Biden Crashes, Trump Lies: The Presidential Debate That Defines the Campaign

June 28, 2024 admin Finance 0

Yves here. Last night’s presidential debate may go down in history, in the same league as the Kennedy-Nixon debate. But here, instead of showing how a young person at that time rewarded good looks and self-confidence, here it showed two men, which often happens with the elderly, they have become more who they are, and not in a good way.

There is no way Biden will be in office for a second term after last night’s performance. As blinkered as Biden himself, there’s a lot riding on having at least a moderate candidate, and voters and donors recognize that. Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was not apparent when he ran for a second term and remained well hidden. But the biggest reason why was his strong Cabinet, something Biden lacked. The members of his elite team, in their various ways, are generally not as weak as he is.

That doesn’t mean Trump will be president. He can be choked to death on a burger or suffer from George Wallace or the worst attempted murder. Or maybe Democrats will do the seemingly impossible and successfully rally around a last-minute challenger like Jay Pritzker or Gretchen Whitmer. But chances are he will return to the White House.

I suspect that Lambert will shrug off the panic in the Democratic Party and the seemingly urgent need to oust Biden as quickly and gracefully as possible and settle on a successor with the least amount of controversy.

While some Twitterati and no doubt some analysts have speculated that party officials put Biden in this debate to drown him out, that doesn’t seem likely. It seems that Biden is surrounded by yes-men and is biting the heads off those who dare to oppose him. The tweet below was released on June 26 in a New York Times story, Joe Biden: An Old School Politician in a New School Era.

So even if the idea for the early debate didn’t come from Biden, it seems unlikely that he was brought into it.

The end of the debate provided a sad picture of Biden’s weakness:

However, the Financial Times reports that Biden thought he did well. Is this a side effect of the medication?

But Biden appeared undeterred, telling reporters at a late-night stop at a Waffle House restaurant in Atlanta: “I think we did well.”

Asked about the calls for him to step aside, and whether he had any concerns about his performance in the debate, Biden – who said he had “a sore throat” – replied: “No. It’s hard to argue with a liar.”

In today’s links, Lambert brought up a story from Axios, Democrats may want to replace Biden, but it’s his call. Key categories:

Big picture: Biden already has almost all the pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention thanks to the state primaries he won. Those delegates must vote for Biden on the first ballot unless he withdraws earlier.

  • Democrats plan to hold their official nomination process in the weeks before their August 9 convention, so new candidates will have to emerge before that roll call.
  • To win the Democratic nomination on the primary ballot, a candidate needs a majority of approximately 3,933 pledged delegates. Biden has crossed that line well.

Actual testing: It is unlikely that Biden will agree to withdraw as a member of the Democratic Alliance.

As Betty Davis warned, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Now for the main event.

Update at 10:30 AM EDT. As soon as this post was fired, The Hill published the White House, the Biden campaign criticized the discussion after the debate. From the story:

President Biden’s aides and his top supporters stepped in on Friday to shut down talk that he might drop out of the race following a poor performance in an interview with former President Trump.

A campaign official has dismissed talk that Biden is withdrawing, and top Democrats are seen as possible successors to Biden working to end any talk of running for president.

And the Russians are running out of missiles, yes siree!

Biden should go through a second debate. Perhaps his group still believes in a better life through chemistry.

By Mary Kate Cary, Associate Professor of Politics and Director of Think Again, University of Virginia and Karrin Vasby Anderson, Professor of Communication Studies, Colorado State University. Originally published on The Conversation

With four months to go until Election Day, the classic national election debate features two presidents – one current, one former – and many bitter personal attacks. Joe Biden admitted to the world a poor performance Democrats were surprised and shocked; Donald Trump gave a powerful – if not realistic – performance.

The interview asked two scholars, Mary Kate Cary and Karrin Vasby Anderson, to watch the debate and analyze a particular role or moment that stood out. Anderson is a communications scholar specializing in gender and the presidency, as well as the political culture of politics. Cary teaches political speechwriting and served as a White House speechwriter for President George HW Bush, writing more than 100 addresses for him.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, Colorado State University Department of Communication Studies

One of the first definitions of eloquence that I read as a college debater and rhetoric student came from the ancient Roman scholar and teacher of rhetoric Quintilian. In his 12-volume “Institutio Oratoria”, Quintilian said that a good orator was a good person, who spoke well. He was very concerned about the danger that an unscrupulous orator could present to society.

A presidential debate should feature good speakers – skilled speakers who are characters. The June 27 debate gave voters a status or status.

Former President Donald Trump was aggressive, confident and disciplined, but he peppered his words with many lies, half-truths and misinformation. President Joe Biden focused on Trump’s documented history – criminal and political – but failed as a speaker, showing the awkwardness and command shown during his latest State of the Union speech four months ago.

The difference became clear early in the debate when CNN’s Dana Bash asked Trump if he would block access to abortion drugs. Trump said he wouldn’t. He then lied that, before the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and removed federal protections for abortion rights, “everybody wanted to bring it back to the states, everybody, without exception.”

Trump then continued the charge, accusing Democrats of taking “a child’s life in the eighth month, the ninth month, even after birth.”

Biden’s response was initially clear and strong: “It was a terrible thing, what you did,” he said. He also disputed the claim that “everyone” wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, saying, “the idea that the states are able to do this is like we’re going to return civil rights to the states (and ) each state has a different law.”

But the rest of Biden’s response was confused. After “inexplicably detouring” into an anecdote about a woman killed by an undocumented immigrant, Biden voiced his support for people’s right to choose by saying three separate times that the decision should be up to the doctor, not the pregnant woman.

Trump closed the segment by repeating his blatant lies with strong words: “So that means, he can take the life of a child, in the ninth month even after birth because some states, the Democrat is running, take it after birth.” An Associated Press fact-check on this assertion is clear: “Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has enacted a law allowing infanticide after birth.”

After nearly a decade of exposure to Trump’s misinformation, lies about states that kill babies may not be shocking in a presidential debate. And, of course, it’s an argument that should have been easy for Biden to counter.

But if people have to choose between a good person and a well-spoken person, Quintilian would remind us that a well-spoken but insincere person is dangerous.

The consequences for a republic could be dire.

Mary Kate Cary, University of Virginia Department of Politics

I think America just saw history being written.

Less than 10 minutes later, outgoing President Joe Biden, asked about the budget deficit, lost his train of thought, and ended his answer with some muttering about “beating Medicare.” It was very bad.

There were several moments when Biden looked confused and unable to process what was happening. I took notes on key exchanges, but the number of embarrassing passages, unfinished sentences and disjointed sentences by Biden is too long to list. His answer to why he should be president in his 80s somehow turned into computer chips made in South Korea.

Former President Donald Trump made his own missteps, but overall, he was sharp, and held his temper. He got some points in the news and did much better than he did in their first interview four years ago. Trump has done better than I thought most people thought he would.

Our assignment tonight was to find a moment of reaction and put it in context. I’ve been to many presidential debates and watched many more on television over the years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.

Is there any way Democrats can convincingly argue for keeping Biden as their nominee?

Bottom line: Moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did a good job of asking relevant questions and managing the debate; Trump missed an opportunity to knock it out of the park but he passed it; and Biden may have created a disaster for the Democratic Party.




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