This is absolutely true. The thing about people Joe Biden's age is that THEY ARE NOT GOING TO MAGICALLY GET BETTER. Joe isn't going to be any better than he is right now. He's not going to be able to speak better, or answer questions better, or make better decisions on what he says and does. This is it. He clearly cannot serve another 4 year term in his current state... And THIS IS AS GOOD AS HE'S GOING TO BE.
Even if it was POSSIBLE for him to 'get better' (it isn't but bear with me) we still can't take that chance...because if he fucked up the next debate we would be too far in to change up...no backsies at that point...IF they are going to replace him they have to do it NOW...There simply IS no more 'wait and see' collateral left...
Yep. We basically need him to be the best possible version of Joe Biden from here through election day, with no more fuck ups. Anyone comfortable taking those odds?
Everything is so topsy-turvy. To find myself agreeing with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi??? and disagreeing with AOC and Bernie Sanders??? What world am I in? It's so strange that it's his centrist peers and friends who are calling for him to step down and not the people you would have expected ... I totally understand Sanders and AOC's calculus in trying to get something out of this, but that seems so uncharacteristically cynical of them, I can't quite parse that either
What seems to be happening is that are some figures within the Dem elite like Pelosi who truly do want to beat Trump and realize that Biden is going to lose while others like the unnamed senior House Dem in that Axios article have resigned themselves to Trump winning. Meanwhile the "left" of Bernie and AOC I think realize correctly that they have basically no sway in this so are just trying to get something out of it, ineptly as HamNo points out
Yeah, I totally understand their calculus. it just seems uncharacteristically cynical for them. I mean almost bordering on elder abuse. On the other hand Biden signed up for this job, and it's progressive’s job to get whatever they can out of a political institution that is antagonistic to their goals. So in that way, I'm certainly not judging them on ethical grounds. It really is a hard call. But I think Hamilton has the right take on this
This is spot on, the kind of good-faith critique we need more of. Everything about this situation feels like an Amando Iannucci satire of the Democratic Party--including the dogged loyalty of the party's left which is never reciprocated.
Great piece. The counterpoint is that being honest (I'll stipulate that Bernie and AOC mostly are, in the context this column addresses) hasn't really gotten the American left very far. Right? By speaking honestly to voters' reasonable frustrations with the Democratic Party incumbent, AOC got a seat in Congress (good!) By hammering the corporate capture of the Democratic Party writ large, Bernie successfully pulled the entire party left in not one but two presidential elections, and got a lot closer to the nomination than anyone expected both times (also good!) He's also held a Senate seat for 17 years; presumably his constituents have sent him back to DC in part because of his integrity. But what is integrity against power? This is not meant as an endorsement of the AOC/Bernie gambit; you make good points about why that was unwise. I guess I just haven't seen a viable alternative to their bargain (which I, like you, consider to be good-faith but ill-fated) being presented from the left. Are you? Can you imagine one? Maybe I'm just being dumb. Alright, thanks for taking my call, I'll hang-up and listen.
I think we have to be honest and it's a long game and the practice of sacrificing honest for short term political gain is why the approval rating of Congress is like 10% and nobody believes anything anyone says.
Yeah, fair enough. I guess it just feels like this game has been pretty long already, and the left has not been winning it for as long as I've been alive (for reasons you have written about here and elsewhere that I more or less categorically agree with.) Half of nothing is still nothing, so on merit the Bernie/AOC play will fail if/when Biden fails, as you correctly point. But then what happens to the American left the next quarter (period/inning/etc.) of the long game? At what point can we stop playing the long game and start winning in the short term? These aren't supposed to be gotcha/doomer questions, I just struggle with them myself, particularly lately.
I don't think you need to get into all that to think that this AOC/Bernie gambit is dumb. First, what good are these policy concessions if and when Biden loses? Second, Biden had an entire first term to do this stuff what makes them think he'll do it now? Third, they're now associating themselves with a campaign that's most likely going to lose in historic fashion
Assume somehow he wins and will do the things now. Unlikely but let's just pretend. Fourth - he can't do most of it himself. He needs a House majority (possible) and in many cases 60 Senate seats (not very likely to be possible).
The takeaway I suppose is that you have to be more strategic about WHAT you lie about....Telling people that they didn't see what they CLEARLY saw is NEVER going to be a winning strategy ESPECIALLY on the left...We KNOW what fragility and infirmity LOOK like and THATS what we saw...If you're GOING to lie, there needs to be sufficient plausibility to back it up...We SAW what we saw..There IS no plausibility to the lie that he's 'OK'
Biden's chronological age is not the issue; the issue is his mental capacity, which can be a problem at ANY age. There are people much older than Biden whose minds are far sharper than his. The continual use of "age" as a criterion is nothing more than a shorthand euphemism for the fact that he is simply not fit, mentally or physically, for the job to which he aspires.
yeah some old folks are more up for it than others the problem is politicians are surrounded by suck ups whose career depends on their so there is not a good system in place to get them to recognize when the time has come
I read this piece as a request that the Democratic Party be honest with the public, even if it’s inconvenient and difficult — that seems to be the recommendation.
Excellent read. We must do what’s right even when it’s not easy — We need leaders strong enough to tell us the truth — Our coalition is so big we’re bound to have disagreements, but we should never have disrespect
When old folks decline, they do so in a non linear manner. They will be at a certain level, then decline, find a new level, stay there for a period, then decline further. They don't have upswings. I watched this with my father, with my mother in law, and it's pretty standard.
100% closely related is the problem of totally demoralizing your base. I was talking to a friend recently deeply involved in trying to stop the war in Gaza. She has no illusions about the guy and even she might suck it up and vote for him because the alternative is too scary. But she's also someone who has knocked doors every election despite being far to the left every candidate she's knocked for, and she doesn't think she could do it this time because how do you get out of bed, give up your day off to go lie to voters? It's too demoralizing and many feel the same way.
There are lot of things, both true and hyperbolic, both positive and negative, that can be said about the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. One thing that is invariably true about both of them is that they are not politically stupid. They may do stupid things (the Kente Cloth incident that will and should never die), but they're not idiots at this whole thing. Maybe, sometimes, we should take their ability to read a room at face value.
"Maybe, sometimes, we should take their ability to read a room at face value."
I don't even think we need to go THAT far...The kicker was how bold and UNCHARACTERISTIC this move by Pelosi and Schumer was...The fact that dead-center Schumer was sufficiently spooked enough to take a stand SO OFF SCRIPT for him is the indicator that we can't ignore this....These are the LAST people I could imagine that would want to rock the boat...It HAS to be even WORSE than we're being told
Your first sentence is completely, 100% true, but will get you no friends here.
Bernie is only “Bernie” because he’s been re-elected by the same cohort of 50,000 Whole Foods shoppers in the micro-tiny backwater statelet of Vermont. There is nothing “democratic” about his seat, nor is his “Our Political Revolution” anything more than wish-dreams.
AOC was never more than a brief hallucination of a “progressive” spokesmodel - she’s as Ms. Modern Catholic as Hawley/Vance are Opus Dei Catholics.
Kids, and this is meant for kids of all ages - electoral politics is an old person’s long-running corporate-ad soap opera: dull, dispiriting, unworthy of any viewership, as real as Jill Stein’s unlined face.
I think truth, & a lack of it, is a big reason we're in the situation we're in right now. It, in my opinion, would be naive to think Biden has not shown missteps in private for the past 3+ years. However, his team has shielded him from the wider world for most of that time so only upper echelon Dems may have noticed.
They, in turn, seemingly decided that it was better to retain personal power than be truthful/honest in their assessments about Joe's decline, and therefore chances, with him/his circle/etc. And that plainly sucks. I joke about Republicans being members of a cult due to their subservience to Trump. We have to be better as a party because of the trust that should reside in public servants.
The legislative accomplishments under Biden's tenure have been great. He still has a great grip on foreign affairs as shown in his press conference last week. But the notions of Biden are baked in, and nothing is changing it. He should go HAM with social policies as a lame duck while Harris or someone else runs.
Exactly right. When you can spook Chuck Schumer enough to get him to go off script and recommend something as bold and uncharacteristic as Biden stepping down, we'd better fucking listen.
My initial take on AOC’s endorsement was that she had read the room and didn’t see that the anti-Biden forces had the strength to remove him. IOW, if Biden is the candidate it would behoove the left to get behind him now and not later. It remains to be seen if that is true. Regardless, I don’t think the squad has enough influence now to make a real impact. Biden will or will not be removed regardless of what they do. For the record, though, I want Biden to step down.
People of color and women are used to needing more proof to be taken seriously; they know they need more support to make their case. Maybe AOC was holding herself to a higher standard out of habit.
This is on point HamNo. As usual. Whoever replaces Biden is going to be less beholden/friendly to the left and unions than Biden will be. It'll be the most centrist corporate Dem imaginable picked by the party donors to replace him. So I totally understand why the left would support keeping Biden in there to achieve these policy goals, but Biden is still just too old.
Well maybe not "lies" exactly. Most of the evidence that Biden is "too" old refers to his speaking abilities. Anyone who's made it to their sixties, or struggled with fatigue, or tried to produce words in a recently acquired language after getting off a transcontinental flight knows that there's a difference between thinking and speaking. I think it's stereotypical to equate the appearance of aging with assumptions about actual capacity.
That's only the secondary reason for my reluctance to jump on the "replace Biden" bandwagon. The other one concerns the risk of introducing an mostly-unknown candidate at the last minute. We don't know what kinds of muck the GOP might come up with to doom our last minute savior. If our only risk assessment tool is polls, how do we decide whether someone else would do better?
He is a professional politician and a native english speaker.
Hes trained his whole life for the campaign trail so him collapsing under it is a sign of collapse.
He's spoken English his whole life so Im not sure what a jet lagged esl speaker comes into it.
And he had a stutter but he beat it and I never even knew he HAD a stutter until his previously normal diction went to hell, implying his brain is unrolling the habits of literal decades and reverting him to childhood.
Any replacement Democrat polls massively better against both him and Trump so theres literally no downside.
Hes also a bad man, open racist, credibly accused sex pest, glib liar, strike breaker, and the reason Clarence Thomas sits on the supreme court and generations of other black men sit in jail. So don't worry the next guy might be worse.
Not that it matters on the scale of the rest of it but he also just legalized helicopter hunting of wolves/bears and shooting them and their young in their dens. Ohama banned it. It was settled law till he stuck his nose in.
Another good use of the executive branch's limited capacity in what might be the final months of his only term; A savvy move sure to garner many more votes from the Psychobilly MAGA nuts in like Wyoming, at the expense of committed environmentalists and animal rights activists whose votes the dems hate dirtying their hands with.
Trump has lowered our standards. President Biden’s speaking abilities and signs of cognitive decline are being dismissed, because Biden is being compared to his opponent. But we need to remember that before Trump, neither party would’ve accepted a candidate who struggles to communicate. Communication is a huge part of being President.
What struggle to communicate when you’re jet lagged, sleep deprived, have a cold andca hoarse throat? 90 minutes erases almost 4 years of ultra performance. Families of past presidents say he’s surpassed all of them w/performance. On his worst day he’s light years ahead of the 🍊hitler child rapist felon out on bail who brought down our country as best he could and now wants to finish us. Gee whiz. Since then he’s been “the comeback kid”. Remember that? Look at jimmy Carter in his 90’s building houses. Biden can ride a bike. He falls down, gets up and rides some more. His bio age is way younger than his chrono age. 🍊shitler wearing diapers can’t even walk down. A slight incline. Hasn’t told one truth in his whole con man artist life? WTH?!?!
This is my point: it's a popular misconception. This misconception is so widespread I don't know why I'm even trying to raise awareness about this aspect of how our brains work. We can all just continue to assume that people who don't speak our language fluently, or people with cerebral palsy, or people with Parkinson's, or just people who look or sound old are therefore stupid. Until we experience some of these things ourselves.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no real evidence either way about Biden's cognitive capacity. It's certainly okay to raise the question, but the level of certainty being expressed across the board doesn't seem very objective. (I didn't think there was any real evidence for WMDs in Iraq either. I guess I read too many mysteries where the plot problem is lack of evidence.)
The point is moot either way. The job of being the President involves a lot of speaking, both in the sense of reading prepared speeches and talking to the media etc. but also being involved in sensitive negotiations with foreign heads of state, other powerful politicians, powerful CEOs etc. When Biden calls Zelensky Putin or something do you think Zelensky's reaction is "this guy's probably at the top of his game he's just having a speech pathology issue"? No, of course not. Just to be safe he's going to assume that he's not thinking that great either. Aging is very unfair in that people have a younger you they can compare to the present so everything is registered as a decline
Second, at least I'm not saying he's "stupid". I'm just saying he shouldn't be the President of the United States at age 81
"We don't know what kinds of muck the GOP might come up with to doom our last minute savior"
That's the thing though...If they CAN'T come up with anything, they'll just make something up...Smears against WHICHEVER candidate gets picked are a given...It a waste of time trying to get in front of them because fresh bullshit will be thrown at us on the regular...
An unknown can become 'known' in a very short period of time...And for better or worse, folks tend decide whether they like someone or not VERY quickly...That's what happened with Obama...He was 'in' the first time he opened his mouth...Even with the resistance from the PUMAs it was clear he was going to be the candidate
This is absolutely true. The thing about people Joe Biden's age is that THEY ARE NOT GOING TO MAGICALLY GET BETTER. Joe isn't going to be any better than he is right now. He's not going to be able to speak better, or answer questions better, or make better decisions on what he says and does. This is it. He clearly cannot serve another 4 year term in his current state... And THIS IS AS GOOD AS HE'S GOING TO BE.
A full-on presidential campaign will only make him worse. It's too grueling. And now with covid...
exactly
Even if it was POSSIBLE for him to 'get better' (it isn't but bear with me) we still can't take that chance...because if he fucked up the next debate we would be too far in to change up...no backsies at that point...IF they are going to replace him they have to do it NOW...There simply IS no more 'wait and see' collateral left...
Yep. We basically need him to be the best possible version of Joe Biden from here through election day, with no more fuck ups. Anyone comfortable taking those odds?
Everything is so topsy-turvy. To find myself agreeing with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi??? and disagreeing with AOC and Bernie Sanders??? What world am I in? It's so strange that it's his centrist peers and friends who are calling for him to step down and not the people you would have expected ... I totally understand Sanders and AOC's calculus in trying to get something out of this, but that seems so uncharacteristically cynical of them, I can't quite parse that either
What seems to be happening is that are some figures within the Dem elite like Pelosi who truly do want to beat Trump and realize that Biden is going to lose while others like the unnamed senior House Dem in that Axios article have resigned themselves to Trump winning. Meanwhile the "left" of Bernie and AOC I think realize correctly that they have basically no sway in this so are just trying to get something out of it, ineptly as HamNo points out
Yeah, I totally understand their calculus. it just seems uncharacteristically cynical for them. I mean almost bordering on elder abuse. On the other hand Biden signed up for this job, and it's progressive’s job to get whatever they can out of a political institution that is antagonistic to their goals. So in that way, I'm certainly not judging them on ethical grounds. It really is a hard call. But I think Hamilton has the right take on this
This is spot on, the kind of good-faith critique we need more of. Everything about this situation feels like an Amando Iannucci satire of the Democratic Party--including the dogged loyalty of the party's left which is never reciprocated.
Great piece. The counterpoint is that being honest (I'll stipulate that Bernie and AOC mostly are, in the context this column addresses) hasn't really gotten the American left very far. Right? By speaking honestly to voters' reasonable frustrations with the Democratic Party incumbent, AOC got a seat in Congress (good!) By hammering the corporate capture of the Democratic Party writ large, Bernie successfully pulled the entire party left in not one but two presidential elections, and got a lot closer to the nomination than anyone expected both times (also good!) He's also held a Senate seat for 17 years; presumably his constituents have sent him back to DC in part because of his integrity. But what is integrity against power? This is not meant as an endorsement of the AOC/Bernie gambit; you make good points about why that was unwise. I guess I just haven't seen a viable alternative to their bargain (which I, like you, consider to be good-faith but ill-fated) being presented from the left. Are you? Can you imagine one? Maybe I'm just being dumb. Alright, thanks for taking my call, I'll hang-up and listen.
I think we have to be honest and it's a long game and the practice of sacrificing honest for short term political gain is why the approval rating of Congress is like 10% and nobody believes anything anyone says.
Yeah, fair enough. I guess it just feels like this game has been pretty long already, and the left has not been winning it for as long as I've been alive (for reasons you have written about here and elsewhere that I more or less categorically agree with.) Half of nothing is still nothing, so on merit the Bernie/AOC play will fail if/when Biden fails, as you correctly point. But then what happens to the American left the next quarter (period/inning/etc.) of the long game? At what point can we stop playing the long game and start winning in the short term? These aren't supposed to be gotcha/doomer questions, I just struggle with them myself, particularly lately.
I know, I know: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hamilton-nolan/the-hammer/9780306830921/
I don't think you need to get into all that to think that this AOC/Bernie gambit is dumb. First, what good are these policy concessions if and when Biden loses? Second, Biden had an entire first term to do this stuff what makes them think he'll do it now? Third, they're now associating themselves with a campaign that's most likely going to lose in historic fashion
Assume somehow he wins and will do the things now. Unlikely but let's just pretend. Fourth - he can't do most of it himself. He needs a House majority (possible) and in many cases 60 Senate seats (not very likely to be possible).
Its the unwillingness to fight the good fight...bare fisted....
And a WASTED 'lie' to boot...
The takeaway I suppose is that you have to be more strategic about WHAT you lie about....Telling people that they didn't see what they CLEARLY saw is NEVER going to be a winning strategy ESPECIALLY on the left...We KNOW what fragility and infirmity LOOK like and THATS what we saw...If you're GOING to lie, there needs to be sufficient plausibility to back it up...We SAW what we saw..There IS no plausibility to the lie that he's 'OK'
Biden's chronological age is not the issue; the issue is his mental capacity, which can be a problem at ANY age. There are people much older than Biden whose minds are far sharper than his. The continual use of "age" as a criterion is nothing more than a shorthand euphemism for the fact that he is simply not fit, mentally or physically, for the job to which he aspires.
Norman Lear (RIP)...It was downright BIZARRE to see him at 100 years old in interviews...It's like NO FUCKING WAY this dude is 100
luck of the draw...that's about it...Biden didn't get that royal flush hand unfortunately
yeah some old folks are more up for it than others the problem is politicians are surrounded by suck ups whose career depends on their so there is not a good system in place to get them to recognize when the time has come
I read this piece as a request that the Democratic Party be honest with the public, even if it’s inconvenient and difficult — that seems to be the recommendation.
Don't hold yer breath.
Excellent read. We must do what’s right even when it’s not easy — We need leaders strong enough to tell us the truth — Our coalition is so big we’re bound to have disagreements, but we should never have disrespect
I promise you will never take my disrespect away. Ever
When old folks decline, they do so in a non linear manner. They will be at a certain level, then decline, find a new level, stay there for a period, then decline further. They don't have upswings. I watched this with my father, with my mother in law, and it's pretty standard.
Very true. But another 4 yrs how will he be?
He doesn't seem capable of filling the office for another 4 years now.
100% closely related is the problem of totally demoralizing your base. I was talking to a friend recently deeply involved in trying to stop the war in Gaza. She has no illusions about the guy and even she might suck it up and vote for him because the alternative is too scary. But she's also someone who has knocked doors every election despite being far to the left every candidate she's knocked for, and she doesn't think she could do it this time because how do you get out of bed, give up your day off to go lie to voters? It's too demoralizing and many feel the same way.
There are lot of things, both true and hyperbolic, both positive and negative, that can be said about the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. One thing that is invariably true about both of them is that they are not politically stupid. They may do stupid things (the Kente Cloth incident that will and should never die), but they're not idiots at this whole thing. Maybe, sometimes, we should take their ability to read a room at face value.
"Maybe, sometimes, we should take their ability to read a room at face value."
I don't even think we need to go THAT far...The kicker was how bold and UNCHARACTERISTIC this move by Pelosi and Schumer was...The fact that dead-center Schumer was sufficiently spooked enough to take a stand SO OFF SCRIPT for him is the indicator that we can't ignore this....These are the LAST people I could imagine that would want to rock the boat...It HAS to be even WORSE than we're being told
Firstly there is no 'left' in the USA.
Secondly how do the rest of the world view this doddering old man?
It's not just about the US.
Your first sentence is completely, 100% true, but will get you no friends here.
Bernie is only “Bernie” because he’s been re-elected by the same cohort of 50,000 Whole Foods shoppers in the micro-tiny backwater statelet of Vermont. There is nothing “democratic” about his seat, nor is his “Our Political Revolution” anything more than wish-dreams.
AOC was never more than a brief hallucination of a “progressive” spokesmodel - she’s as Ms. Modern Catholic as Hawley/Vance are Opus Dei Catholics.
Kids, and this is meant for kids of all ages - electoral politics is an old person’s long-running corporate-ad soap opera: dull, dispiriting, unworthy of any viewership, as real as Jill Stein’s unlined face.
I think truth, & a lack of it, is a big reason we're in the situation we're in right now. It, in my opinion, would be naive to think Biden has not shown missteps in private for the past 3+ years. However, his team has shielded him from the wider world for most of that time so only upper echelon Dems may have noticed.
They, in turn, seemingly decided that it was better to retain personal power than be truthful/honest in their assessments about Joe's decline, and therefore chances, with him/his circle/etc. And that plainly sucks. I joke about Republicans being members of a cult due to their subservience to Trump. We have to be better as a party because of the trust that should reside in public servants.
The legislative accomplishments under Biden's tenure have been great. He still has a great grip on foreign affairs as shown in his press conference last week. But the notions of Biden are baked in, and nothing is changing it. He should go HAM with social policies as a lame duck while Harris or someone else runs.
Exactly right. When you can spook Chuck Schumer enough to get him to go off script and recommend something as bold and uncharacteristic as Biden stepping down, we'd better fucking listen.
My initial take on AOC’s endorsement was that she had read the room and didn’t see that the anti-Biden forces had the strength to remove him. IOW, if Biden is the candidate it would behoove the left to get behind him now and not later. It remains to be seen if that is true. Regardless, I don’t think the squad has enough influence now to make a real impact. Biden will or will not be removed regardless of what they do. For the record, though, I want Biden to step down.
People of color and women are used to needing more proof to be taken seriously; they know they need more support to make their case. Maybe AOC was holding herself to a higher standard out of habit.
I'm missing your actual recommendation. Enough with the criticism. What's your solution?
Joe Biden needs to drop out and be replaced ASAP.
I think Covid is a very elegant solution.
anything that gives him a graceful 'out', and 'medical reasons' are the easiest way to do that I think
Almost like the Almighty saying... Something.
Its right there in the opening paragraph of the article...Biden needs to step down
I insist that Trump quit the field for he is demonstrably too old/too bereft of sense to preside.
This is on point HamNo. As usual. Whoever replaces Biden is going to be less beholden/friendly to the left and unions than Biden will be. It'll be the most centrist corporate Dem imaginable picked by the party donors to replace him. So I totally understand why the left would support keeping Biden in there to achieve these policy goals, but Biden is still just too old.
Well maybe not "lies" exactly. Most of the evidence that Biden is "too" old refers to his speaking abilities. Anyone who's made it to their sixties, or struggled with fatigue, or tried to produce words in a recently acquired language after getting off a transcontinental flight knows that there's a difference between thinking and speaking. I think it's stereotypical to equate the appearance of aging with assumptions about actual capacity.
That's only the secondary reason for my reluctance to jump on the "replace Biden" bandwagon. The other one concerns the risk of introducing an mostly-unknown candidate at the last minute. We don't know what kinds of muck the GOP might come up with to doom our last minute savior. If our only risk assessment tool is polls, how do we decide whether someone else would do better?
He is a professional politician and a native english speaker.
Hes trained his whole life for the campaign trail so him collapsing under it is a sign of collapse.
He's spoken English his whole life so Im not sure what a jet lagged esl speaker comes into it.
And he had a stutter but he beat it and I never even knew he HAD a stutter until his previously normal diction went to hell, implying his brain is unrolling the habits of literal decades and reverting him to childhood.
Any replacement Democrat polls massively better against both him and Trump so theres literally no downside.
Hes also a bad man, open racist, credibly accused sex pest, glib liar, strike breaker, and the reason Clarence Thomas sits on the supreme court and generations of other black men sit in jail. So don't worry the next guy might be worse.
Not that it matters on the scale of the rest of it but he also just legalized helicopter hunting of wolves/bears and shooting them and their young in their dens. Ohama banned it. It was settled law till he stuck his nose in.
Another good use of the executive branch's limited capacity in what might be the final months of his only term; A savvy move sure to garner many more votes from the Psychobilly MAGA nuts in like Wyoming, at the expense of committed environmentalists and animal rights activists whose votes the dems hate dirtying their hands with.
Trump has lowered our standards. President Biden’s speaking abilities and signs of cognitive decline are being dismissed, because Biden is being compared to his opponent. But we need to remember that before Trump, neither party would’ve accepted a candidate who struggles to communicate. Communication is a huge part of being President.
What struggle to communicate when you’re jet lagged, sleep deprived, have a cold andca hoarse throat? 90 minutes erases almost 4 years of ultra performance. Families of past presidents say he’s surpassed all of them w/performance. On his worst day he’s light years ahead of the 🍊hitler child rapist felon out on bail who brought down our country as best he could and now wants to finish us. Gee whiz. Since then he’s been “the comeback kid”. Remember that? Look at jimmy Carter in his 90’s building houses. Biden can ride a bike. He falls down, gets up and rides some more. His bio age is way younger than his chrono age. 🍊shitler wearing diapers can’t even walk down. A slight incline. Hasn’t told one truth in his whole con man artist life? WTH?!?!
Let's be real here. Speaking is a proxy for thinking for like 90 perent of people 90 perecent of the time
This is my point: it's a popular misconception. This misconception is so widespread I don't know why I'm even trying to raise awareness about this aspect of how our brains work. We can all just continue to assume that people who don't speak our language fluently, or people with cerebral palsy, or people with Parkinson's, or just people who look or sound old are therefore stupid. Until we experience some of these things ourselves.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no real evidence either way about Biden's cognitive capacity. It's certainly okay to raise the question, but the level of certainty being expressed across the board doesn't seem very objective. (I didn't think there was any real evidence for WMDs in Iraq either. I guess I read too many mysteries where the plot problem is lack of evidence.)
The point is moot either way. The job of being the President involves a lot of speaking, both in the sense of reading prepared speeches and talking to the media etc. but also being involved in sensitive negotiations with foreign heads of state, other powerful politicians, powerful CEOs etc. When Biden calls Zelensky Putin or something do you think Zelensky's reaction is "this guy's probably at the top of his game he's just having a speech pathology issue"? No, of course not. Just to be safe he's going to assume that he's not thinking that great either. Aging is very unfair in that people have a younger you they can compare to the present so everything is registered as a decline
Second, at least I'm not saying he's "stupid". I'm just saying he shouldn't be the President of the United States at age 81
"We don't know what kinds of muck the GOP might come up with to doom our last minute savior"
That's the thing though...If they CAN'T come up with anything, they'll just make something up...Smears against WHICHEVER candidate gets picked are a given...It a waste of time trying to get in front of them because fresh bullshit will be thrown at us on the regular...
An unknown can become 'known' in a very short period of time...And for better or worse, folks tend decide whether they like someone or not VERY quickly...That's what happened with Obama...He was 'in' the first time he opened his mouth...Even with the resistance from the PUMAs it was clear he was going to be the candidate