs.
I recall thinking that Biden lost the first debate in 2020, also. He managed to come back then. We’ll see about this time.
“Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users,” Griffin’s complaint said. “Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place.”
That’s just nuts
I wish all it took was a can of Mountain Dew to “fix” dementia. I would have had so much more quality time with all those older relatives.
Hey, kids, if your grandparents are still around and coherent, take the time to ask them about their lives when they were younger.
Just like when he told Obama to show his birth certificate.
Which he did, and the birthers promptly dismissed as a fake. So complying with their demands does nothing but makes the lie go farther.
Never mud wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it.
I don’t find it that hard to believe, they’re responding anonymously
If they’re responding anonymously on the Internet, they could be anyone. We have no way of knowing whether they really are hiring managers, or whether the site doing this “poll” made it up for clicks. I’m skeptical of everything I read on the Internet, even if it comes to a conclusion I agree with.
I’d be very interested to know what the wording was in their survey of 600 “HR managers”. Because I find it hard to believe that companies would file job posts that they never intend to fill – and then admit it in a survey. I find it more likely the Internet is trolling them
On the other hand, I would expect companies to put up job posts that they have every intention to fill if the right candidate comes along, but structure the job requiremrnts so that precisely 10 people in the entire country are fully qualified for the well-compensated position. And then complain that they can’t fill the position while collecting everyone’s resumes and getting back to a few of them saying “That position is no longer open, would you consider this one at half the salary?”
Fix Or Repair Daily
They are taking “if it’s Boeing I’m not going” to a new level
I wouldn’t put it past Trump to start describing Biden as a “Master Debater”. It has the level of intellectual discourse we expect from Donald Trump.
This is exactly what we should expect all of Biden’s top allies to say, publically, unless he decides to back out, in which case all these same people will publically say the next lady is the best bet now.