Should Biden Step Aside?

 

+ MSDNC’s Chris Hayes: “Biden is a decent man who has done nothing wrong. He has not got caught in a scandal—he’s just aging. And that reality, I think, makes him increasingly likely to lose re-election to a Republican candidate…”

+ The real scandal is that liberals don’t see arming a genocide as a scandal.

+ When people say, “Joe Biden’s a decent man,” what Biden are they talking about? The man who befriended Strom Thurmond, the man who treated Anita Hill dismissively, the man who plagiarized Neil Kinnock’s speeches, the man who crafted the most punitive and racist crime laws of the 20th Century, the man who voted for the Iraq war and armed a genocide?

 

You’ll notice no stammering or stuttering in this blatantly racist Biden rant from 1996 on the floor of the Senate, defending mandatory minimum sentences and an expansion of the federal prison system:

 

“We must take back our neighborhoods. Somewhere on the order of 70 percent of one population group in America [he’s talking about Blacks] will have children born out of wedlock. And another population group is 40 percent and the largest population group, racial group, in America it’s something like 25 percent. The reason why these folks are convicted felons ain’t because they have high IQs. They’re stupid. Most of them. They’re not only predators. They’re stupid. The real smart ones don’t get caught. We don’t know how to rehabilitate. We have no idea how to rehabilitate. A noble urging and instinct on our part, but the truth is when a criminal is rehabilitated, we don’t know whether it’s real or not to recognize it. And secondly, if we’re convinced it’s real, we don’t know why he got rehabilitated. He literally, and I’m not being facetious, seen God. He may have come to religion. He may have decided that his son or daughter’s future was hanging in the balance. He may, whatever. We don’t know what happened. It may have been through the program he was in in prison. But we have no notion why. We used to have indeterminate sentences. We used to say that we would allow a parole board to decide when or when not someone was rehabilitated. So, they’d march for a certain period of time before a parole board, usually good actors or actresses got parole and the ones who didn’t act so good didn’t get parole. So, the law we wrote says, hey, if you got sentenced and convicted the federal judge has to give you an eleven-year sentence. He or she can’t say, I kind of like you and I understand that your background is such that your mother may not have loved you when you were seven and your father left you when you were one and by the way when you got to school you sat next to someone who was anti-social and that rubbed off on you and therefore we realize you had it tough. Can’t do that. They go to jail for eleven years. Flat. A friend said but what this is going to do Joe is fill up more prisons now that judges can’t put people on probation. He’s right. So, I, along with others, sponsored a bill to spend more money to build federal prisons.”

 

+ Even if Biden can somehow prove he’s competent (he can’t), what is his own campaign’s rationale for his reelection? That he will continue the same policies that have left him with a 35% approval rating?

+ It’s a strange victory for Biden that the key question about his presidency is over his demyelinating brain and not the 186,000 Palestinians (according to Lancet) he’s helped the Israelis kill.

+ According to Biden intimate Joe Scarborough, Biden believes Obama is behind the plot to oust him. “The Biden campaign and many Democratic officials do believe that Barack Obama is quietly working behind the scenes to orchestrate this. Joe Biden is deeply resentful of his treatment under not only the Obama staff but also the way he was pushed aside for Hillary Clinton.”

+ On the day Biden announced his abortive presidential campaign in 2008, he said this about Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Maybe Biden had decided to steal lines from his old pal Strom Thurmond instead of Neil Kinnock in this campaign.

+ Biden’s phone-in conversations on Morning Joe resemble Nixon’s with Kissinger during the Final Days, where his paranoia, petty grievances, aphasia and megalomania are on full display.

+ Obama enjoyed an approval rating of 60% when he left office (unjustifiably robust to my mind). That’s 25 percent higher than either Biden or Trump at the end of their terms. Blaming Obama for his misfortune is a losing game. But Biden’s a loser and a sore one at that. He owes his presidency to Obama, who cleared the field for him in the Democratic primaries in 2020.

+ Scott Fitzgerald said that a true sign of genius was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at once. I’m not sure if that’s really a sign of intelligence or evidence of schizophrenia. But the Biden campaign wants you to believe that Black Democrats are firmly behind him, while at the same time blaming the plot to oust him on Obama.

+ In fact, Black Democrats aren’t firmly behind Biden, according to a new poll by The Economist…

 

Should Biden step aside…

Black voters: Yes 49%, No 34%
Hispanic voters: Yes 56%, No 22%  
Younger voters: Yes 58%, No 20%
Independents: Yes 60%, No 21%

 

+ Post-debate polling shows only 29% believe Biden has the mental capacity and physical stamina to serve for another four years. Even HRC is polling better than Biden. Stop the world, I want to get off…

+ After a meeting of House Democrats on Biden, Rep. Stephen Cohen was asked by reporters:

Reporter: Are you all on the same page?

Cohen: No.

Reporter: What do you been you’re not on the same page?

Cohen: We’re not even on the same book.

+ Josh Barro: “Biden is treating us the way Trump has treated Republicans for a decade: he’s pointing a gun at the head of the Democratic party and threatening to shoot if he doesn’t get his way.”

+ Jeet Heer: “The severity of the crisis can be measured by the fact it has forced centrist pundits (Yglesias, Chait, Barro) to write the most sensible columns of their careers.”

+ When asked by George Stephanopoulos whether he’d had a recent neurological exam, Biden said, “No one said I had to … they said I’m good,” Biden replied. Later Biden grandly pronounced, “I get a cognitive test every day. Everything I do – you know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world.”

+ According to White House visitor logs, Dr Kevin Cannard, a Parkinson’s disease expert at Walter Reed Medical Center, has visited the White House eight times since August 2023. In at least one of those meetings, Cannard met with Biden’s personal physician, Dr Kevin O’Connor.

+At first, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre refused to confirm Cannard’s visits, saying she needed to respect the privacy of those involved for security reasons. Later Jean-Pierre ludicrously suggested that Cannard’s visits might be related to military officers working at the White House: “There are thousands of military personnel that come to the White House, and they are under the care of the medical unit.”

+ As the great baseball statistician Bill James quipped, “The cover-up is worse than the dementia.”

+ Is it by design that Biden’s PR staff is almost as incompetent as he is?

+ Biden’s claim that the elites of the party are out to get him is laughable. Biden has been president, vice president and a senator for 40 years. He’s an Ascended Master (or Grand Dragon, in his buddy Strom Thurmond’s vernacular) of the Democratic Party.

+ The “elites of the party” are the only reason he became the nominee in 2020, after finishing fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire and losing to Sanders by 40% to 19% in Nevada…

+ As an early member of the pro-corporate, crime-mongering, hawkish Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Biden was a leader of the newly ascendant right wing of the party, which was determined to replace LBJ’s Great Society programs with Thatcherite neoliberalism…

+ The Nation’s John Nichols, an old hand in Wisconsin politics:

 

In 2012, after a rough debate, Obama flew to Madison and addressed 30,000 at a massive outdoor rally. In 2024, after a much rougher debate, Biden flew to Madison and addressed around 300 party stalwarts in a middle-school gym. The contrast is stark.

 

+ Rep. Adam Smith, the Democrat from Washington State, on getting Biden to drop out: “I’m not looking to be an asshole here, but if there’s not a nice way to do it, then do it the not-nice way. It’s just too important.” Smith followed this up by saying the quiet part out loud: “Joe Biden was not picked in 2020 because he was the only person that could beat Donald Trump. He was picked because he was the only person that could beat Bernie Sanders.”

+ Which begs the question, why are Sanders and the Squad, most prominently, AOC backing Biden so vocally and unequivocally?

+ Dylan Saba: “I kind of get the bind AOC and Ilhan are in because they had already endorsed someone, they admit is doing genocide. Once you’ve gone for 99% Hitler it would be pretty weird to abandon him because he’s old.”

+ Bernie’s affection for Biden is even stranger than Biden’s affection for Strom Thurmond.

+ A “well-connected” Democrat told the Daily Beast called Biden’s son Hunter, who is currently awaiting sentencing on federal gun charges, “the acting chief of staff. He’s the gatekeeper. He’s the one bucking up his dad.”

+ Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said he saw a recent poll that showed Biden losing in his Congressional district in Riverside, which Biden won with 62% of the vote in 2020.

+ Whoopi Goldberg gives one of the most graphic descriptions yet of the logic of lesser evil voting:  “I don’t care if [Biden] pooped his pants. I don’t care if he can’t put a sentence together. Show me he can’t do the job, and then I’ll say, okay, maybe it’s time to go…I have a poopy day all the time. All the time.”

+ Whoopi may be all in, but George Clooney’s all out.

+ It looks like George exacted a measure of revenge for team Biden’s attacks on his wife Amal and the ICC…

 

Clooney had just helped raise $30 million for Biden at a recent fundraiser, where he witnessed firsthand Biden’s diminished capacity: “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate. Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign. The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, who we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.”

 

+ The Biden White House’s response to Clooney’s op-ed was that Joe Biden has more stamina than Clooney because Clooney left a fundraiser before Biden did. (Clooney likely left early because he saw what a monumental mistake, he’d made by raising $30 million for a political zombie…)

+ As for Trump, he really, really wants Biden to stay in the race…

 

Jon Stewart: “Now to my mind, the debate was a shocking display of cognitive difficulty recognizable to, unfortunately, anybody who’s dealt with aging parents, and it’s a hard watch. Some people think his performance was not as noteworthy as Biden’s opponent in the debate…I will tell you the difference. The difference is Trump delivered at the debate to expectation. We expect him to be fucking crazy. But Biden’s performance and inability to articulate at times was stunning. Like, I could not believe what I was watching.” Stewart ridiculed the excuses put forward by Biden’s PR flacks: that he was tired, that he had a cold, that he was on cold medicine, that he still suffered from jet lag following a flight from Europe that landed in DC 12 days before the debate: ‘He’d been home for almost two weeks. He was jet-lagged? How big is that fucking jet? The point is, for a campaign based on honesty and decency, the spin about the debate appears to be blatant bulls‑‑‑. And the redemption tour hasn’t gotten that much better.’ Not only are big Democratic Party donors like Abigail Disney and Clooney pulling their support for Biden, but small donors are sitting on their checks and Venmo accounts, too. Projections that are grassroots fundraising for the Biden campaign will drop by at least 20-25% this month.”

 

+ Biden’s first communications director, Kate Bedingfield, is publicly pleading with the Biden campaign team to put forward a path to beating Trump: “I know firsthand better than almost anyone how smart the Biden team is about data and about ignoring the noise. They are right that the game here is to convince voters, not pundits. But when the battle over the public data is so overwhelmingly negative, it’s a good moment to put forward your theory of the case. If they have data that supports the path to victory that they see, they should put it out there now and help people who badly want to beat Trump rally around it. People want to see the path.”

 

+ The problem for Biden is there is no path. Not when you’re stuck at 35% favorability, you’ve exposed yourself as suffering from dementia and you continue to double down on one unpopular dead-end war and a genocide.

+ Two weeks after Biden’s debate debacle, several of his campaign officials told NBC News the president has “zero chance” of defeating Trump. One Biden campaign official said, “He needs to drop out. He will never recover from this.”

+ Biden seems to have mastered the art of continuing to fall even after he hit bottom.

+ Pelosi went on Morning Joe to talk about Biden: “It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”

Reporter: Do you want him to run

Pelosi: I want him to do whatever he decides to do. And that’s the way it is. Whatever he decides we go with…Let’s just hold off. Whatever you’re thinking, either tell somebody privately, but you don’t have to put that out on the table until we see how we go this week.

+ Pelosi is often as difficult to understand as Biden. But according to Politico, she has privately told at least 6 lawmakers that Biden won’t win this November and should step aside.

+ A new AARP poll of Wisconsin, taken after the debate, shows an 11-point split between Biden and Tammy Baldwin…

 

Trump: 44 (+6pts)
Biden: 38
RFK: 9

 

+ Support for Biden is collapsing even in New York, where Democratic Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine told Politico: “We’re still acting like this is a one-party state, which for pretty much 20, 25 years it has been. I truly believe we’re a battleground state now.” New York hasn’t been won by a Republican since Reagan’s reelection in 1984.

+ Internal Democrat post-debate polling shows Biden down by double digits in suburban swing districts NY-17 (R-Lawler) and NY-19 (R-Molinaro), and down a point in NY-22 (R-Williams), all districts Biden carried in 2020. Perhaps this is why New York’s lieutenant governor called for Biden to step aside…

+ Meanwhile, Axios reported that Chuck Schumer is now open to replacing Biden at the top of the ticket. When the President from MasterCard loses the Senator from Citibank…

+ Colorado Senator Michael Bennet on CNN: “Donald Trump is on track I think to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide and take with it the Senate and the House.” Colorado’s other Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper said calls to his office about Biden are running 9-1 in favor of wanting him to withdraw.

+ A new ABC/Washington Post poll is even more devastating since there’s nothing Biden can do to become younger…

 

Is Biden too old for a second term?

85% too old

13% not too old

 

+ Is it possible to quantify the amount of moral courage it takes for a politician to jump ship after it hits the iceberg?

+ Haaretz’s Amir Tabon: “As an Israeli journalist who writes regularly about the U.S.-Israel relationship, one thing is clear: Biden’s understanding of Israeli politics belongs to the 1980s, not the current moment.”

+ Biden in Harrisburg: “I’ll be blunt. I ended the pandemic. And corporate profits doubled.” He didn’t.  In fact, Biden ended pandemic relief and exposed the population to a pandemic without economic or health care support. More than 800,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 since Biden took office and continue to die at the rate of more than 1000 per week. Corporate profits went up, as 10s of thousands were evicted from their homes and others were plunged into medical and student debt.

+ Move over Rachel Dolezal! Biden told a Philadelphia radio station that he’s “proud to be the first black woman to serve with a black president.”

+ Andrea Lawful-Sanders, a radio host who interviewed Biden two days ago–told CNN that the White House sent her 8 questions in advance, and she picked four of the 8 White House questions to ask Biden during the interview. (Not only did the Biden camp feed reporters questions, but they also asked to edit and delete some of his answers.)

+ Jill Biden is the Edith Wilson of our time, who secretly ran the White House for more than a year and covered up the severity of Woodrow’s incapacitating stroke…

+ The Wall Street Journal was the first mainstream outlet to probe Biden’s deteriorating mental and physical condition. According to their reporting, the Europeans were the first to raise questions about Biden’s mental fitness and physical stamina. In June 202s, the Germans arranged a meeting at the Alpine resort Schloss Elmau between German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the early evening in order to accommodate Biden’s fatigue at night. But Biden surprised his host by failing to show up. Instead, Secretary of State Tony Blinken came in Biden’s place, explaining that Biden had gone to bed early.

+ The Journal reported that Biden’s aides often step in to help the president when he seems confused. At a fundraiser in New York last fall, Biden was at a loss trying to answer questions about the Middle East from people in a photo line An aide whispered in Biden’s ear and the president then answered.

+ During a fundraiser at the Four Seasons in New York in June 2023, Biden spoke for around 10 minutes and then took a few questions. At one point, Biden couldn’t remember the word for “veteran.” The president asked the group to help him find the right word, saying he wanted to refer to a person who had served in the Army or Navy.

+ The Biden campaign regularly directs donors to submit their questions for the president in advance, including at an event this year in South Florida with only 8 people attending.

+ The Journal also reported that by 2020 Biden’s inner circle considered him physically unable to comfortably withstand weekly cross-country trips.

+ In a September 2022 speech on food insecurity, Biden praised the work of Rep. Jackie Walorski, a Republican from Indiana: “Representative, Jackie are you here? Where’s Jackie?” Walorski had been killed in a car crash a few weeks earlier, a death Biden had already issued a statement of condolence for. He’d even ordered the flags at the White House flown at half-staff in her honor. His prepared remarks at the event noted Walorski’s passing.

+ CNN reported that Biden hasn’t held a full cabinet meeting since October 2, 2023, nearly before the Hamas attacks against Israel. (Traditionally, presidents meet hold full cabinet meetings once a week or once every two weeks.)

 

At the NATO summit on Thursday, Biden introduced Zelenskyy by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”

The crowd gasped. Biden paused, realized his blunder, walked back to the podium, then said, “President Putin? He’s gonna beat President Putin. President Zelenskyy! I’m so focused on beating Putin, we’ve got to worry about it. Anyway…” I guess he’s going to beat Zelenskyy, er Putin, the same way he beat Medicare.

 

+ Biden’s answer to the first question at his “Big Boy” press conference:

Reporter: What concerns do you have about Vice President Harris’ ability to beat Donald Trump if she were at the top of the ticket? Biden: Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be president.

+ Biden was right about at least one thing during his slow-motion press conference: “My numbers in Israel are better than they are here.”

+ Rachel Maddow‘s assessment of the Big Boy press conference: “President Biden showed a startlingly impressive command of the issues at his press conference. He is not only strong on foreign policy; he is just fundamentally right on foreign policy in the way that he talks about it. It just shows you he is a master of the foreign policy field and has been for decades in his career.”

+ This “Master of Foreign” policy voted for the most destructive war in US history and is now supervising a genocide in Gaza, refusing to engage in diplomatic talks to end a bloody stagnated war in eastern Europe and actively trying to antagonize China across the Pacific…

+ Biden, speaking in his typically fractured diction, at his presser: “There are at least five presidents running or incumbent presidents who had lower numbers than I have now.” True. But none of them won re-election.

+ An agitated House Democrat ratted out Biden to NOTUS this week: “At our Democratic caucus issues conference a few months ago, everything was tightly controlled and scripted — to the point of designated members reading a few preapproved questions from cue cards for POTUS instead of the unscripted Q&A we’ve always had in years past. Something has changed, and his handlers know it.”

+ On his podcast this week, MSDNC’s Chuck Todd said that Biden’s stubborn refusal to stand down has made him reevaluate Biden’s entire political biography: “I still can’t believe he ran for president in the first place, given that his family was in crisis in 2018…You look at what has happened, I can’t believe he has put his family through this. And now, looking at his behavior now, in clinging to this, I think the entire narrative on Joe Biden is gonna change, in that everything’s always been about his ambition and his ambition comes first.”

+ A new IPSOS/ABC poll taken this week shows Harris leading Trump. This doesn’t say all that much about Harris. She’s about where you’d expect any almost Democrat would be against Trump, except for Biden…

 

Harris 49% (+3)
Trump 46% Ipsos #B (ABC)

 

-CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair