The Biden campaign team has settled on the way to handle the fallout from Joe Biden’s disastrous debate: attack anyone who says Biden looked and sounded too old to handle the duties of the presidency. From Bloomberg:
President Joe Biden’s campaign is going on the attack against a chorus of donors, consultants, officials and media voices calling on him to drop out of the 2024 race after his devastating debate performance. . . .
In private calls, public memos and media appearances, they mocked those who suggested the president self-inflicted a fatal wound as “bed wetters” out of touch with real Americans. Top Democratic lawmakers rallied around the president, fanning out on television to argue there’s still a path to victory against former President Donald Trump.
The Bloomberg report dryly notes, “The strategy will be remembered as a display of either remarkable foresight or incredible hubris.” I’m going to go with the latter.
The ongoing Democratic reaction isn’t “bed wetting.” It is an entirely rational response to the incumbent president going on stage and barely being able to speak in complete sentences and spending much of the night in a slack-jawed, blank-eyed stare of bewilderment.
This morning, there have been some Twitter arguments about whether members of the media knew Biden was in such dire shape that he was incapable of keeping it together, without a teleprompter, on his feet, at 9 p.m. Eastern. I suspect the mainstream press talked itself into believing Biden could look non-senile for 90 minutes. I figured the debate would be bad but undramatic, with Biden having enough cranky “will you shut up, man!” outbursts and references to Trump’s conviction that the press and Democrats could tell themselves (and everyone else) that Biden was “a fighter,” etc. Instead, Biden looked lost, confused, and hapless from the opening minutes.
That, I’d contend, is what is driving so much of the abandonment of Biden. The media had set the bar as low as it could go, and Biden couldn’t even clear that. He put them in a situation where his performance was so indisputably, irrefutably, confidence-shakingly bad — along with the post-debate “Joe, you did such a great job, you answered every question” kindergartner treatment from Jill — that they just couldn’t defend it.
Imagine the galactic-scale hubris you must have to watch Joe Biden turn in that bottom-of-the-barrel performance and thinking you can shame Democrats into pretending they didn’t see what they just saw.