Well, I’m not sure what to say. That debate was awful. Joe Biden looked feeble and unfocused. Donald Trump lied throughout, just making stuff up with no rebuttal. Trump won the debate because he looked like Trump while Biden looked like a weak old man. Unfortunately, the substance of their answers really don’t matter too much.
The reaction among Democrats falls on a scale from denial to panic. People like Heather Cox Richardson are telling us that Biden won the debate because his answers were substantive while Trump’s were mostly boasting, evasive, and lies. A larger chorus, at least on social media, is calling for Biden to drop out of the race. A sliver of left-leaning pundits and operatives is telling us not to panic.
The don’t panic crowd tells us that it’s just a moment and just the first debate, but there won’t be any other debates. Trump will never agree to one. He just got what he wanted, a televised contrast that made him look strong and vital while Biden looked old and frail. The substance of the debate doesn’t matter too much to the low-information voters who are still undecided.
If Democrats do push Biden out, his replacement will be Kamala Harris. To think otherwise is foolish. Harris is next in line to the presidency and black and brown Democrats are not going to let her get passed by. At this point in the election cycle, the party can’t afford to alienate their base or have a loud divisive fight. It’s not politically feasible to draft a Newsom or Whitmer, regardless of what a lot of Democrats want.
That said, Harris has improved substantially over the past few years. She’s still not popular but she’s also not known. There’s still time to define her and she would probably be more appealing to the young voters who are so dissatisfied with Biden. She would also help attract women and Black voters that Democrats need to win. Her problem would be with the mostly white, moderate swing voters in swing states who might not trust a California liberal.
Media outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are feeling justified for their coverage of Biden’s age and mental acuity. Democrats and progressives have criticized them for what they considered a bogus story. Now, those outlets are feeling smug about their coverage in a “See, I told you so” sort of way. Biden’s performance last night invited more scrutiny instead of damping concerns.
Republican pollster Frank Luntz’s focus group of fourteen undecided voters broke for Trump by twelve to one. Luntz said he’s never seen an outcome like that. Most of them cited cognitive concerns instead of substantive ones.
Despite calls for him to step down, I don’t think Biden’s going anywhere. I’m not sure what Democrats do. The problem isn’t that he stumbled on his answers in the debate. The problem is that too many Americans believe that he isn’t physically or cognitively up for the job. I don’t how you change that perception without another debate.
The the best answer now is to make Trump a more disturbing choice than Biden. Given all Democrats have tried to do on that front, it’s a hard proposition. Still, Trump’s repeated lies last night give them an opening if Democrats parse his answers ad nauseam to show that he’s dishonest and has ill intentions.
The other choice is to hope Americans just forget. The July 4 holiday is coming up. People are going on vacation. Maybe the debate becomes a fuzzy memory like so much in politics. It’s certainly plausible. They’ve clearly forgotten how chaotic Trump’s presidency was.
We’re left with a choice between a man with the “morals of an alley cat,” as Biden accurately summarized Trump’s character, and a man who looks like he might not make it to the election, much less four more years in the White House. My 19-year-old daughter and her friends were disgusted and disturbed. I don’t even want to hear the rant I’m going to get from my 34-year-old daughter. We’ve let down a generation of young people.
I’m going back to the mountains.
Weeks ago, I thought it was a very bad idea for this debate to occur. I feared that Biden might come across to the public just as he did. I knew Trump would lie in every utterance. But it did not feel right to give Trump the national stage as a legitimate presidential candidate. For crying out loud, he is a 34-times-and-counting convicted felon. He should not even be in the conversation in this year’s presidential race.
I have been in the news business for six decades. I have seen stories like Biden’s fitness pushed to the backburner by other stories. This could happen with the flap over Biden’s mental sharpness. The immunity ruling and the sentencing of Trump in New York are going to take the spotlight off Biden’s “performance” Thursday night.
If Democrats remove Biden from the ticket, they almost surely will lose in November. They need to embrace him, stress that he had a cold, which he appeared clearly to have, put him in public settings to show his strength (once he is over the cold) and move forward. He is not the first incumbent president to do badly in the first debate. This is something of a rite of passage for incumbents. We are electing/re-electing a national magistrate, not a debater.
If we had had these damn debates in the 1940s, FDR clearly would not have won a third or fourth term. He might not even have been elected. The man was confined to a wheelchair. Imagine what today’s snotty critics would have said of him. But from that wheelchair he led the country through the Great Depression and World War II, and created the world we live in to this very moment.
In my 80 years, there have been three transformative U.S. presidents: FDR, LBJ, and Joe Biden. To throw him under the bus based on a sorry showtime performance is wrongheaded. Yes, I wish he were 20 years younger. But then, I wish I were, too. I will take his decency, leadership, and experience any day of the week over that of a charlatan who wants to dump democracy. The latter needs to be the focus of Democrats and the country.
Rick Gunter
Americans still have the same choice: Vote for a lying, traitorous felon who is desired for his autocratic desires, or vote for Biden.