President Biden Addresses the Nation Regarding Not Seeking Re-election
The full, uncut remarks by President Joe Biden as he declines to seek re-election for you to watch and discuss.
Video via The White House
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Once again he made a case for a strong record of success befitting a second term. I admire him trying to lipstick this pig, but I continue to stand by my assessment that legacy media did this to us for clicks. Nothing more. And it disgusts me.Report
The final test will be in November but, having seen the improvement in energy and fund raising as well as a demonstration of how a living, functioning party actually works, I feel optimistic that Biden made the correct decision.Report
Apparently, there is polling that shows Harris regained the support Biden lost among Black voters and has more youth support/approvalReport
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaReport
I’m not going to give polling much credence until around the beginning of September. Maybe late August though, I have a half day for the state fair.Report
Biden did this to himself by showing up to that debate looking and speaking the way he did. It would have become the entire focus of the election and it’s easy to understand why that is.Report
No, the media did this to him. If their paychecks didn’t depend on clicks they would have covered TFG’s equally disasterous performance, and we the people would have been able to reflect and decide. Instead, perhaps as soon as the cameras were turned off, the media began a drumbeat for his removal. His record belies the need to dump him, and so far we have but one poll where Harris does better then Biden against Trump.
It was a hack kneed hit job and deserves to be treated as such.Report
My dude, I think people simply saw what they saw.Report
So no one saw Trump lying? Let’s be real… here is what happened.
Trump has alot of supporters. They don’t care if he lies.
Trump went up and lied for 2 hours. His supporters said, “That’s our boy!” and went about their day.
Biden has alot of supporters. Many of them are concerned about his age or how he presents himself.
Biden looked shaky at times during the debate. Many of his supporters had their concerns confirmed or worsened. And then came the snowball effect.
If Biden supporters collectively shrugged their shoulders and said, “Meh… who cares. He’s our boy!” what would have been the response?
Yes, Biden looked shaky at times. There is no doubt about that. But let’s not pretend that’s the only thing that happened during or after the debate. During the debate, Trump lied his ass off time and time again. And after the debate, Trump’s supporters shrugged their shoulders and cheered even louder for him. And the rest of us said, “Welp, what ya gonna do?!”
It is more okay for a Republican to be a completely untrustworthy liar than it is okay for a Democrat to show some signs of his age. That is just what we have a country have decided, in large part due to the legacy media.Report
Trump lied through the whole debate. He always does. Biden lied through the whole debate. He always does. Biden couldn’t form thoughts or sentences. Watching footage of that in real time with no one to bail him out, that was new.Report
Biden couldn’t form a thought BUT could lie…?Report
He could repeat his standards, poorly (there are a thousand trillionaires).Report
I think you’re reading way more into my comment than what I meant, particularly with respect to Trump. Trump’s negatives are built in. They’re built into how he polls. They’re built into the way he is covered in the media. I have plenty of serious criticisms of how the legacy media has handled Trump. But in this case the camera didn’t lie. It’s the whole story. Nothing else.
Biden looked like terrible. He looked so terrible that the contrast made Trump’s own lackluster, rambling, lying performance look better. Not good, not by any objective standard, just better in the very limited sense that he did not look like he could collapse and die at any second. Worse, given Bidens age and deterioration chances are high that he would only look worse as the campaign went on. I sat through the whole debate and was getting texted by multiple people I know who all plan to vote Democrat. The first one I got, well before the debate ended said ‘Biden looks like death warmed over.’ And that’s because he did!
In terms of Biden the politician, I have been positively disposed towards him for a long time. I wrote a piece here in 2020 endorsing him and making the case to moderate types to vote for him too. I also thought the Democratic party really came through with his nomination, given the alternatives, and all the nutty things that got thrown around in the primary.
To me the right choice in this election is extremely obvious. But I also know that for whatever reason there are people for whom it isn’t. After what happened on that stage I have no idea how he would be able to convince them, and I don’t think the media is to blame. The people who matter most are probably only barely engaged with what the pundits were saying to begin with, but at some point they will all see the man on TV. It couldn’t go on, and while I have a lot of concerns about Harris (I probably wouldn’t have picked her in a primary) she at least has a fighting chance.Report
In the weeks prior to the debate, the argument that Biden was bad off was called a conspiracy theory and the footage of him looking lost or confused were called taken out of context or “cheap fakes”.
My own personal analogy was to the Emperor’s New Clothes.
The same people who were at the forefront of discrediting the kid who yelled “he’s naked!” are now telling me things about how awesome this is or that is or how bad this other thing is.
Someone on the twitters made the comparison to critics gushing over some new show on Amazon Prime or whatever where the critics give it 83% but the audience score swaps those two numbers around and give it a 38%.
It’s not a good dynamic going into an election, I tell you that much.
We’ll probably see a lot more image management over the next few months.
We’d better, anyway.Report
I think it was hard to know what to expect in the lead up. You had the stuff on right wing tv and its internet ecosystem, but then you’d have him do SOTU and appear… sufficiently ok given who the opponent was already almost certain to be. Maybe there were people who really thought he was going to come out like he did in the debate with Paul Ryan but I doubt their numbers were large. I think most knew it could be an issue but were blindsided with just how bad it was.
Anyway I see all of this as a question of whether or not people are willing to believe their own eyes. I personally watched the whole thing and know what I saw.Report
I think that part of the media “backlash”, if you want to call it that, against Biden is how many journalists watched with their own eyes and saw that not only had they been hoodwinked, but realized that, to some extent, they’d been participating in the hoodwinking.
I’m sure that some reporters got extra harsh in their criticisms because they wanted to get revenge on those that hoodwinked them. Others probably wanted to claw back some lost credibility. Still others probably just shrugged and pivoted to printing out press releases. “Biden Stumbles Metaphorically at Debate; Republicans Pounce”.
How they acted last month should color how you read them next month.Report
There’s a reason the Emperor’s New Clothes story features a naive kid who pointed at the Emperor and said he’s naked. Had, instead, the story have had the accusation coming from a cynical courtier who routinely pointed at fully clothed rivals at court while shouting “They’re naked” and demanding they be thrown out to said courtiers own benefit; well, the story would hit very differently.
Up until the debates the lion’s share of the most extreme “Biden is too old to do anything” stories were from people who’d been saying it for more than four years and who’d been saying almost the same thing about HRC the cycle before and who, prior to that, had been saying that Obama wasn’t an American Citizen. That’s a pretty solid defense for people to point to in their own defense. Moreover, once Biden failed in the debate and subsequently failed to recover (or even try to recover) the narrative changed to reflect the evidence.Report
A mixture of Emperor’s New Clothing and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I guess.
Might have been worth it to glance in the emperor’s direction, though.Report
One problem with the analogy is that there was no kid. The Emperor appeared naked in front of everyone, 10% of whom had been screaming “he’s naked!” for at least a year. Yeah, some of those screaming had also said some dumb things previously.
Or maybe the analogy works better if we see the press as the Emperor’s subjects in the analogy, and the US population was the kid.Report
The Boy Who Cried Wolf And The Other Boy Who Kept Saying That Wolves Were Conspiracy TheoriesReport
The Naked Emperor Who Cried Wolf While Little Red Riding Hood Was…
Or you know what, the Monkey’s Paw. Just the stupid monkey’s paw.Report
He did at the debate, and when he flubbed the debate (and subsequently failed to prove his claims that it was a one off) enough of his own team acknowledged it enough to result in him stepping down. When the facts changed we changed our minds, so to speak.Report
I think it’s one thing to be frustrated with the legacy media. They did cover the issue of Biden’s age, in the sense of referencing it as a vulnerability, but they failed to adequately inform of how bad the situation was. I don’t know if it was laziness that allowed the administration to stage manage around them, or a little bit of bias that made them overly credulous, or if they actually knew stuff and covered it up. No matter which it was they screwed this up, plain and simple, and its another data point against them whenever their credibility is at issue.
However it’s another thing entirely to give too much credit to the right wing media that in the end proved sort of right. To add to your list they’re the same people that have been lying about the 2020 election results for years, and in the case of Fox News even fired its pollsters for providing accurate results that upset it’s audience. No one immersed in that stuff has room for I told ya so’s.Report
Several things are true:
1. Biden is showing signs of decline;
2. Trump is showing signs of decline;
3. The media ignores Trump’s decline while focusing on Biden;
4. The Democratic Party leaders, most notably Nancy Pelosi took action to remedy their candidate;
5. The Republican party embraces their cognitively declining candidate.
These things are all true at the same time.Report
That’d be a credible position if National Review, The Daily [Wire], the WSJ, et cetera didn’t exist.
ETA: Oh, no, I initially posted “the Daily Caller”!Report
Hey if you want to pay for a WSJ subscription for me I will 100% take it and I promise I will treat it as credible. I’d do it myself but all my money goes to my kids’ tuition.
More seriously I feel like that’s kind of a motte and bailey. I’m not familiar with the Daily Wire, but if you want me to give credit to a few traditionally conservative publications like WSJ and NR whose own connection to the modern, MAGAfied conservative movement is ever more tenuous I can do that. It still doesn’t mean I need to change my stance towards conservative media more generally, and I think I’m better off not doing that. I also did have some warning by commenters I take and took seriously like Andrew Sullivan and Nate Silver but I don’t know where Substacks fall on the ideological spectrum.Report
Well it depends on the stack in question. It’d be like asking whether Television is right wing or left wing.Report
I am not certain about the denunciations of the main stream media. I’m gonna try and unpack it here.
Let’s plot the claims about Bidens senescence on a scale of 1 to 10:
– At 1 are the people saying Biden’s totally fine, he’s spryer than people half his age and anyone suggesting otherwise is agist and/or malevolent.
-At 10 are the people saying Biden is next thing to (or actually) dead and being propped up Weekend at Bernies style by *insert your right wing bugaboo of choice* group.
-I’m going to place our midpoint 5 as people saying “Bidens age is a question that’s encumbering his campaign but no concrete definitive evidence has emerged to answer that question for sure.”
-I’d place Team Biden and certain individual commentators out at 1. Most of the Democratic professional party ranged from 3ish down to 1ish positions initially.
-Fox and the right-wing media ecosystem to the right of them, that most voting right wingers get their info from, sit at 9 and 10. Team Trump sits at 10ish when they’re talking to right wingers and at a far lower number when talking to anyone else because, of course, they didn’t actually want Biden replaced.
-Pinky’s people, the intellectual but low mass influence right wing outfits, NRO and their ilk, perch around 8. Generally sympathetic to positions 9 and 10 but more measured in tone and claim. They basically claim Bidens’ impacted by his age and incapable of campaigning or remaining President.
-Where we’ve ended up in reality is around position 6 shading into 7: Biden is clearly impeded by his age and doesn’t seem capable of handling the task of both governing and campaigning.
I’d say that, pre-debate, the main stream media has been distributed from position 6 downward but mostly concentrated in a range of, say, 4-6. There’ve been plenty of centrists (left and right) individually who’ve been at a 6 or seven position (Chait, Klein, Sullivan, etc) but in terms of main stream institutionalist organs I’d say they’ve mostly been stroking their chins around position 5 or close to it. The ones who wanted a primary spectacle leaned towards 6 and the ones who were trying to be strictly impartial stuck to the safe lane at 5.
Post debate the media shifted over into the 6-7ish range. To be angry at them requires info that we just don’t know. We don’t know exactly when or how quickly Biden got to the stage he’s at now. If his decline happened in the past year, say, since the state of the union address then it’s pretty plausible that Bidens team would be able (for both self-interested, professional, self-deceiving and idealistic reasons) to hide it from everyone enough that the main stream media wouldn’t have the goods enough to reach a conclusion different than the pattern they have followed. Bidens crew have been extremely good at running a non-leaky operation and the media’s been burnt something awful by boy who cried wolf behavior from the right for a long time now.
So, to be angry at the main stream media, at this point, I think we’d need to know for certain that Biden was in severe decline for much longer and that various main stream media figures got definitive info about this and sat on it for ideological reasons. No. I don’t think anonymous to quasi anonymous stories or various anecdotal individual tales that Biden seemed out of it on certain occasions is enough personally but YMMV. I don’t think we’ll really know-know until some of Bidens crew leave the admin and write some tell all memoirs, at which point the aggregate of those recollections -might- give us an idea of what the truth is (but it’ll be tough since that lot will be strongly motivated to spin the story in a way that makes them look good).Report
The debate was an 7.5. The clips that Jon Stewart showed on his post-debate show were condensed and made him look like an 8. Maybe an 8.5.
I don’t know how many people watched the presidential debate but the Jon Stewart video has
10,506,046 views as of 10 seconds ago.
What’s worse is that in the days following, the whole “he had a bad night, what have you never had a bad night?” defense thing rang hollow. It rang like denial.
Were you witness to any conversations questioning Polling Theory? Mocking the idea of internal polling?
If not, I might be able to dig you up some… but if you were, you remember how very *NOT* persuasive those discussions were for moving people off of 8ish back to a more respectable 5ish.
Biden leaving was inevitable after the debate.
He needed to be hitting homers.
He only got on base.Report
Nothing you’ve said contradicts what I’ve said Jay me lad and you’re mostly talking about post debate media response which, frankly, is utterly bereft of even a whiff of “scandal”.Report
The only “scandal” is the whole “coverup” thing.
Did journalismists cover up how bad Biden was doing? Was it entirely the White House? Was Kamala in on it?
Is Biden fit to run the White House until January?
Did you see the since-retracted explainer about how JD Vance never humped a couch?Report
To add to this, have they learned their lesson, or are they now covering up Trump’s deteriorating mental state?Report
They should start covering Trump more negatively, definitely. Question whether he’s fit to be President.
Fact-check *EVERYTHING* he says. If he claims to have gotten shot, double-check it.Report
Yes and, as I noted in my analysis, we don’t know if there’s any cover up at all. The strong “Biden can’t run the Whitehouse” case is, itself, not established. We saw the debate and we saw Biden fail to adequately make up for the debate in subsequent appearances (lacking both in quantity and quality) so the 6-7 position appears to comport with reality but there’s been no evidence of Biden being able to run his administration which is why GOP inveigling on that subject has gone nowhere. We likewise have no idea when Biden’s decline occurred that made him incapable of adequately campaigning or if anyone outside his administration covered for him at all. Not much of a scandal then.
And I’m not clear on why JD Vance’s alleged epiplophilia is suddenly popping up in this subject.Report
We likewise have no idea when Biden’s decline occurred that made him incapable of adequately campaigning or if anyone outside his administration covered for him at all.
Is this something that you can understand how someone might *WANT* to know it?
For what it’s worth, I understand how someone might look at that question and immediately want to change the subject to something funny and untrue and about how the opposition sucks.Report
Of course, heck -I’d- like to know but I also know we likely won’t know until/unless Bidens’ inner circle writes tell alls after his presidency but even those narratives will be slanted to cover their butts.
But in terms of -media- scandal? I just don’t see any scandal there.Report
I see the incuriosity as a scandal, I guess.
Did you see the article about JD Vance?
Do you still have no idea why I bring that up?Report
I think the media has been plenty curious, they just haven’t been able to find anything to base a concrete story on.
As for JD fishing couches? I haven’t seen the article but I’m certainly not going to judge him. As long as they aren’t other peoples couches. I mean I wasn’t going to vote for him anyhow. Why you brought it up I’m still not clear.Report
Some stories have no information no matter how hard you try to dig.
Others have info lying strewn on the ground, like you’re walking through the Crater of Diamonds in Arkansas.Report
So you’re saying the media should have been spinning a more aggressive story against Bidens’ age based on less prior to the debate and that it’s a scandal they didn’t?Report
“So you’re saying”
Anyway, I think that the incuriosity about the “cheap fakes” is a tidbit of information all by itself. Oh, it’s a tough story to get information out of the White House about how Biden is doing? And the footage that we *DO* have is being taken out of context? Okay. We’ll put out a story about the conspiracy theory that Biden is doing poorly.
Oh, there’s stuff going on with the Trump campaign? Hell, let’s just go to print.
Lotta data points that indicate nothing if you look at each individual data point and try to reach a conclusion from it in isolation.
If you step back and see stuff like the “Biden Conspiracy Theory” next to stories about how there are rumors out there about the VP, you might see how someone could conclude that the media is more than happy enough to be a workable ref.Report
Dude you just described the actual media environment prior to the debates.Report
And the current environment.
I imagine that it also describes August’s.Report
“ there’s been no evidence of Biden [not] being able to run his administration which is why GOP inveigling on that subject has gone nowhere. ”
What exactly would constitute evidence? Everyone acknowledges that he looks pretty bad in the public-facing parts of the job – but we are all definitionally ignorant of what’s happening with the non-public parts. The fact that things are still running reasonably well is evidence only that the job is being done, not that Biden is the one doing it, and obviously those who are in a position to see and comment on the non public activity have a strong interest to downplay any of his deficiencies, so we can’t take their statements at face value.
All any of us can do is take our best guess based on what we do get to see. But let’s all stop with the “evidence” game, there’s no proving one side or the other until maybe after he’s out of office and the books start coming out.Report
Yes, i’ve been saying from the get go that we won’t know for certain until well after the fact.
What would constitute evidence of Biden not being able to run his administration? Well some major failure of his in running his administration. We have, on the contrary, seen evidence in the other direction- Biden is considerably outside his party’s comfort level on Israel support and, despite that, his administration has hewn to Bidens position despite his own staffers carping and complaining about it. If Biden were inert and the admin was being run by leftists as the GOP alleges, then this outcome doesn’t fit that allegation.Report
OK I guess we’re agreed on the ultimate uncertainty anyway. I don’t think your examples of evidence are very powerful — in the case that he’s not “with it” enough to exercise much control, it’s his CoS and cabinet (all of whom he picked) that are running things, and the differences would be too subtle to notice. He has in fact tacked left on several things compared to where he was in 2020 (e.g. student loan forgiveness) but there’s no way to know whether that’s because he personally thought there was political gain in that direction or he was being led by the nose.
A president is basically Chief Vision Officer and doesn’t touch most of what the government does anyway — I doubt it would make much difference either way up until there’s a real crisis.Report
You and I don’t particularly disagree. The Presidency is big and, set up with competent staff and a specific vision, could run pretty well with little further input from the CVO as you put it.
How about this. To remain president once you are one you only need an absence of evidence that you’re incapable. The onus is on opponents trying to force you to resign or to invoke the 25th to provide affirmative evidence of incapacity. To be a presidential candidate, however, requires more of the candidate. Affirmative evidence of capability is required otherwise, well, what happened this last month can happen. (well, at least if you’re a member of a living functioning political party)Report
Biden had to drop out because of the perception that he couldn’t face the rigors of a campaign. That perception was decisive whether true or not. (FWIW, it looks true to me, but it was still the perception that was politically important, not whatever the reality may be or when it became the reality, if it did.) Whether Biden can run his government is an entirely different question, because running a government requires a very different set of skills than campaigning, and, at this point, there is no reason to think those skills have deteriorated enough to be problematic. I would assume that he has lost his fastball, but I haven’t seen anything that suggests that he can’t get folks out with his off-speed stuff. Quite the contrary. Until there is a perception that he can’t run the government, especially now that he doesn’t have to campaign, there isn’t a pressing story. Eventually, memoirs, biographies, and histories will get us more detail about the decline of his fastball and the effectiveness of his off-speed stuff, but that will be in the “nice to know” category, not the “holy shit” category.Report
I will repeat what I said after the debate. I said that Biden had to either do a blitz of good performing public appearances and one on ones in unscripted interactions with the media or else he’d have to get out of the way. Biden didn’t do the former for whatever reason (most likely because he couldn’t), thus he ended up having to do the latter. God(ess) bless him for not being a Trump and doing neither.
But in terms of his performance as President and running his administration? We have been presented no reason to believe he can’t do it. Wobbly debate performances; poor performance in media interactions and looking old in public are not disqualifying for the job of President. They are, taken together, pretty much disqualifying for the job of Presidential candidate.Report
I haven’t seen anything that suggests that he can’t get folks out with his off-speed stuff.
Prior to the debate, did you see anything that indicated that he wasn’t fit to face the rigors of a campaign?Report
I don’t find much to disagree with in your breakdown. Maybe the detail that has me a bit more peevish is that it’s the MSM’s job to find out about stuff like this. If I’m at one of the big media institutions I’m calling a meeting first thing Friday after the debate with my reporter(s) on the presidential beat and expecting a thorough explanation of how the degree to which things had deteriorated was missed.Report
It’s old news. It’s a nothingburger. They already switched him out so what’s the problem.
Now we have to run stories getting Kamala elected.
Did you see the story debunking the rumor that JD Vance humped a couch? Pretty funny!
Anyway, here’s an explainer for the sexist and racist attacks that Kamala is likely to experience over the next hundred days.Report
Heh sounds like it’s going to be a long 100 days.Report
Technically, people have only debunked the statement that he confessed to humping a cough in Hilbilly Elegy. Word is still out on whether or not he actually ever did it.
More seriously, JD Vance is…not doing well as a candidate.Report
Sure, but you founder in your outrage (in this hypothetical scenario) because your reporters say “we don’t know where Biden is at exactly or when it happened. He whupped the GOPs’ posteriors at the SOTU and his team runs a tight ship so we couldn’t get any grist for our mill except anonymous and anecdotal info. Remember the emails? We got burnt good on those. Remember the laptop? We dodged a bullet there. As you chomp your cigar and fume, Perry White style, that we needed to get the story out there we -still- don’t know when Biden actually declined.Report
Maybe. And to be clear, my feelings are closer to ‘pretty annoyed’ than ‘outraged.’ I’m not rethinking basic commitments or perceptions of who is and isn’t credible over it.
But I would like for the Democrats to win this election and I think having the information we have now would have been helpful.Report
And if the information was available, who would you blame? Because it was.Report
Ultimately the buck stops with Biden for not doing the right thing earlier.Report
The problem there is that we had exactly this thing already happen, with Hillary’s health, and it was completely made up.
Meanwhile, Trump is…very rapidly deteriorating. A thing which very obvious for a while.
Both of their inner circles may indeed have hidden this about their candidate, but, like, the Democrats actually did something when other people noticed. The Republicans have not.Report
If you apply the same curating strategy that failed you last time, you’ll fail next time. There are situations in which the right strategy leads to a loss. This isn’t one of them. Heck, even a completely neutral strategy would have led you to say “this side is saying A, that side is saying not A, I should check to see if A” and it would have been obvious that A is true. A curation that missed both what the right-wing press was saying and the truth, that’s a weird thing for you to be defending.Report
Pre-debate, the mainstream press such as the NYT and the three broadcast networks were actively refuting claims about Biden’s health. I’d put them at 2.5: he needs to get out ahead of this because it’s showing up in polling, but he can do so because there’s no real problem there.Report
Also, show me journalists or officials who were saying that Biden was dead. I can show you plenty who were saying Biden is 100% and calling people who denied it liars.Report
I can’t pass up a good taxonomy…
Based on public utterances:
1. WH: 1-2
2. DemPro: 2-3
3. MSM: 2-5
4. Normies: 5-7
5. ConPro: 6-8
6. MAGA: 7-9
7. RWMedia: 9-10
Now, the *real* question is what were the Group Chats like?
Mcluaghlin Group answer: 7 – worse than expected.
…Bye ByeReport
Depending on your classifications, MAGA is more extreme than RWMedia.Report
Some RWMedia I’d probably classify as ConPro…
But that’s what’s awesome about taxonomies, we can define and re-define terms!Report
well playedReport
Very clever!Report
1) Ronald Reagan was clearly experiencing early onset Alzheimers toward the end of his second term. It was not reported on by anyone, much like FDR’s polio was conveniently “ignored.” No such grace was granted to Biden, and the press chalked up TFG’s clear issues to “Trump being Trump.”
2) THe legacy media focused almost all its reporting on amplifying TFG’s outlandish statements – leaving challenging them to fact checker columns almost no one reads. They also focused heavily on Biden’s age related issues, leaving the economy and pandemic recovery largely off the table in describing his reelection campaign.
3) Now that Biden is out, we are seeing a flood of “Hey, the US is in a good place” reporting, specifically on economics. Too little too late.
4) Biden made the classic Democratic error of believing the 4th estate was on his side, and his people (save Karen St. Pierre) hardly ever pushed back. That lack of fighting the actual fight cost him dearly.
Democrats may now have moved from taking charts to a bazooka fight to carrying fixed blade knives to a bazooka fight, but they have a long way to go. And the 4th estate remains a significant part of the problem. Brinkley, Cronkhite, and Murrow are no doubt spinning ax exponential speed.Report
1) irrelevant. The media universe was utterly different. The fishing communication technology universe was entirely different!
2) Trump still is a conundrum for the MSM. They’ve tried undercutting/balancing him by not reporting so much on his exploits but that, ironically, boosts him by pasteurizing his deranged rambling down into vaguely sane sounding sound bites.
3) it could be that sentiments and facts are just reaching an inflection point. Inflation is looking well and truly whupped now. Consumer sentiment has ticked up a lot in June.
4) I agree that Dems shouldn’t believe the 4th estate is on their side. I would also allege, however, that the left in general has a very bad “work the refs” attitude that serves them ill. The Grey Lady going Jacobin is not going to win elections. Far from it.Report
Come August 1st, I am curious as to whether Biden’s approval rating will still be measured.
I wonder if it will go up significantly.Report
Presidential approval ratings are even measured after they leave office.Report
In that case, I’m confident that we’ll witness Biden’s job approval going up.
Heck, if polled, *I* might even throw him some mild approval.Report
This is what a statesman sounds like.Report
I’ll always be grateful to him.Report
Denouncing partisan rancor while denouncing his opposition as the end of democracy. Every day is a new low for Biden.Report
When one starts off pretty high up on the scale, hitting a “new low” isn’t that big a deal.Report
There are a great many folks out there who see “the opposition” as at least a threat to democracy. And great deal of that fear and mistrust is based more on statements made by TFG himself than on biased punditry. Do you think there is an inherent threat from TFG and his coterie? Do you think that TCG and TFW pose an equal threat?Report
I don’t know those initials, but I think the guy who’s been president for four years is a known commodity.
There’s an interesting bit of psychology about the two-term limit. A post-Roosevelt president thinks of himself as a success if he gets a second term, a failure if he doesn’t. The second election counts more than the first, because it’s a referendum. This is why Biden held on so fiercely, and it’s why Trump hated losing so much. If Trump wins, he’ll go away quietly (well, he’ll be complaining if Vance doesn’t get elected in 2028, then denounce Vance win or lose, then still be Trump, but not be a threat to anything). So I don’t know why anyone would realistically fear Trump.Report
So you take him neither seriously nor literally? Fascinating.Report
He hasn’t said anything that would be out of place in his prior two campaigns, so I take his record seriously. The worst conduct of his presidency was his attempt to game a reelection, and that won’t be an issue this time. All that said, I don’t think this term would be identical to his last one; I think he’s going to be more about his legacy and at least trying to remold the Republicans rather than fight with them.Report
What happens to the US Economy when you forcibly deport 15 million people?Report
He said he’d do that last time too, and he did nothing.Report
Because he lacked a sufficient number of loyal sycophants working for him. I doubt he will have that problem this time.Report
Why would you doubt that? And if he did, would he have a House and 60 Senators?Report
Trump will feel even less need in a second term to get Congressional approval then he did the first time. So I doubt the House and Senate enter into his thinking.
That aside, if you look at what’s left of the GOP, the competent “Adults” who in prior years could have occupied senior political and cabinet appointments will refuse to serve, or have already served and been marked as “disloyal” by him (never to return), to say nothing of the abortive attempt to remake a major portion of the professional civil service into political appointees through Schedule F. That will be one of the first things he does.Report
It doesn’t matter if he’s not thinking about the House and Senate, if they’re not giving him money for it. You understand how government works. If you can’t make your prediction without pretending away branches of government, how am I supposed to believe it?
By all accounts the “major portion” of government employees that would fall under Schedule F is about 2%.Report
He didn’t get money for the wall either and that didn’t stop him.Report
He promised something like a thousand miles and built less than 50. Proportionally, he’d be deporting 300k. Would that traumatize the economy?Report
I think that kind of argument against Trump is unlikely to carry a lot of water. While I think attempting mass deportation would probably be more than a little bit of a disaster, at a certain point, the people living here illegally (with the exception of minors) took their chances when they came and would only have themselves to blame. As for the companies profiting from the situation, well, they’re also breaking the law and juicing the economy isn’t an excuse for it.
Now, for me personally, it’s as simple as the fact that I feel an extremely high degree of confidence that if Kamala Harris wins, no matter what I agree or disagree with her about, she will leave office in 4 or 8 years, no craziness, no constitutional crisis. I don’t see how anyone can believe the same about Trump, given that last go round when it was time for him to go he engineered an incident to try to get around maybe the most important rule we have. There’s 0 reason to believe he won’t do it again and of the handful of things the US can never tolerate that is one.
If you want to talk policy I think it’s Trump’s plan to inplement a 10% VAT that would be brutal on the middle class, enact a budget busting tax cut when we are just getting inflation back under control, and to the extent anything is cut for a tiny modicum of balance it will be health insurance for poor people. That’s pretty crappy, as is his short sighted approach to renegotiating the way we work with NATO, which while probably has to be done, shouldn’t be in a way that leaves us with fewer friends as we face our own relative decline. Not that anyone will ever put any of that in a bumper sticker.Report
What evidence do you have that he will not attempt to remain in power again?
Fun fact: The 22nd amendment doesn’t say anything about how long a president can hold office. It says they can’t be _elected_ more than twice: ‘No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…’
There’s a dozen ways around that, the easiest one is run as the vice president with a presidential candidate who will decline to take office.
And, no, in case anyone is wonder, the 12th amendment saying ‘But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.’ doesn’t forbid that, because, again, a term-limited president is not _ineligible_ to be president, just ineligible to be _elected_ president.
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Hell, it’s an interesting question if what he tried _last time_ would have worked for a third term. A remind that plot was not the fake EC votes, the those were merely to make Congress fail to finish counting EC votes, which would have made this part of the constitution trigger:
Is that ‘electing’ someone to president, if the House chooses someone by a vote? By ‘election’ we usually refer to the voting by the people, or by the EC, not by the House…I think a reasonable argument could be made that the House choosing the president is not ‘electing’ him. (He would have needed at least one electoral vote to defect to him to qualify in the ‘top five’ candidates, though, so that’s more complicated than just running as VP.)
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Pretending that Trump can’t run around smashing things to remain in power _again_ is nonsense. He certainly can. Hell, there’s the ‘Let’s call a constitutional convention’ nonsense that keeps showing up, I can easily imaging him pretending that was voted for and pretending they repealed the 22nd.Report
I guarantee you that what you’re describing won’t happen. It goes against human nature, and if Trump is anything, he’s human nature. If he leaves at the end of a second term, he can tell himself that he could have been elected indefinitely. The contemporary measure of a president is winning a second term. Obama made fun of Trump. If Trump can’t win a second term, then Obama’s better. If Trump can win a second term, then he can say he’s better.Report
So how do you interpret this?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-christians-they-wont-have-vote-after-this-election-2024-07-27/Report
He was talking about the supposed voting irregularities. Get him in power and he’ll fix them.Report
And then they won’t have to vote because …?Report
I think in Trump’s mind, it’s that illegals are casting votes and he’ll put and end to that.
That’s not to say Bedingfield is wrong, although I think it’s more that Trump has no party loyalty. He doesn’t have the impulse to build anything that doesn’t literally have the word TRUMP across it. But the concept he’s thinking of is likely what I said above. Of course I could look at the speech for context, but we both know there won’t be any.Report
Here’s former White House Comms Director Kate Bedingfield:
I realize this will earn me the ire of many Dems, but…I don’t think that here he’s saying there will be no more elections. I think he is saying I won’t be on the ticket either way, so who cares. Which is hideously damning in its own right, cause this is what the Republican Party has turned itself inside out and shredded its credibility for — to become a stan account for this one awful, narcissistic guy.
The real reason to enjoy her explanation is to watch the responses to it.Report
You’re assuming this means something and isn’t just word salad from a doddering old fool.Report
That word salad Gish Gallop offers political cover for a lot of ultraright conservatives who want to achieve a certain political end. Watching conservatives explain the word salad – and their staunch refusal to take the actions growing from it seriously – is deeply educational.Report
If we assume the most generous interpretation of Trump’s words…
Wait, why would we do that?
Given his track record of authoritarianism and the attempted overthrow of a free and fair election, why wouldn’t we just take his words at face value, that he will rig things so that voting becomes meaningless?Report
I take him seriously. Clearly the one conservative willing to engage with us on this doesn’t. Or rather he believes that TFG is talking about something else. Funny how none of the other conservatives seem to want to engage in his words.Report
Gosh, and I thought I was being so clever. You know “The Former Guy.” Introducing “The Current Guy” and “The Future Woman.”
And, yeah, we do have (essentially) four years to judge these two men. It seems very obvious to me that Biden, agree with his stuff or not, fits into the generally accepted mode of “successful politician” and Trump definitely does not. Given Trump’s obvious and extreme distrust of the democratic system, and the possibility that he may have learned a few lessons about implementing his desires next time around, I feel that some fear of his second shot is justified. Will he actually “destroy democracy”? The chance seems much more than zero to me…or at least dent it badly. Not many historical precedents warn me away from an institutional guy like Biden, but there are too many precedents that are too much like Trump for me to feel at all comfortable with someone like him. Fear? Yeah.Report
Dang it…this supposed to be a reply to 7/25 5:13 Pinky. Sorry.Report
Nah, I got it. Half a “Page Down”. It’s survivable.
I really just see this as some people falling back into Trump Derangement Syndrome. When I look at Biden’s violations of norms, from the social media pressure to the attempts at a vaccine mandate, along with his reintroduction of campus rape courts, and now his Supreme Court reform, I see him as a bigger threat. The courts have finally overturned Roe and pushed back against the administrative state, and there’s legitimate reason to fear the Democrats’ response.Report