Where do Democrats go from here?

 For better or worse (mostly worse), the debate is in the books. Since Thursday night, Democrats and Never Trumpers have been involved in a megafreakout and the conventional wisdom is that Biden’s campaign is dead. Is Trump merely awaiting a coronation at this point? Is Biden done for? Will Democrats replace their standard bearer?

Tune in soon for the answers to these and other questions! Same Bat Time! Same Bat Channel!

Photo by Simone Secci on Unsplash

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Seriously, we really don’t have good answers to these questions yet, but we do have some hints. First, we know that President Biden is not voluntarily stepping down from the ticket.

“You’ll have to carry me out feet-first, you dog-faced pony soldier!'“ the president was reported to have said.

No, I made that up. But it is true that Biden has refused to step down in a speech that was much more clear than his debate performance.

The big question on everyone’s mind is, “What happened during the debate?”

Was Thursday night an accurate depiction of Biden’s mental and physical state or was it a one-off, a bad night? Following on the heels of that question, we can wonder, if Thursday night was normal for Biden, why would his staff put him on the debate stage? Remember that Biden challenged Trump to the debate. He didn’t have to do that.

I think there is at least a chance that Thursday night was an aberration. I say that for a couple of reasons. First, we’ve seen Biden in other settings recently and the debate was atypically bad. As I noted last week, even at the post-debate party, he seemed like a different person. Biden gave a rousing speech in North Carolina the day after the debate, and he showed none of the voice problems or slowness evident on Thursday night.

Second, Biden’s performance in the debate was made worse by the optics. If you listened and could understand what he was saying, he made sense except for losing his train of thought a time or two. Similar to the infamous Kennedy-Nixon debate, the visuals made a big difference. In this case, the transcript reveals a much different debate than the one we watched because we were all concentrating on Biden’s voice and why his mouth was agape. Biden did okay if you listened to the words.

If this was the case, then Team Biden needs to get their candidate front and center and put him on display. He needs to be seen interacting with people and speaking. At this point, they can’t play it safe and have him hide in the basement.

The downside to this strategy is obvious. If Biden has a similar episode, it won’t be recoverable.

But at least we’ll know. And if there is a similar episode there will be a much better case for removing him from the ticket. And removing Biden would almost certainly need Biden’s cooperation unless he becomes incapacitated. The only other alternative might be to create an entirely new party and ban Joe from it the way the Stonecutters became the Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers on the “Simpsons.”

But what if Thursday night was not an aberration? Why would Biden’s staff send him out to the wolves? I can only think of one good reason: Biden’s staff could see what Biden can’t or won’t see. Maybe Biden’s aides threw him into the lion’s den because they know he’s not fit to lead for another four years and they needed to shake Biden up to get him to see the truth.

Which possibility is the real deal? Everyone has an opinion, but I don’t think that anyone knows for sure except the people who are in close contact with the president on a day-to-day basis. And most of those seem to be standing by their man, at least publicly.

There are reports that Mr. Biden is meeting with his family today. If there are real cognitive and/or physical problems, they should be honest with him. And Biden should do the right thing for his party and his country by stepping aside (unlike some other presidential candidates I could mention who seem to care only about what is good for themselves).

It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for Biden to spend his remaining days enjoying life at home with his family while going down in history as the man who saved the country from Trumpism twice, once by stepping up and once by stepping down.

If Joe Biden stays on the ticket, will I still vote for him? Absolutely. Given the choice between a guy who is a bit slow but who helped the country recover from COVID and is a strong defender of the free world versus a who hurt the economy by launching unnecessary trade wars, cozies up to Putin, has been legally held liable for sexual assault, and who goaded his supporters into attacking Congress, I’ll take Biden any day.

And if anyone could lose to a man in cognitive decline, it’s Donald Trump.

This race ain’t over.

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From the Racket News

The master debaters (not)

 I’m writing this as I’m watching the historic first presidential debate between a current and a former president.

Right out of the gate, I noticed that Biden’s voice was raspy and seemed like he was tired. Trump, on the other hand, was more energetic and a clear speaker.

Biden also did not present a good visual. He looked tired and often had his mouth slightly agape, although this may be because he couldn’t believe what he was hearing from the other podium.

Whatever the reason, for most viewers the bottom line will be that Trump looked and sounded better than Biden.

Going further, Biden had a few oratorical stumbles. I’m sure that you’ll be seeing the clips of these replayed. In context, however, he was mostly coherent with the exception of what seemed to me like a recurrence of his stuttering problem several times. As the debate went on, Biden did seem to warm up and got more energetic and feisty, but first impressions had already been made.

There won’t be talk about Biden being jacked up on drugs after the debate, but he really could have used a lozenge.

When it came to substance, it was a different story. A steady stream of falsehoods came from Donald Trump that will defy the efforts of an army of fact-checkers. To be fair, Biden did make misstatements as well. Every candidate does in the heat of battle, but I’m pretty sure that Trump was just making stuff up to a large extent. (If you’re interested in fact-checks, here are two from CNN and Politifact.)

As an example, Trump came out of the gate with two lies, that America was not at war during his presidency and that he presided over a historically strong economy. The facts are that America was at war in Afghanistan throughout his Administration though he did negotiate the Afghan withdrawal with the Taliban, and Trump’s economy was mediocre even before the pandemic. A big part of Trump’s economic woes can be traced directly to Trump’s tariff and trade wars.

And that’s the problem. Many people will hear Trump’s words and assume that they are the truth because of the law of primacy, which holds that people remember what they hear first. Put in different terms, as George Santayana said, “Repeat a lie often enough and the people will believe it,” and, as Will Rogers pointed out, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

Trump is a very convincing liar. He’s a con man from way back. A bull-shitter. Making a sales pitch is second nature to him.

Biden is not a salesman.

The downside for Trump, other than the blatant lies, was that he tended to ramble and avoid difficult questions like whether he would accept the election results even if he lost. That failure to answer is an answer in itself and that fact should deeply concern Americans.

I won’t lie. It was not a good night for Joe Biden. Going into the debate, he needed to project vibrance and clarity. He was lucid but sometimes unintelligible, coherent but not articulate. The clips of his stumbles will hurt. It may be superficial, but his weak voice and stumbles made him seem frail. Biden got in good jabs at Trump, but they won’t be remembered because they were hard to understand.

The weird thing is that at the post-debate party, Biden sounded more energetic and the raspiness was gone from his voice. If he had presented this image during the debate, the night might have ended on a very different note.

On substance, especially if one screens out Trump’s lies, Biden did better, even as I disagreed with a lot of his policy positions. (I can say the same about Trump’s policies. His economic plans are a recipe for disaster.) He refuted a great many of Trump’s false statements, but the question was whether anyone was listening, and if they were listening, whether they could understand him.

The bottom line is that America is in trouble. Not the way Trump says when he paints a picture of the economy in shambles and Biden as a tyrant. Neither is true despite Trump hammering away at the talking points.

We’re in trouble because the reality is that neither one of these guys should be president. Joe Biden is an old man who should be enjoying his twilight years, and Donald Trump is an old man who is corrupt, incompetent, and vengeful. It was a depressing night.

As the post-debate shows play on, there is talk about possibly replacing Biden. A lot of it from Democrats. At this point, it is difficult to see how Biden can overcome his debate performance, except…

Not too many undecided voters were probably watching the June debate, much earlier than previous debates, and he’s running against a very unlikeable, incompetent, and radical opponent.

Joe Biden’s hoarse voice does not make Donald Trump honest or trustworthy.

I think the reaction of most Americans will be similar to the meme below that was posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Photo credit: Twitter screenshot

Biden did not inspire confidence. Trump inspires fear, such fear that dozens of his former aides and cabinet members have warned against re-electing him.

That may be a silver lining for Biden. The snap reaction of a lot of many viewers seems to be that while Biden looked old, Trump scored poorly on the issues. There is some speculation that even though Biden did not do himself any favors, Trump may not capitalize because of his weakness on substance. The polls in the coming weeks will tell the tale, but the bottom line is that it isn’t Republicans who are talking about replacing their candidate (although they definitely should).

Are these two really the best we can do? The answer is pretty obviously no, but what are we going to do about it?

Barring a miracle or the Sweet Meteor of Death, one of the two will be inaugurated president next January. Donald Trump is too dangerous to be allowed to return to power, and if Joe Biden can’t make that case effectively to the American people, Democrats need to find someone who can.

The ball is in Biden’s court. He needs to show the country that he can handle another four years. And time is running out to do so.

From the Racket News

The presidential race may have turned a corner

 

It is premature to say that the presidential race is over, but there was a major milestone recently as Joe Biden took the lead in the FiveThirtyEight polling average for the first time. The shift comes as Biden closed the gap after Trump’s first felony conviction in late May. FiveThirtyEight’s election model was unveiled a few weeks ago and, taking other electoral indicators into account in addition to polling, the model gave Biden a slightly greater chance of victory even with tighter polls. As I write this, the model still shows a tossup with Biden having slightly better odds.

The Real Clear Politics average, which is typically more friendly to Trump, also shows a tight race. The RCP average showed a decline for both Trump and Biden in early June and currently stands at Trump +1.

Credit: Imgflip.com meme template

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It took some time for the effect of Trump’s conviction to trickle into polling, but it now seems that Trump’s legal woes were not baked into the cake. They were also not, as many Trump supporters claimed, a boon to Trump’s campaign. (The next time the pro-Trump pundits determine anything will be bad for Trump will be the first.)

Veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove agreed on Fox News, saying, “There’s been a trend since the… May 30th guilty verdict in the New York case” away from Trump and toward Biden.

The shift extends beyond popular vote polls to the Electoral College, because my readers are all aware that the national popular vote is meaningless. The FiveThirtyEight model currently predicts a 272-266 victory for Biden.

Where Trump led in the swing states a month ago, the race has tightened in the battleground states as well. The swing states, as you would expect, are very close and mostly rated as tossups, but there has been movement from a month ago when Trump was on top in almost every battleground. FiveThirtyEight ranks the closest states (in order) as Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina. At this point, the forecast is for Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to go blue, which would yield 270 electoral votes for Biden, but these states are all tossups with predicted margins of less than three percent.

Republicans may cry foul that Trump’s decline is tied to his conviction. The rub is that Republicans knew that one or more felony convictions were likely when they voted for Trump in the primaries. The Former Guy was indicted in four separate cases before the primary season began. Convictions were a risk that they took. Republican voters might not have emotionally accepted this risk, but they knew about it.

There are also a couple of additional factors to consider. One is that Trump and MAGA tend to underperform their polling. Politico pointed out in March that polling error in the primaries may not translate into polling error in November, but it is a data point to consider.

And then there’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the third-party candidate. Currently, RFKJR is polling at about eight percent and is drawing from both Trump and Biden. I’ll eat my hat if he gets eight percent in the general election, but the question is who his candidacy will hurt more.

Trump supporters seem to realize that their candidate is in trouble. I’m seeing an increasing number of allegations that Democrats are registering illegal immigrants as voters or up to other shenanigans.

As David Limbaugh posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter, “While many stay tunnel-focused on the polls, which are mostly encouraging, I can't quit thinking about reports that Dems are registering illegals among other sorts of chicanery.”

Of course, evidence in the “reports” cited by Limbaugh is sketchy if it exists at all. A report by the Washington Times found 99 ballots cast by illegals since 1996, about a third of whom registered as Republicans. These illegal voters should be prosecuted, but the evidence falls far short of evidence of massive fraud and would be unlikely to have influenced the outcome of even one local election.

It seems more likely that what we are seeing is the same preemptive excuse-making that we saw in 2020. That year, Republicans laid the groundwork for Trump’s false claims of a stolen election long before the ballots were counted. For that matter, Trump also made claims of election fraud in 2012 and 2016. In this area, he’s consistent if nothing else.

In the past, these conspiratorial fantasies have hurt Trump and other MAGA candidates with moderate voters. It may be that as Republicans turn up the crazy, they scare more and more voters away.

As I said earlier, this year’s election is far from over, but the polls do show a tightening and a shift towards Joe Biden. Longtime readers will remember that one of the basics of reading polls is to look for trends rather than focusing on topline numbers. It will take time to see if this trend persists.

Given the state of the race, this week’s debate [see “Will Trump debate]” is taking on a larger-than-normal importance. And in this case, Republicans are also taking steps to explain away a disappointing performance by their candidate. From attacking CNN and the moderators to alleging that President Biden will use drugs such as cocaine or steroids to enhance his debate performance, the Trump campaign seems to be working to lower expectations for a Trump victory and pump up President Biden in the dustup in Atlanta.

I’ve been predicting that voters would come back to Biden for a long time. As I’ve said over and over, when Americans take a close look at Trump, they don’t like what they see. Four months prior to the election, they may also finally be listening to what Trump is saying, which ranges from frightening threats of revenge to promises to expand the police state to hunt down illegals to rants about sharks and batteries on boats.

For many, if not most Americans, the upcoming election is a choice between a rock and a hard place. Or rather, as The Former Guy might say, between a shark and a battery.

My bet is that America will choose to avoid the shark.

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TRUMP BACKS OFF ON GREEN CARD PLAN: Donald Trump recently floated a plan in which foreign graduates of American colleges would “automatically as part of your diploma [receive] a green card to be able to stay in this country.”

While I applaud the effort to keep people who are educated at American colleges from working for our competition, I do think vetting is needed rather than stapling a greed card to a diploma. But don’t worry, if this concerns you, the plan is already DOA. Fox News reported the same day that the Trump campaign was walking back the comments.

There are certain places that Republican voters won’t follow Trump, and liberalizing immigration policy after years of demonizing immigrants is one of them. Today’s Republican Party has no appetite for increasing immigration, legal or not. That’s only one of the many signs that the current GOP is not the same party that it used to be.

WHAT I’M READING: One of my favorite movies as a kid was “The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang.” Over the past 40 years, my memory got fuzzy on the details of the shootout in Coffeyville, Kansas, and the movie doesn’t run much anymore. For these and other reasons I was excited to see Tom Clavin’s new book, “The Last Outlaws: The Desperate Final Days of the Dalton Gang.”

The title doesn’t give the book enough credit because Clavin details the rise and fall of the Daltons. The attempted double bank robbery in Coffeyville is only the meat in a Doolin-Dalton sandwich that leaves the reader amazed, amused, and in wonder at these last outlaw battles of the Old West. The journey of the Dalton gang is a fascinating journey from their beginning as lawmen to motion picture actors and advisors. Seriously!

It’s a very readable and enjoyable history book that keeps the pages turning. It also took me back to reexamine The Eagles’ second album, “Desperado” (1973), which was pretty Dalton-centered in retrospect. The song, “Doolin Dalton,” pretty obviously centers on the gang, but much of the rest of the album is an homage to the outlaws as well. That includes the Eagles staple, “Desperado.”

Now, I need to find the movie.

From the Racket News