MELTDOWN: Democrats Panic After Biden Has the ‘Single Worst Debate Performance in American History’
Posted on | June 28, 2024 | 8 Comments
WOW! Just . . . WOW!
My pre-debate prediction was that CNN had this “debate” pre-arranged to be a Biden victory, but if so, it certainly didn’t work as planned. Not only is CNN itself now admitting that Biden crashed like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, but there is a universal consensus among Democrats and all their media mouthpieces that (a) Biden cannot win in November and (b) he therefore must be replaced as the party’s nominee.
That headline is from New York magazine, whose Matthew Steib said as soon as the debate was over, “There’s lot of panic in the Democratic party that did not exist a few hours ago. . . . Speculation is rampant about swapping out Biden at the top of the ticket.” Until about 10 p.m. ET Thursday, anyone talking like that was dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist,” but now everybody is saying the same thing.
Ditch Biden. That Debate
Performance Was a Disaster.
That’s the headline from the New Republic‘s Alex Shephard:
Thursday’s debate should have been a tap-in. All Biden had to do was appear mildly competent. All he had to do was let Donald Trump be Donald Trump. Then the rest would take care of itself.
It’s hard to see how the bar could have been set any lower. And yet Biden not only failed to meet it, he delivered what may very well be the single worst debate performance in American history. Again and again, with no prompting, he made his opponent’s case for him. He was often incoherent, frequently appeared to forget the question he was responding to . . . This was a disaster, from start to finish. It is impossible to see how Joe Biden can continue as the Democratic nominee for president.
That’s emphatic, and the same basic message was echoing universally across the media landscape as soon as Thursday’s debate ended.
That’s the headline from Politico:
All Joe Biden needed to do was deliver a repeat performance of his State of the Union address.
Instead, he stammered. He stumbled. And, with fewer than five months to November, he played straight into Democrats’ worst fears — that he’s fumbling away this election to Donald Trump.
The alarm bells for Democrats started ringing the second Biden started speaking in a haltingly hoarse voice. Minutes into the debate, he struggled to mount an effective defense of the economy on his watch and flubbed the description of key health initiatives he’s made central to his reelection bid, saying “we finally beat Medicare” and incorrectly stating how much his administration lowered the price of insulin. He talked himself into a corner on Afghanistan, bringing up his administration’s botched withdrawal unprompted. He repeatedly mixed up “billion” and “million,” and found himself stuck for long stretches of the 90-minute debate playing defense.
And when he wasn’t speaking, he stood frozen behind his podium, mouth agape, his eyes wide and unblinking for long stretches of time.
That was something a lot of people mentioned: Didn’t Biden realize he was on a split screen when Trump was talking? Never mind what either candidate said during the debate, the simple visual contrast between the two candidates on split-screen was disastrous for Biden.
From another Politico article Thursday night:
Democrats are so panicked over President Joe Biden’s faltering debate performance some are actively discussing what was once unspeakable: replacing him on the ticket. . . .
One major Democratic donor and Biden supporter said it was time for the president to end his campaign. This person described Biden’s night as “the worst performance in history” and said Biden was so “bad that no one will pay attention to Trump’s lies.”
“Biden needs to drop out. No question about it,” the donor said in a text message, proposing an alternate ticket led by the governors of Maryland and Michigan. . . .
One adviser to major Democratic Party donors said they were texting from a meeting of donors in Atlanta on Thursday night, some writing “wtf.”
“Our only hope is that he bows out, we have a brokered convention, or dies,” the donor adviser said. “Otherwise we are f–king dead.” . . .
“No one expected a master class in debating from Joe Biden, but no one expected this nose dive,” said a senior adviser to top Democratic officials. “He was bad on message, bad on substance, bad on counter punching, bad on presentation, bad on non-verbals. There was no bright spot in this debate for him. The only bright spot is that this happened in June and not October.”
How bad was it? On MSNBC, former Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill was practically in tears saying how bad it was:
Watch this assessment by @clairecmc on @MSNBC. All 4 minutes. pic.twitter.com/WNFhOKEjG2
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 28, 2024
“Joe Biden had one thing he had to do tonight and he didn’t do it. He had one thing he had to accomplish, and that was reassure America that he was up to the job at his age, and he failed at that tonight. . . . I’m not the only one whose heart is breaking right now. There’s a lot of people who watched this tonight and felt terribly for Joe Biden. And you know, you have to ask, how did we get here?”
Yes, how did we get here? With the surprising midnight discovery of “extra” mail-in ballots on Election Night 2020? How did we get here, with 51 intelligence operatives signing a letter swearing that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”? How did we get here, with a “cabal” of operatives bragging about how they “fortified” Biden’s alleged victory in 2020? You see, Ms. McCaskill, some of us know damned well how we got here, and we know who is responsible for this. Unlike you, however, we don’t “feel terribly for Joe Biden,” as this was the logical conclusion of his long and dishonest career in politics. His first presidential campaign collapsed because Biden was caught plagiarizing his speeches. In early 2020 — don’t you remember? — Biden was on the verge of losing the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders until James Carville swooped in, got James Clyburn to endorse Biden, then locked down the black vote to win the South Carolina primary. We watched it happen, and we have not forgotten how we got here, with Biden now seemingly doomed to leave office — next January, if not sooner — as the Worst President in American History. He’s earned it. Selah.
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8 Responses to “MELTDOWN: Democrats Panic After Biden Has the ‘Single Worst Debate Performance in American History’”
June 28th, 2024 @ 9:29 am
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June 28th, 2024 @ 9:40 am
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June 30th, 2024 @ 7:59 am
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July 6th, 2024 @ 10:49 am
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July 11th, 2024 @ 7:33 pm
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