You Built This Hell Yourself, Democrats
Joe Biden just gave the worst debate performance in modern history
Well, I don’t think any of us are going to forget that debate anytime soon.
There’s something that happens when you’re around people with feeble minds that make communication a challenge — whether they’re old, disabled or toddlers — where their inability to find the right word or express themselves isn’t a barrier to understanding what they mean. When my one-year-old toddles around the living room and says “baba,” I know she’s asking for her bottle. But there’s an insulation factor here. You understand them even though others don’t.
If you are a White House staffer, I have to tell you: you have been suffering from this same disease. You have become insulated and completely resistant to the signals, the ringing flashing klaxons that indicate Joe Biden cannot do the job of the commander-in-chief any more. And that’s how you get this debate — maybe the worst single performance by any incumbent president since debates began.
The Democratic Party is in chaos over this, and so are his water-carriers. From the very first lines of the debate, Biden stumbled and botched his prepared remarks. He swayed and meandered. And in the single most central issue for Democrats’ campaign plans this cycle — abortion — Biden made an absolute mess of his answer, falsely describing both the policies of his own party, losing his train of thought, stumbling through what clearly had to be a carefully prepared line of attack.
You have to wonder if this was a plan all along. Did Democratic operatives convince the White House they needed to do this debate so early to give party figures and donors time to decide to make a change? That’s certainly a possibility. The spin from the White House seems to just be that Biden had a previously unreported cold. That might explain the cough or the whispering voice — it doesn’t explain what it means to veer at the end of your statement to declare that you “beat Medicare.”
The CNN approach to the debate was unexpectedly favorable to Trump, helping keep him on the rails and leading to a more disciplined approach. The limited ability to interrupt was actually helpful for him, as it left Biden to spin his wheels, repeatedly failing to fill the time allotted for his answers. The only time he interrupted significantly was, of all things, over a debate about golf handicaps. We can only dream that the two actually take this challenge to fruition.
As for Biden’s challenger, it is unique in this way: for the first time since he has entered the world of politics, Donald Trump’s performance is not the most memorable thing about a debate. He won the first third and last third of the debate on policy matters — Biden only really held his own in the foreign policy exchanges in the middle, post a commercial break that seemed to rejuvenate him. But there’s no solace to be found in it. Instead this looks like a moment that threatens to absolutely blow up an incumbent president’s campaign, in a way that will leave the party scrambling for a new solution. Does that look like Gavin Newsom, who was there in Atlanta tonight? It’s his decision if he even wants to try in this environment.
Right now, Democrats are freaking out. They are right to be afraid.
Don’t Let The Media Escape Blame For This
Much as they’d like to pretend otherwise. In the aftermath of the worst debate performance by an incumbent president in American history, the media is already scrambling for a storyline about what went wrong with their chosen candidate. Their frame of argument goes like this: we love Joe Biden, he’s the best, his presidency is an enormous success, but really, someone at the White House should have told us that he was this ludicrously old. How were we to know? Shame on them.
This narrative is a blatant lie. The truth is that if the media conglomerates had been honest with the voters a year ago, they would not be in this predicament today, nor would the country be saddled with an mentally addled, barely ambulatory octogenarian as the candidate of the major party media members overwhelmingly support.
The reaction to the debate performance was instantaneous and direct: CNN’s John King saying his phone had blown up like never before, MSNBC acting as if they were discussing if an old dog needs to be put down, the pages of the reliably sycophantic New York Times, Washington Post and Atlantic wallowing in grief and despair, the only silver lining a desperate insistence from Canadian David Frum that Trump shouldn’t have ever been allowed on the stage. The pieces have different bylines but they all follow that same pattern: Joe Biden is a great man, he’s a great president, but it pains me to say it, he’s got to go.
This is, of course, another lie. Biden has definitely not been a great or even a good president. Household net worth is up by 0.7 percent during Biden’s three-year tenure, while it was up 16 percent at this point during Trump’s. Biden has presided over the biggest foreign policy debacle in the Afghanistan exit that the United States has experienced in years, pairing massive foreign policy bungles with a military that has decreased significantly in its readiness. His radical approach to culture war issues has shocked those who knew him as a centrist in the past, particularly on issues related to abortion, trans medical treatments and Title IX. And then, there’s the utter humanitarian disaster of the border, where Biden’s approach of undoing everything Trump did led to a crisis so significant that he had to reinstall multiple policies via executive order.
When Joe Biden leaves office, whenever that is, he’ll be remembered not as a president who healed the nation but as one who sold Americans a false bill of goods. But now he can’t even sell anymore. The striking thing about the CNN debate is that the moderators, while generally fair, absolutely teed things up as softballs for the president on multiple occasions, asking him questions where his answers should have been straightforward and easy. There were no gotchas for him — this was tee-ball. But he failed to connect, over and over again, meandering and even descending into name-calling and falsely boasting about his golf skills (note, for the most surreal moment of the night, that it’s Biden who brought that up).
Decline is a choice — and a choice in this case that the media decided en masse to defend as a-OK to the American people, hoping against hope that no one would catch on. But you can only claim videos are “cheap fakes” when they aren’t happening live on TV in front of your face.
As much as the spin might be that responsibility for this moment falls on the Biden family, Jill in particular, the media cannot be allowed to escape the fact that without their constant water-carrying and the lies they told on his behalf, Joe Biden would not currently be the presumptive nominee of their party. They could have done something different. They didn’t. Now they may be stuck with the pain of a reality they created.
Look in the mirror Joe and Mika: it’s no one’s fault but your own.
Numerous other reactions out there, so here are a few worth your time:
Martin: The movement to convince Biden to step down is real.
“God Help Us” — but NYT’s Jamelle Bouie thinks debate was a draw.
The Facts of Biden Fallout
There were two things that might save Biden. First, that Trump is also really unpopular — and also really old. Even now, I suppose I think Biden has some chances if he remains in the race — but surely they’re lower now, probably by quite a lot, than the already-low 35 percent chance that Biden woke up with in the Silver Bulletin forecast this morning.
I’m not really in a mood to critique Trump’s debate performance, which was stronger than I’d expected but also included lots of wild, rambling tangents that only seemed coherent in comparison to Biden. Trump never won a post-debate poll in any of his three debates against Hillary Clinton or his two against Biden in 2020. But he absolutely crushed Biden, 67-33, in CNN’s poll of debate-watchers. How bad do you have to screw up to lose a debate by 34 points to Donald Trump in a country as divided as this one? And yes, these polls historically do have some predictive power in anticipating movement in the horse race, especially with a result as lopsided as this one.
The other way out is if Biden had consistently been able to deliver vigorous and crisp performances in his public appearances. Notwithstanding his other electoral liabilities, Bernie Sanders — also aged 82 — at least seems roughly as sharp as he’s always been. But Biden is a shadow of himself. This is the most obvious thing in the world — and it was obvious before tonight. Seriously, go ahead and watch clips comparing Biden’s 2012 debate performance against Paul Ryan or even one of his 2020 debates against Trump to virtually any of his recent prolonged public appearances. Republicans, predictably, have begun to weaponize the issue and if Biden remains on the ballot, Democrats ought to be deeply worried about an “October surprise” in which Republicans simply run clips of Biden then compared to Biden now.
Instead, Biden has been graded on an incredibly generous curve, like after his substantively fine but poorly-delivered State of the Union address. And the White House has been playing hide-the-ball, from Biden’s declining to do a Super Bowl interview to reducing the number of debates from three to two to using executive privilege to block the release of the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur — who concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and was pilloried for it, even though Hur had been appointed by the White House’s own Attorney General, resistance hero Merrick Garland.
White House staffers who unskew the polls showing Biden trailing, charlatans selling you “hopium”, columnists who predicted (!) that Trump was going to drop out of the debate (!!) — if you’re a Democrat, you should be angry at these people for putting you in this predicament. The same goes for special interest groups who insisted that Kamala Harris ought to be VP — against Biden’s initial instincts — even though she’d just run one of the most underperforming campaigns in primary history. Without that, Democrats would have a better set of options, or Biden might not have run again in the first place.
And you should be angry at Joe Biden, every bit as much as you should be angry at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Lest We Forget: Chevron Goes Down!
How this happened and isn’t the actual biggest story of the day is amazing.
The Supreme Court upended the federal regulatory framework in place for 40 years, expanding the power of federal judges to second-guess agency decisions over environmental, consumer and workplace safety policy among other areas.
The 6-3 decision, along ideological lines, discards a 1984 precedent directing federal courts to defer to agency legal interpretations when the statutory language passed by Congress is ambiguous. Conservative legal activists, Republican-led states and some business groups have argued in recent years that the 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, allows agenda-driven regulators to push the limits of their power.
By abandoning the doctrine called Chevron deference, the justices have given parties unhappy with agency decisions more opportunities to overturn regulations by persuading federal judges that agency officials exceeded their authority…
The decision brings the Chevron precedent full circle. Conservatives initially hailed the Chevron decision, which required the then-liberal leaning federal judiciary to defer to Reagan administration policies rolling back environmental protections. Over subsequent decades, however, the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden used regulatory tools to advance their agendas in the face of congressional gridlock. With Congress often passing vaguely worded legislation, the Chevron doctrine limited judges from second-guessing regulators’ application of ambiguous provisions except when manifestly unreasonable.
Feature
Items of Interest
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The fall of Macron’s personality cult.
Domestic
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Ruling against Biden DOJ could help Trump.
SCOTUS ruling will make it easier to clear homeless encampments.
Iowa Supreme Court allows strict abortion law to proceed.
2024
Strassel: The 51 Intel Know-Nothings.
Trump vows to secure freedom for Evan Gershkovich.
Media
Ephemera
NFL loses massive Sunday Ticket lawsuit, setting up major change.
The Ringer’s NBA draft grades.
NBA draft pick falls because of older girlfriend.
Review: Kevin Costner’s western is a must-see.
Quote
“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.”
— Mark Twain