You know what they say about the size of a man’s platform…

Do you know any 80 year old men? I bet he gets up every night at 4 am just to pee

And it’s weird that one side of that equation is getting such a shriekingly loud level of coverage and the other side is getting more or less nothing.

It’s because Trump’s performance was exactly the same as prior years. He was a lying piece of shit then, he is a lying piece of shit now. Biden has run for President for 30+ years, and is visibly diminished vs even 4 years ago.

I don’t think Donald Trump is capable of embarrassment. That emotion simply doesn’t register.

Cognitive ability alone is not the whole story, the ability to be persuasive and communicate well is also a key point. I watched the whole debate, and Biden did not communicate well at all. He started out lousy, got a bit better in the middle, but then fell off the wagon again. I think if he had finished strong it would be a lot different.

Age is a key concern because it will affect everyone. Not every 80 year old is diminished, and not everyone has that mental decline before their physical decline accellerates. But we all end up in the same place, in the end. So his age is the one concern that Biden can’t counteract with a policy change or an executive order. All he can do is show us what he has. And he simply didn’t deliver, even after all his debate prep.

I honestly don’t think Biden is incapable. I think that he still showed a deep understanding of the issues facing the country. His stutter (which he has always had) showed up in force, and he was definitely far less articulate than Trump. I think he can still lead a White House staff that, working together, will get it all done.

He’s been running for President (on and off) since the Reagan era. We know what he used to be capable of in a debate. He is not the same man. Trump, for all his flaws, is a known quantity. His mannerisms, childish as they are, haven’t changed since 2016 (or, indeed, since First Grade.-

I also acknowledge that it is a lot easier for Trump to sound confident, because he doesn’t worry about actually being correct, or grounded at all in the same reality the rest of us share.

So while he can do the job, I have serious doubts that enough people can look past that performance to give him the margin he needs. Being President is a tough job, and I think it’s reasonable to not have to make excuses for how the guy in office explains his positions.

You’re right, I’m being a bit disengenuous there. But I’m trying to draw a line between the typical GeNoCiDe JoE nonsense that some people push here, and what is going on now. There are a lot of well-meaning progressives who get caught up in that, not realizing their movement does nothing productive for anyone they claim to support. They may as well be tankies, in regards to their effect on what happens in the election.

Any replacement for Biden will not be more progressive, and in fact will be more centrist to try and win back that middle voter. Progressives can’t say “I won’t back Harris either, she likes cops too much” and not be part of the problem.

Even after all this, I still have confidence in Biden as a leader, and will vote for him if he remains on the ballot. But I now have much more severe doubts about his electability than I did on Wednesday.

This is getting down voted here, but it shouldn’t be just because some people disagree. The NYT editorial board coming out with this is a Big Deal. It has the potential to change the race. A lot of influential people still read it.

Key Democratic leaders have been lining up to support Biden, but of course they will. He is their guy. We don’t know what private conversations are happening, though. If Biden can be convinced to drop out, all these people who are defending his decision to stay in now will defend his decision to back out.

No matter how many op-eds people write, though, Biden will stay in the game unless two things happen:

1. his polls take a further nosedive – but even then he may be convinced he can make that up

2. his donors dry up.

Even if Biden drops out, all the tankies here need to accept the fact that the Democratic nominee will not be some progressive darling who will stop shipping arms to Israel. It will be whats-her-name, and the entire party will expect us all to get behind her. Get over yourselves. Hold your nose and vote for her, no matter how much she loves cops.

And he’s not getting fired at the convention. The only off-ramp for Biden is if he backs out entirely. That means formally resigning and giving whats-her-name not only a campaign, but a country to run. Good luck!

Don’t you think he looks tired?

I agree if it happens it should be Kamala, I only bring Dean Phillips up because he actually has a handful of delegates pledged to him. It is less of a stretch to pick someone who campaigned for the job and actually got primary votes vs. someone who didn’t even participate in the primaries.

being born in USA", that sort of arbitrary weirdness

The actual requirement is “natural-born citizen”, which doesn’t really have a definition. John McCain was born on a US military base in Panama, Rafael Edward Cruz was born in Calgary, yet both were citizens at birth and nobody contested their status as “natural-born” when they ran for President

Maybe the party needs to adopt bylaws saying that there shall be no fewer than three candidates in any Presidential primary, even for an incumbant. That will take away a bit of the stigma against challenging an incumbent. It would no longer be a direct challenge to the establishment, and more of a party role to fill.

Yes, the primaries may be a huge joke, but they at least have the veneer of democracy over them. Primaries are formal elections run by each state, so there are laws to follow regarding how delegates are applied.

Here’s what I think now: I’m sure Barack Obama watched that debate, and came to the same conclusion we all did. If anyone has Biden’s ear on this, it’s Obama. Obama needs to get on the phone with Joe, and have a heart-to-heart about how fucking devastating that thing was. He should point out how much damage was done by RBG not retiring when it was her time to do so. I’m sure he had those discussions directly with her in 2015.

(Edited to add: according to the NYT, Obama’s not going there

“Bad debate nights happen,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/us/politics/biden-democrats-nominee-2024-election.html

I still have confidence that Joe can do the job, but not so much that he is electable anymore. I hope I’m wrong, and in November, if he is on the ballot I will still vote for him, and not regret it.

In retrospect, maybe we should have had a Primary debate after all.

Just made a large post on this elsewhere, but the TL;DR is that the party can’t just replace Biden. He has all the delegates from the primaries. Do you really think the party that is campaigning on preserving Democracy can get away with ignoring elections?

Now, it’s possible that Biden gets diagnosed with a severe case of not-gonna-win-itis which adversely affects his health to the point that he has to resign not only from the campaign, but from the Presidency. If that happens, Kamala Harris becomes the 47th President, and has the only real claim to take over the ticket. It has the fun side effect of making Trump reprint all his hats to say “45 - 48” instead of “45-47”.

(The Secret Service better take good care of President Harris, because whatever VP she appoints to take over that role needs to get a majority vote in both houses of Congress, and the House will never do it.)

The biggest argument against removing Biden from the ticket against his will is that we went through a bunch of primaries, and he has won enough delegates to be the nominee. For the party that claims to be about protecting democracy, it would be a stretch to tell all those Primary voters “Hey, guess what? Your vote doesn’t really count” so directly.

But, there are contingency plans for a reason. If Biden’s doctors decide he has a sudden case of chronic not-gonna-win-itis that is affecting his health, and he gets a sudden medical diagnosis that forces him from the race (and the Presidency), there are precisely two people who can take over without the Democratic Party totally abandoning the democratic process:

1. the newly minted 47th President. Kamala Harris. While she did not get any delegates herself, as Biden’s VP she shares the ticket and would take over the Presidency once he backs out.

2. Dean Phillips , who as far as I know is the only other candidate to get any Primary delegates. No, “uncommitted” doesn’t count.

Nobody else can swoop in and take over, because they have no legitimate relationship to the Biden ticket, or to the primaries.

Making a mental note to come back here later, as I am busy today and this looks important.

If you are too busy to click through, the list is here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Deprecated_sources

The list itself looks reasonable. Note that on Wikipedia, this is not a blanket ban on discussion, but links that go to those sources generally get removed.

Sounds like a good idea, but I need more time to process the list. It looks like there are tiers to it, not every source is banned outright.

Trump’s debate performance was awful, but so was Biden’s, and somehow because this country is weird as hell Biden is held to a much higher standard than Trump while also being immensely unpopular.

Trump’s performance as a debater was awful. He ignored the questions put to him, and frequently lied through his teeth. But, you could put a clip from this debate alongside a clip from his debate with Hillary 8 years ago, and not really see much of a difference.

The reason people are freaking out is that Biden’s age was on full display here. His stutter was much more visible, his voice was raspy at times, and he frequently couldn’t finish his thoughts before the mic went off. We also have a long history of his time in government to know how he used to be.

If this election turns into a referendum on Biden’s age, he loses. Even though Trump is only 3 years younger. Trump doesn’t show it.

He still ranted and raved like a crazy person based on what I’m reading.

His ideas and concepts were crazy, but his delivery really hasn’t changed much since we first saw him in debates in 2016. Biden’s clearly has. If you were living under a rock and didn’t already know everything you needed to about these two men, you never would have guessed that only three years separated them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Jim Jordan pulled his contempt Citation for the AG after this. They don’t need the audio of the Special Counsel investigation to put in attack ads anymore.

The closest thing we’ll get to that is in the polls over the next few days, and the moving forward to the election.

But even then, the numbers don’t have to move very much in order to make a difference. GA has 11 million people, and Biden won there last time by only 11k votes. Do you think a GA poll (much less a national poll) would pick up 11k people there changing their votes, or 22k people deciding to not vote at all (or vote for the brain worm guy instead)? That can all happen in the margins, outside of any ability for the rest of us to detect it.

I watched it all, and Biden did a much worse job than Trump did. Trump lied his way through the whole thing, but we expected that going in. I don’t think Democrats expected Biden to look this feeble.

No, not many people are going to change their vote because of this. But the last few elections have been one with very close margins in a handful of states. It doesn’t take that many people in certain zip codes to decide they can no longer support Biden to turn the election. They don’t even have to turn to Trump, they can go third party or stay home.

I’m not a fan of replacing Biden this late in the process, if that happens for any reason other than Biden’s health then it basically renders all the Primaries invalid, and puts party officials in a position to make the decision, not voters. And let’s be fair: Democrats who were watching saw that Biden was actually able to make his points, and draw a clear distinction between his positions and his opponent. Nobody is saying that the substance of Biden’s performance was wrong, they’re all just upset over the optics of his performance, and his ability to attract those last few voters in PA and WI that he needs.

I recall thinking that Biden lost the first debate in 2020, also. He managed to come back then. We’ll see about this time.