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November Is A Bidenary Choice

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 29, 2024

Democrats want to govern. Republicans want to rule.

Photo by author.

Confidence, even false confidence, inspires. As Bill McKibben once wrote:

The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.

Democrats’ loud, public second-guessing themselves about Joe Biden looks desperate. It’s a bad look.

So take a long, deep breath through your nose. Hold it a beat. Then exhale slowly through your mouth. Do it again. (Relax those shoulders.) If you lean Democrat, I know. It’s hard.

Joe Biden had a bad night on Thursday. “Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know,” Barack Obama tweeted Friday afternoon.

The president responded to his bad debate an hour or so earlier on Friday with a forceful speech in Raleigh, N.C. I was there right up front. His performances were literally night and day. This was the guy we’d hoped would show up to face Donald Trump.

Biden wiped his left eye a couple of times as if it was watering while his wife Jill introduced him. So maybe the campaign explanation for Thursday that he’s working through a cold has merit.

But in Raleigh, Biden delivered a lot of lines he’d likely prepared but failed to deliver on Thursday. When Trump boasted about “acing” his cognitive test Thursday night, I thought, “Here we go,” and figured Biden would pounce. He didn’t. More’s the pity.

“Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted felon—Donald Trump is a one-man crime wave,” Biden insisted on Friday, just not to a worldwide audience. Too late, but on Friday Biden was on.

What Democrats must defeat before Donald Trump are their own insecurities. Trump is a Sam’s Club pallet of them. Don’t be like Donald. Except where it comes to projecting confidence.

MAGA Republicans stand unshakably behind a 34-time convicted criminal ruled liable for sexual assault, a man who (Republicans invented the catchphrase) “pals around with” dictators. Trump is emotionally stunted, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, a pathological liar and con man. He played a successful businessman on TV but in reality failed to run casinos profitably. His went bankrupt. Other Trump enterprises have been ruled frauds and dissolved. But an effective con man projects confidence to take in his marks. Trump does that well.

Trump has been banned from doing business in New York. Trump wants to sell out NATO and Ukraine to Russia. He racked up 30,000 false and misleading statements during his presidency and added to them with virtually every statement Thursday night.

Trump’s mishandling of the response to COVID-19 cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives. Oh, and he’s delusional.

Teed up for a second Trump term, Project 2025 wants to lobotomize the federal government and dissolve external reality to ensconce an American dictator. MAGA Republicans’ candidate wants the world’s dictators to welcome him into their autocrats club.

After (allegedly) provoking an insurrectionist mob to storm and sack the U.S. Capitol, and after (allegedly) storing national security documents in a golf resort bathroom, and after (allegedly) plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Donald Trump is asking Americans for just one more chance. Many will give it to him if we don’t stop him.

“This may seem like an inopportune moment to ask, Dean Wormer, but do you think you could see your way clear to giving us just one more chance?”

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, looked old (and old-school) and gave a poor performance Thursday night. He got whupped. That makes him the underdog less-political Americans love to root for to beat the assholish bully. Work with that. Trump wants power for himself. Biden wants to stomp him and for America to live up to its potential as a multicultural democracy.

So chill out before panicking and calling for an open Democratic convention that’s not going to happen. Republicans wouldn’t.

President Bill Clinton understood the risks of Democrats’ second-guessing themselves over 20 years ago: ”When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.” That’s the risk here. Further weakening Biden with talk of replacing him exposes Democrats’ soft underbellies and empowers Trump.

A pundit on MSNBC’s “The Beat” Friday night referenced a “The Simpsons'” episode contrasting Republicans and Democrats. As Chai Komanduri remembered it, the GOP platform was “We Hate Democrats.” The Democrats’ platform was “We Hate Ourselves.” See actual images below.

November is a Bidenary choice: Democracy or dictatorship? Freedom or serfdom?

Unless Biden steps aside, there will not be an alternate Democratic candidate. This is a “run what you brung” presidential race. Democrats brought Biden. Republicans brought Trump. As WisDems chair Ben Wikler tweeted, recommit. Americans pull for an underdog with heart. Biden clearly has one.

Former Republican Rick Wilson gave Democrats sound advice just weeks ago:

“You better start thinking of Joe Biden as 12 ft. tall, covered in steel, brilliant, with a 12-inch dick. Stop acting like he’s a feeble old man,” Wilson shouts at Democrats. “Toughen the fuck up!”

Or else Trump won’t beat Joe Biden. His own party will.

Update: From Jasmine Crockett

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Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on June 28, 2024

I think we all need a soother potpourri. And a stiff drink.

The Reset

Published by digby on June 28, 2024

Let’s take a look at the two candidates on the day after the debate:

Blah,blah, blah. He’s just as offensive and nuts as ever.

And this says it all:

Meanwhile, here’s Biden. (I posted this earlier but it needs to go viral so here it is again.)

Then he went to NY to dedicate the new Stonewall LGBTQ Monument visitor’s center. If you start this speech at about 10 minutes in you’ll hear him tell a story I’ve never heard before about how he first saw two men kissing when he was 16 years old and he turned to his dad for an explanation and he told him, “they just love each other.” I’ll admit it brought a tear to my eye. Nobody does that better than him.

I know we’re all traumatized by what we saw last night. Despite the hand wringing by the pundits and anonymous Democrats, today is a reset. And today Biden is better than Trump.

By the way, the Biden campaign raised 14 million yesterday. Trump raised 8. Just saying.

Who’s This Guy?

Published by digby on June 28, 2024

That was Biden at a rally in North Carolina today. He was the guy we usually see. I don’t know who that guy last night was.

CNN has a snap poll about the debate. Make of it what you will:

Registered voters who watched CNN’s presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump largely think Trump outperformed Biden, according to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, with most saying they have no real confidence in Biden’s ability to lead the country.

At the same time, a majority who tuned in say it had little or no effect on their choice for president.

okay…

Debate watchers say, 67% to 33%, that Trump turned in a better performance Thursday. Prior to the debate, the same voters said, 55% to 45%, that they expected Trump to turn in a better performance than Biden. And in 2020, Biden was seen by debate watchers as outperforming Trump in both of their presidential debates.

Republicans who watched the first 2024 debate expressed broad confidence in Trump’s performance, the poll finds, with Democrats less sanguine about their party’s presumptive nominee. A near-universal 96% of GOP debate watchers say Trump did the better job in the debate, while a more modest 69% of Democratic debate watchers view Biden as the night’s winner.

[…]

An 81% majority of registered voters who watched the debate say it had no effect on their choice for president, with another 14% saying that it made them reconsider but didn’t change their mind. Just 5% say it changed their minds about whom to vote for.

Roughly equal shares of Biden and Trump supporters – about 3% of each – say the debate had changed their mind. Larger shares of those supporting other candidates say that the debate had changed their minds. Among debate watchers who said pre-debate that they hadn’t chosen a candidate or were open to changing their minds, 9% said that the debate had changed their minds, and 25% were reconsidering.

Just 3% of debate watchers who said in the pre-debate survey that they supported Trump currently say they’d consider voting for Biden, while 5% of Biden supporters currently say they’d consider a vote for Trump.

Among debate watchers overall, 48% say they’d only consider voting for Trump, 40% that they’d only consider voting for Biden, 2% that they’re considering both candidates, and 11% that they aren’t considering voting for either.

The question of whether or not they have any confidence in either candidate to lead the country, the numbers were unchanged by the debate. (More have confidence in Trump than Biden.) None of this is good, that’s for sure. In a close election even a small share of people deciding to go for Trump will make the difference, as we saw in 2016. But it may not be the knock out punch many seem to think it is.

Also keep this in mind:

The poll’s results reflect opinions of the debate only among those voters who tuned in and aren’t representative of the views of the full voting public – in their demographics, their political preferences or the level of attention they pay to politics. Debate watchers in the poll were 5 points likelier to be Republican-aligned than Democratic-aligned, making for an audience that was slightly more GOP-leaning than all registered voters nationally.

The missed opportunity for Biden to really stick it to Trump can’t be overstated. It’s a huge miss. And Biden will be dogged by this forever. People haven’t fully absorbed the hysterical garment rending of the Democratic establishment yet so in a few days they may come to believe that this was an unrecoverable error after all. But so much of this race is baked in that even a devastating performance by either candidate may not move the dial all that much, at least not yet. Stay tuned.

Update: This just dropped too

A Word To The Wise From An Unexpected Source

Published by digby on June 28, 2024

Not Kamala, David Frum:

A word to everybody writing, “The Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves” takes … 

The fundamental reason we’re in this crisis this morning is that the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is about to nominate for president a dictator-loving criminal against the Constitution. That disgrace and shame is theirs. 

If President Biden had posted an equally poor performance against presumptive GOP nominee Nikki Haley, then in that case yes, the Democrats would have nobody to blame but themselves – too bad for them, but the Constitution would not be in danger. 

The Republicans could have nominated somebody else. They chose Trump over many alternatives. They did it because their core voters like and enjoy Trump. Tell me again, who has nobody to blame but themselves? 

Last night, operating in the truest spirit of “good people on both sides,” a CNN moderator asked President Biden whether he thought that Trump’s voters were voting against democracy. Biden evaded the question, as any vote-seeking candidate would and should and must. 

But the terrible true answer to the moderator’s question is: “Yes.” Trump’s voters are voting to return to power a president who attempted a coup. Whatever their justifications or rationalizations, that’s what they are doing. 

Blame Biden’s vanity and stubbornness all you like. Tut-tut over the Democratic party’s collective action problems if you wish. But the reason we are here is because of Trump and those who vote for him – and those who failed to defend democracy in two impeachment trials. 

As we saw last night, the conventions and habits of mass-market media coverage are inadequate to the crisis at hand. A coup against the constitution – first mentioned at minute 41 of the debate – dwindles to one issue among many, alongside food prices and climate change. 

Biden failed to do his job properly last night. Democrats failed to head off that failure. But the reason the failure matters so much – as it wouldn’t in a Biden-Haley race – is that one of the two great parties is ratifying an attempted coup d’etat. END. 

Yup. And when the dust settles I think people will remember that regardless of whether it’s Biden or Harris or someone else against Trump in November. Democrats aren’t going to give up and walk away. Take a breath. Take the weekend off. Let’s see where we are next week.

This Shitty Day Just Got Shittier

Published by digby on June 28, 2024

The high court overruled the Chevron precedent. It’s not entirely unexpected but like Dobbs it’s going to have huge ramifications. Kate Riga at TPM:

The Supreme Court overruled a key pillar of federal agency authority Friday, appropriating a massive amount of executive branch power to itself. In overruling Chevron, the Court decided that federal agencies no longer get to fill in the gaps of Congress’ laws with their experts’ own reasonable interpretation of how to carry them out; that authority now resides in the judiciary. It’s a power grab that the right-wing legal world has been marching towards for years — and they finally got a Court activist enough to do it.

Chief Justice John Roberts, often the tip of the spear for this movement, wrote the majority. Justice Elena Kagan, probably the Court’s best pro-agency voice, wrote the dissent, joined by her two liberal colleagues. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas wrote solo concurrences.

Roberts completed the takeover with very little humility. The thinking underlying Chevron deference is that agencies are staffed by experts who understand the technicalities of their subject matter, and are best equipped to mold often broad statutes into day-to-day regulations. Judges, on the other hand, have no special insight into, say, the Environmental Protection Agency’s calculations to find permissible amounts of air pollution from a factory, or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s experience with how factories should be laid out.

“Delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well informed by subject matter expertise,” Roberts hand-waved.

In fulfilling his right-wing mission, Roberts also pretends that letting judges, rather than agencies, fill in statutory specifics won’t result in a whipsawing based on the judges’ partisan leanings — since, per Robrters, judges  don’t act on them. That’ll come as a surprise to the Biden administration, which has seen everything from power plant regulations to student debt relief summarily shot down by the conservative supermajority.  “Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences,” he intoned.

Roberts tried to downplay the ramifications of the ruling by asserting that old agency cases decided by Chevron deference are still good law and beholden to the precedent the Court so blithely tossed away on Friday. 

Kagan made plain the extent of the majority’s grasp for power in her dissent.“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law,” she wrote. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.” 

That’s very bad. Every regulation will now be subject to some district court judge’s interpretation of some statue they have absolutely no experience or expertise to interpret. It will take years for any regulation to wend its way through the courts. Get ready for even more rapid climate change.

They also made homelessness a crime by saying that sleeping in public that can be prosecuted even if someone is sleeping in their own car. And they made it possible to overturn some of the January 6th cases saying the application of statute against obstruction of a proceeding was an overreach (at least in some cases.) We’ll have to see how that shakes out but it could affect Trump’s January 6th case as well.

Roberts announced that the last cases will be handed down on Monday and that means we have to wait all weekend for the big immunity case. I’m fairly sure they’re going to find a reason to send it back down, further delaying it until 2025. If Trump wins, the charges will be thrown out and if he loses they’ll probably make sure that there’s enough to protect Trump.

I think we should all consider starting cocktail hour early today…

It Was Bad

Published by digby on June 28, 2024

But it wasn’t just Biden. Trump was awful too

There’s no sugar coating it. The best you can say about that debate last night is that it was a missed opportunity for Joe Biden to put to rest the questions about his age and focus on Donald Trump’s extremist agenda and his criminality. The worst is that he gave a disastrous performance that should lead to his resignation and an open convention in August to choose a successor. There are plenty of Democrats pushing for that right now and it’s always possible they’ll succeed in getting Biden to drop out and turn the Chicago gathering into a shitshow not seen since 1968. Maybe that’s the kind of spectacle that will finally bring the Democratic party down to the level of the Trump Show. And maybe that’s what the American people really want.

I don’t know what was wrong with Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently in Europe holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he has a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas. If this goes as these things often do, the public may have a very different take than the insiders today but the media narrative could change it over the course of the next few days.

All that being said, it must be noted, however, that as much as Biden blew the debate and missed his opportunity to dispel the concerns about his age, Donald Trump blew it too. He may have appeared more vigorous but he couldn’t control himself and behaved once again like the undisciplined, lying, vulgarian who half the country already hates. If Biden was on Nyquil, Trump must have guzzled a case of diet coke before he came on stage. He spewed a torrent of lies, was rude and insulting and delivered what was probably the most memorable line in any presidential debate in history:

That’s the least of his various crimes and sexual misbehavior but it’s the one he felt compelled to deny.

For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.

After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it’s a doozy:

It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.

According to former CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, CNN is very happy with how it went. He wrote, “A CNN exec in the control room texts me: “We are very proud of Jake and Dana. Our job was to make sure candidates were heard so voters can make informed decisions and we are pleased we were able to do that.” Actually, CNN inadvertently became one of the greatest disseminators of disinformation in American political history. Millions of people heard Donald Trump’s lies and since they were met with silence from the journalists on the stage upon whom people depend to tell them the facts, many of them probably came away believing he must have been telling the truth.

Even had Joe Biden been at the top of his game, he would not have been able to parry all those lies and he shouldn’t have been put in the role of being Donald Trump’s fact checker. His choice was to either ignore the lies and let them stand so he could use his time to make his own case or spend the entire debate correcting the record. It was not a fair fight.

It will take a few days for the results of the debate to shake out. Biden’s poor performance may tank his poll numbers or it’s possible that the whole thing didn’t change any minds at all. According to CNN’s instant poll of debate viewers in Michigan, it was pretty much a wash with half saying Biden won and half saying it was Trump. And a Univision focus group of Hispanic voters said that Biden won. So who knows?

In the last election cycle we saw Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman, who had recently suffered a stroke, have a debate at which he was clearly having trouble communicating. He was written off by all the pundits and the assumption was that the Democratic Senate majority was lost. He ended up winning. Not that this will necessarily go the same way but I bring it up only to illustrate that these things do happen. A lot depends on who else is on the ballot.

It’s obvious that Biden’s terrible performance has caused panic among Democrats and liberal pundits and analysts. The calls for him to withdraw are loud and meaningful and it’s going to be a very rough period in this campaign whatever happens. For me, this isn’t really a question. As long as Donald Trump is on the ballot, I will vote for the Democratic nominee. If it’s Biden or someone else, the calculation remains the same. Nothing is worse than another Trump administration and I suspect that at the end of the day Democratic voters will agree with that. So it’s still a matter of those undecided voters in swing states, just like it was on Thursday morning.

Biden has been a successful president in my book and I have every expectation that his administration will continue on that path in a second term. But if he becomes convinced that this debate has ruined his chances and he decides to drop out, I just hope that the party can resist the temptation to devolve into a bloodletting free-for-all that empowers Trump even more. If there was ever a time to keep calm and carry on it’s now.

Of Sharks And Showerheads

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 28, 2024

Helluva cognitive wizard

The moment last night when Donald Trump brought up “acing” his cognititve test (actually a screen for early dementia, including Alzheimer’s), Joe Biden should have pounced. He didn’t.

“This guy over here boasts about passing a dementia screen. Boasts! Anyway, how good was it? Donald Trump is obsessed with sharks and showerheads, with windmills and electric boats,” Biden might have responded. “Can he even draw the clock? Next thing you know, he’ll be accusing relatives of stealing his steak knives.”

(A former landlady of mine with dementia complained about that.)

“Trump thinks having an uncle who taught at MIT makes him a genius,” for goodness sake, Biden didn’t say.

Last week Trump got wrong the name of the physician who gave him the test.

But Biden didn’t pounce. Missed opportunity. The choice the debate presented was “Hell no” vs. “Oh, no,” as MSNBC’s post-debate panel put it.

Joe Biden is an accomplished legislator and a surprisingly successful president. But he’s not a communicator on par with Barack Obama. That’s okay. But it’s part of winning the job.

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Biden Campaign Stop In NC

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 28, 2024

Post debate visit

Not jacked up enough.

One of us here is a delegate to the Chicago DNC convention in August. Turns out that privilege comes with demands on your time. That includes, coincidentally, being present when the party’s candidate shows up in your state to campaign. About the time this posts, I’ll be on the way from my end of the state to one such event four hours away. (N.C. is nine hours from east to west.)

I can only imagine what it’s like to be the youngest state chair in the country, Anderson Clayton, now 26. She’s been barnstorming North Carolina’s 100 counties since her 2023 election and attracting national press along the way. And fitting presidential visits into that schedule. Here she is at 24 (June 2022) taking a selfie with a local blogger who avoids selfies. Gen Z gonna Gen Z.

I’ll try to share what I can through the August convention. These things tend to be tightly controlled and hyper busy. It was less demanding to attend the Charlotte convention in 2012 on a press pass.

Your patience appreciated.

Digby will be along presently with some presidential debate coverage/fallout. And there will be fallout.

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