Après le déluge: Get real, Joe

Joe is a fighter - sure.  I'll give you that.  He's a reactionary. He's belligerent in a different way - a more palatable way - from Trump.  Joe gets his back up if you dare question him. He (his team?) made a terrible blunder on debate night, not only in his horrible delivery and semi-coherent responses (maybe they gave him a cold medicine that made him loopy?), but in his entire approach to debating a narcissistic liar.  You CANNOT argue with a narcissistic liar.  

Joe's approach should have been to ignore whatever Trump was saying, giving it absolutely no credence whatsoever, because it deserved none.  Instead of arguing any point, instead of personal counter attacks, instead of a juvenile tit-for-tat (I have a better golf handicap than you???), he should have spent every minute he had talking about his own plans for the next four years versus Trump's Project 2025 plans.  He should have laid it out.  Reports show that most voters don't know what Project 2025 is.  They don't understand what Trump will do next time around.  That was Joe's best approach.  His JOB, I'd argue.

I'm like the person who said they'd vote for Joe Biden's shoe if that's what they put up there, but less politically engaged, more persuadable people - the people both sides need at this point - are not likely to see it that way.  They saw the trainwreck that was Joe Biden on debate night.

The president and first lady attended a political fundraiser on Friday evening in New York City, and on Saturday they visited the Hamptons home of Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner and mega-donor Avram Glazer and his wife, Jill, for a private meeting on Eastern Long Island.

[...]

“We converted more undecided voters than Trump did," [Joe told them.]

  Politico

If that's true, let's see the data.

"The Times had their editorial, and guess what? They also point out [Trump] lied 28 times in a matter of 90 minutes. It’s pretty good. The big takeaway were his lies."

Get real. There's no one left on the planet who doesn't understand Trump lies constantly. We all knew that going in. That was not the big takeaway. The big takeaway was that you are a liability. An old man who's barely hanging on. Democrats, pundits, and foreign governments alike were in a state of near panic.

"People remembered how bad things were during his presidency, how much they disliked him,” Biden told a star-studded crowd seated under a tent on the Rosensteins’ perfectly manicured lawn.

Talking point pre-debate: let Trump talk and people will remember what they didn't like about him. He hasn't been in the news all the time and people have forgotten. I assume that was one of the points they prepped Biden with.

Here's the problem with that, Joe:  You had the same amount of time to talk, and people suddenly saw what they didn't ever know about you.  And it scared the bejesus out of them. The debate was yours to lose, and you lost it. To a convicted felon, lying fraud.  Jesus wept.

Lizanne Rosenstein took the microphone first, telling the crowd that it’s more “meaningful to compare presidencies” than debate nights.” First lady Jill Biden followed: “Joe isn’t just the right person for the job. He’s the only person for the job.”

No, Jill. No he isn't. The Democratic party has plenty of people who could do the job.  And, it well might have been "meaningful to compare presidencies" instead of whatever it was Joe thought he was doing.  So maybe Lizanne should have prepped Joe instead of whoever it was who did.

Campaign Chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks met privately Friday morning with top donors and bundlers at The Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta to convince them the debate was not a “campaign killer.” The trio made clear that Biden would stay in the race.

There is absolutely no doubt of that. There never was.  But stop trying to gaslight voters. Leave that to the Republicans and call it out.

O’Malley Dillon sent a new campaign memo Saturday afternoon, reinforcing the president’s message. She argued that once again pundits and the media are doubting Biden, while pointing to very early polling data that shows the debate had little effect on how voters viewed the race.

“If we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls,” the memo said, followed by several media clips highlighting Barack Obama’s 2012 rocky debate performance.

Joe Biden did not have a "rocky debate performance." He had an unmitigated disaster.

Joe gave some fiery speeches THE NEXT DAY. Hopefully they'll get Joe back on track, but please don't gaslight us. We saw what we saw, and it was terrifying.  THE NEXT DAY Joe was shouting, "I know how to tell the truth!"  So tell it, Joe.  Tell us what the hell happened to you the previous night.

Weissmann, former federal prosecutor and CNN analyst, was unrelentingly excoriated in the comments to that post (especially for bringing up Parkinson's), but he's absolutely right.  

That wasn't "one bad night," as apologists are saying.  That was a trainwreck on a par with the toxic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last year.  We might have forgotten about that at this point, but it was certainly not forgotten four months after it happened.   And all we've got is four months.

Do we imagine that Joe's fiery rallies (using telepromptered speeches written by someone else, by the way) are being seen by even a fraction of the number of people who saw that debate?  Not to mention the déluge of TikTok, right-wing "news", and other social media clips Republicans will be posting on an hourly basis from now until the election.

Others assessing the situation are probably right that it's simply too late to change horses.  We're in the middle of the stream.  Joe told us in 2019 that he was the only person who could beat Trump, and people believed him.  (How is that different from Trump's constant claims of "only I can do this" on everything?) He also said he was just going to get us through the next four years and then hand the reins to a younger person.  They should have stuck with that, but now he's saying again that he's the only person who can beat Trump.  

We don't need hubris.  Hubris will not save this country from Trump's band of autocratic Christian Nationalists and the Supreme Court they've created. We're going to have enough horrors and hard work saving ourselves from the Supreme Court.  We need every advantage we can get in the other two branches of government.  American politics are killing us.  And we thought Trump/Hillary was a bad choice!  Now we're fighting over whether we'll have Bubble Butt or the Crypt Keeper as our front man.  We're in serious trouble and we're still playing team politics.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 11:03 am:

UPDATE 01:50 pm:  Jamie Raskin seems to indicate the party is not unalterably committed to having Biden be the 2024 presidential candidate.  Let's hope everybody makes the right decision - whatever that is - to keep Trump out of the White House.