My God, Joe.
Biden's fragility in last night's debate shook the Democratic Party to its core. Now, what will the leadership do about it?
President Joe Biden Jr. speaks at campaign rally at Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center in Philadelphia, PA on April 18, 2024. Photo credit: lev radin/Shutterstock
As President Joe Biden took the stage last night, the volume on my anxiety about the Presidential debate cranked up so high I could practically hear the buzzing in my brain.
And things quickly got worse from there. I think the last time I was as stunned and flummoxed by a political event was around 9:00 on Tuesday night, November 8, 2016, when it became a real possibility that Hilary Clinton was going to lose an election that should have been a slam dunk.
I don’t need to tell my readers that they are right to be alarmed about sending Biden into the fall campaign. We have been told that videos spread by GOP operatives which showed a physically stiff man shuffling in public were doctored. And yet that is what we saw live last night. We have told ourselves, when Biden misspeaks—says trillions when he means billions, or even millions—that he has always done this. Last night, after the President stumbled through an early response that ended in some word salad about Medicare, a friend tweeted: “Biden’s stutter is really bad tonight.”
That wasn’t a stutter. It was an inability to follow a thought through to completion, a brain desperately casting around for where it should go next. And Biden’s eyes looked panicked. I don’t think I was imagining that.
I want to follow next steps closely before I wrote more: I’m not sure it is useful for me to prognosticate at this point, because it adds to the confusion swirling around all of us.
But here’s what I believe.
Biden must step back, and do it soon. If it is impossible to persuade me that he is fit, not just for the job, but for a fall campaign, it is impossible to persuade anyone. I also want to say that I don’t “know” what is going on: I am not a doctor. But I did find it odd when I saw tweets 20 minutes into the event (it wasn’t a debate just two old men yelling, one lying his head off, and neither one answering questions) that Biden had a cold. If that was true, why didn’t the Biden team tell journalists that before the debate? I think it is far more likely that the anxiety of performing to a national audience, one he could not connect with, triggered cognitive problems that may be connected to an organic problem.
I want to emphasize that I am only guessing. I am also told Biden did better after I turned it off, about 40 minutes in. But not enough better, and I can’t unsee what I saw last night. Why? because it reinforces what anyone who knows aging and elderly people fears about a president (or a faculty colleague, for that matter) in their eighties: that they are fine until they are not, and then decline can be very rapid.
I have no confidence that Biden, even if elected, can make it through four years if he is this fragile now. What does this mean? That the GOP catch phrase, “You are really voting for President Harris,” has some merit. And if I am voting for President Harris, like most Americans who are committed to stopping Trump, I want to goddam vote for President Harris (who should probably start the job on Monday.)
As an aside, Kamala Harris would eviscerate Trump in a second debate. Eviscerate him. Isn’t that a nice thought?
But what if it’s not Harris? Forget the “brokered convention:” that hasn't happened in over half a century, and we don’t live in that political world anymore. Nor will there be a quick and dirty set of “mini-debates” as if the primary season is not over. And maybe—just maybe—a completely new ticket would win the Democratic Party a range of new adherents who are young, unaffiliated, and sick of politics as usual, to pick a new ticket and trust the voters to make the right decision.
As I say, I will have more for you next week, and things may have changed by then. If something needs to be done, better the people closest to Biden should do it quickly. There’s something wrong with the President: the Democratic Party must tell us the truth about what it is and move on.
Yes, this is a five-alarm fire, but it is not an unsolvable problem. I promise.
Really short takes:
The first televised Presidential debate was on November 4, 1956, but no presidents appeared on the stage. Instead, former First Lady Eleanore Roosevelt and Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith stood in as party surrogates. Read about it on the United States Senate web page.
Honestly, I haven’t been this upset after a presidential debate since 1988. That year, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, in his infinite wisdom, asked Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis if he would want a man who had raped and murdered his wife to be executed.
NBC’s Jake Sherman tweeted an interaction with Leader Hakeem Jeffries this morning that makes me think things may be in motion on Capitol Hill. Expect coverage of Biden’s noon campaign rally, which Jeffries refers to in the quote contained in Sherman’s tweet, to be heavily covered.
It's unsolveable as long as the leadership of the party circles the wagons and says, "There is no problem". Which right now is what I would guess they're going to do. Hell, they're even being abandoned by their pet pundits, which should tell them something.
I have *no* faith that the Democratic Party will do what's right. They will take us down with them, all the while asking for just $5 from me.