How Far Gone is Biden? Listen to the Abortion Debate.
Biden was unable to respond to the most basic and best issue for Democrats in the debate. Bigly.
The election looked like it was going to be close for some time. MAGA Republicans, dedicated Democrats, and independents alike could imagine their preferred outcomes based on pre-debate polling. Then the debate all but proved to politically engaged people that Biden will lose dramatically.
To never-Trumpers, this is a problem because Trump would then implement Project 25 which removes many of the remaining guardrails and institutions that safeguard U.S. democracy.
To good-government independents, it’s a problem because both men are old and flawed, and Biden is unlikely to be able to govern as he slips more fully into senescence, making him a less appealing Trump alternative.
To Trumpers this is actually also a problem, because Trump is probably going to have to run against a younger, sharper Biden replacement once Biden steps down.
How bad is Biden?
People focus on the freeze. That is going to be in a 30-second campaign ad for Trump after the Democratic Convention, once it is (almost) too late to change horses. The freeze was visible and shocking, yet some can explain it away because Biden is reputed to be fairly coherent 99% of the time and “only” locks up about once a month.
The freeze
Here is the biggest and most infamous freeze:
His eyes start to flutter about 5–10 seconds earlier, then it gets worse, and finally he locks up, closes his eyes and cannot speak at all.
Dropping the ball on abortion, immigration, and the border
Yet an arguably bigger issue than speaking is substance and clear thinking. For example, in the debate, Biden was unable to articulate his main election advantage: abortion. In fact, he was weak addressing Trump’s most bald-faced lie yet: that Democrats supported overturning Roe v. Wade, and then Biden actually pivoted to Trump’s own talking point of immigrants raping American women due to an unsafe border.
Along the way, Biden sputtered out that women were also being raped by their sisters. You cannot make this stuff up.
Here is Trump’s ridiculous claim:
You had Roe v Wade and everybody wanted to get it back to the States everybody without exception Democrats Republicans liberals conservatives everybody wanted it back … — Trump
And here is Biden’s response, losing the thread and instead talking about immigration and a dangerous border:
Look there’s so many young women who have been including a young woman who just was murdered […] by a by by an immigrant coming in
…
but here’s the deal there’s a lot of young women are being raped by their by their in-laws by their by by their spouses brothers and sisters
…
We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world considered the most dangerous place anywhere in the world and he opened it up and these killers are coming into our country and they are raping and killing women.
This was beyond incompetent. Nobody has ever seen anything like it in the history of debates.
Biden did well as president, but no more
Biden has accomplished great things including saving the economy from a post-pandemic depression, passing an infrastructure bill of the kind that everyone has always wanted but could not get done, putting Russia on it’s back foot, standing up against terrorism as Hamas attacked, and so much more.
We even appear to have sailed through the stimulus phase with temporarily high inflation but no recession at all. His economic team nailed the mythical “soft landing.”
But now we see a different man who is no longer up to the job.
To defeat Trump in November, the Democrats must run a younger, sharper candidate who can debate, speak, walk and do all those presidential things. That is a path forward that avoids four years of rule by either of these older, unpopular men.
