curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
A few general condemnations of political violence. One "this is the dems' fault for calling trump a fascist", which mentioning the guy's apparent conservatism and google searches about the time of dem events didn't really help dispel. One "I wish he'd gone for Biden and it landed, then we'd have a better candidate!"
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
I mean, down in popularity relative to history's presidential candidates, not down head to head against Biden https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/14/biden-trump-are-least-liked-pair-of-major-party-presidential-candidates-in-at-least-3-decades/ https://abcnews.go.com/538/americans-hated-candidates-biden-trump/story?id=108655435
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
I mean, yeah, it is objectively unpleasant. Look at this guy, who shilled for Biden's fitness right until he dropped out, and pivoted to Harris, renaming his account, without even thinking about it.
On the other hand I don't think this is a Democrat thing, it's just as unpleasant how many anti-trump reps who had "principled disagreements" pivoted and fell in line behind trump when the party moved that way.
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
I would expect it to boost him by a point or two, and for that boost to fade out over the next few months. He's down by much more than a point or two
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
Trump is not popular! His approval/favorability is terrible compared to past presidential candidates. He's only winning the election because Dems managed to nominate someone worse. Kamala isn't eighty, she can say more than ten words in sequence without pausing or stuttering. She's not a good Dem, but she's still just a mediocre generic Dem, and that's good enough for a lot of voters.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
Fortunately for Trump's chances, the party's rapidly coalescing around Harris, with 125 endorsements from house democrats and a lot of state dems and delegates endorsing Harris. Dems weren't willing to rock the boat with the last terrible candidate, and when the debate forced them to notice, they immediately make the same mistake again and pick the obvious "consensus" candidate who happens to be mediocre. I'll again post How Democrats Got Here
Harris had just mounted an exceptionally lackluster bid for the presidency. Then a California senator, Harris had entered the race for the Democratic nomination with strong donor support and an early surge in the polls. Despite these early advantages, Harris failed to maintain — let alone build out — her coalition over the ensuing months, and her campaign collapsed before the primary’s first ballots were cast. Nor was Harris’s electoral track record before 2020 especially encouraging. She had never won an election in a swing state or competitive district. And in her first statewide race in deep blue California in 2010, Harris defeated her Republican rival by less than 1 percentage point. Two years earlier, Barack Obama had won that state by more than 23 points.
Given that Biden was 77 in August 2020, the likelihood that his running-mate would one day become his party’s standard-bearer was unusually high ... Biden’s primary consideration in choosing a running-mate should have been his or her electability. Instead, he put enormous weight on demographic considerations. “I think he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman,” former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the New York Times in the summer of 2020. “They are our most loyal voters and I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate.”
On Polymarket, Harris's chance of winning is 30%, to Trump's 64%. Trump was up 71% right after the debate. Better than Biden's conditional probability of 25%, and Harris'll probably go up a bit when she gets the nomination, conditionally that's 35% but while that's better than Biden's 25%, it's not a great outcome for dems.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
If you sit down and explain things calmly, slowly, and carefully you can explain most things to people
... Sure, but it's easy to massively overestimate how well they understand what you've explained. One consistent experience I've had teaching average students higher-level subjects is you'll explain something to them, work them through some problems, and they'll seem to get it. And they'll happily say that they get it. But give them the same kind of problem in a slightly different context, or just wait a month and give them the same problem, and they'll totally fall over in a way that makes you question how they even thought they understood it initially.
So I don't think society merely saying it is enough. I think that, like with teaching, you can counteract that by just drilling them hard enough for long enough - it doesn't really build intelligence, but it gets them through tests and would probably get our below-average people through car and health insurance better than they do today.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
Idk I think these are things that many of these people (not the bottom percentile people we see in AdjusterTok, but say the 25th-40th percentiles) would be able to understand if they spent a lot of time just grinding basic examples and thinking through it, over and over, instead of spending that time trying to understand sports or TV or relationship drama. Relatively dumb people can learn to perform simple jobs that'd be outside their capability to do on the fly by just repeating the task over and over. Not to suggest that usual claims of "it's our fault for not teaching this in schools" aren't stupid, just having an extra financial literacy class isn't enough, but I don't think it's a totally intractable problem even without coercion.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
I don't think this makes sense. Good insurance will cover large infrequent expenses, insurance companies have expertise and economies of scale in getting things done, and good health insurance gets you better care than trying to pay your way through the complex healthcare system yourself unless you're quite rich I think
Idk I agree with the general point but #AdjusterTok is sampling the bottom percentiles of insurance conversations, which are already going to be selected for appearing dumb. Also you're seeing the ones that get 500k views which is, you know, more selection. I think it's a mistake to build intuition for the behavior of a 33rd percentile human based on that!
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
Can you elaborate?
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
Machine learning isn't a necessary ingredient here! Cops will tell you that they know very well which individuals have the highest risk (of both being the offender and victim), but they can't do anything about it until after the fact. It's not difficult to notice who keeps going through the system.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
I disagree, and Nate does too in the post. Even given that Biden can't run a normal campaign, polls are just wrong sometimes, and even if the polls widen a bit more it's still within polling error precedent that Biden wins.
I disagree. People have always made crude and violent comments in small scale conversations. As the Internet has grown, the chatter that once took place in a tavern or next to a fireplace now happens where billions of people can see it. This may be ill-advised, but it's what we have, and it's what we should design norms around. I don't think we should get people fired for saying 'i hate n***ers and k*kes' or 'we should kill all landlords', nor should we for this. An explicit reason, given by the Supreme Court among others, for not making support for political violence is illegal is that abstract support for violence inevitably comes along with justified political grievances, and I think that's a similarly good reason to not make it a social taboo punishable by excommunication. The First Amendment and freedom broadly correspond to values about how society should be, not just procedures the government must follow. It's perfectly legal for me to be unpersoned by everyone I know for supporting Trump, and not served by every business, but that's still, I would think, bad.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
This is a bit dumb, but I don't think anyone checked to see if that woman endorsed cancel culture before getting her fired, so that fits hypothesis 1 more than hypothesis 2.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
Yes, they all deserve each other. Eventually they'll end up in Hell and spend eternity applying arbitrary tortures to members of the other 'side', not even remembering why there are sides in the first place.
More seriously. Neither really accomplish anything. You note that the shoe is 'momentarily' on the other foot, it's not like this little outburst will make future cancellations less likely! It might if one targeted people with cultural power on the left, but they aren't!
Semi-relatedly, I think a post thinking how the attitude towards the 'racial reckoning' has significantly soured on the center-left, putting it in the context of history. 2020 was hardly the first progressive "excess" that was later disavowed as too exuberant. What comes next?
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
I don't think this is exactly a pendulum swinging back. I think if an assassination attempt against Trump had happened in 2020, people'd still be fired for saying it should've happened. 'killing the president is bad' is a very strong political norm that is fairly independent of anti-racism or rape c. If the attempt had been on Biden instead (which might've been possible, the shooter searched for both trump and biden and trump had a rally near his home), we'd see something similar.
I think framing this as striking back against the left's cancel culture power, fighting fire with fire, is confused for that reason among others. This isn't training a muscle you can use to cancel trans activists or anti-white DEI racists. Nor will punishing random cashiers for saying things like this make it less likely popular progressive twitter users will say things you dislike. Cancelling a popular twitter user or celebrity is very different from cancelling a random old woman. It kinda feels like PUSHING BACK, it sorta feels like the same sort of thing as cancelling a beloved actor or tech CEO, but it really isn't
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
What happens if one or both of them don't
Yeah, most Biden-alternative discussion is premised on Biden choosing to back out, since he controls the delegates. There's a general sense there's a solid chance this happens.
Does the Democrat party actually have good options to replace them without their cooperation
Delegates could, in theory, reject Biden, the delegates are only obligated to "in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them". This seems difficult and unlikely though.
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
I strongly disagree, actually! I think a non-Biden/Harris/Newsom nominee is around 50% to win. Both Biden and Trump are historically unpopular presidential candidates, they poll terribly, both in approvals and in poll questions like 'are they fit to / too old to run'. I don't think the short period of time between now and the election is an issue, in part because American election seasons are just so much longer than other countries. There are a lot of options (Shapiro? Beshear? warnock?). Whitmer and co tie with biden in head-to-head polls, but I think that's mostly name recognition, once everyone's seen their face and the energy of a young candidate charismatic enough to be popular in their own state they should surge.
but how will the bureaucratic weirdness that would be necessary to do this affect the voters' confidence in the Democrat ticket
I don't really buy this. People are voting against Biden and Trump more than they're voting for them, and a young and confident voice saying all the right things will pick up a lot of votes, I think. "They're both too old" is an extremely common position, and I think that'll dominate any concerns about someone who wins a second "primary".
How much of a mess might Biden and/or Harris make on the way out
In terms of accusations / insults, past Dem nomination fights were bloody but that didn't really spill over into the general. And we're still months out, elections take around a month in some nations. In terms of throwing up procedural / legal issues, I doubt that's too big of an issue.
Not to mention the optics of kneecapping the female POC with the progressive wing.
I think it's a much bigger problem with the progressive wing of the elites than it is with the voters. Could just go Whitmer w/ black VP or something.
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
I think they're pointed out as physical symptoms of aging. You can see some of it by watching his TV appearances, he often seems to blink much less than he should and his eyes often seem a bit narrow and scrunched.
I'll still give Biden some personal credit for the Afghanistan withdrawal though.
Kamala seems most likely, for legal-fundraising reasons
I think this is wrong and misses why people support Harris, it's not exactly a tactical decision. Money isn't as important as people think for presidential elections - voters are voting for, above all, a party and a candidate, it's the face they'll see and the voice they'll hear. And Dem donors will still have piles of money available for any non-Harris candidate. Harris is, in my opinion, not a good candidate. She's not popular, with an approval rating virtually equivalent to biden's 37% (although biden's disapprove is 6 higher). She was received poorly in the 2020 primary. I don't feel the charisma whe nwatching her. The clips of her going viral on social media are of her making statements that are ironically endearing for their strangeness, greatest hits compiled here, and I'm not sure this'll translate to excitement among swing voters. In head to head polls she doesn't do much better than Biden, and though none of the governor alternatives do better either Harris has less of a name recognition gap to make up for. And she's burdened with the Biden brand - inflation, the age issues, and a cloud of malaise generally. I don't think money can make up for this! The recent Republican local races demonstrate the importance of candidate quality over anything else.
Even ignoring that, though, I think the campaign finance issues are overstated. The articles claiming this supports harris say things like:
The campaign could also give it all to the Democratic National Committee, but even with the DNC, there are rules governing coordinating with candidates that curb how freely the committee can spend. “That’s not necessarily as effective as a campaign spending money itself,” Noble said.
UPDATE: There is a possibility that the campaign committee funds could be transferred to the Democratic National Committee. But the DNC could then only give up to $5,000 directly to a candidate. It could use the funds on behalf of the candidate, but again the coordination and ad rate questions come up. And it is possible that Kamala Harris would have to comply with a transfer of those funds in that manner, in a scenario where she was just passed over for the top of the ticket.
Sure, "coordination costs" and "ad rate questions" mean it's "not necessarily as effective" as if Harris gets the money directly. It's not ideal. That language is a bit wishy-washy though. And using it to justify "practically speaking, Biden and Harris are really the only two choices available at this late stage of the campaign" seems to overstep.
And reviewing the language in those articles
That hasn’t stopped the endless fantasy league scenarios from those who see no avenue for Biden to defeat Donald Trump in November. ... This is a tremendous insult to Kamala Harris, who Biden himself handpicked as his second in command.
And it is possible that Kamala Harris would have to comply with a transfer of those funds in that manner, in a scenario where she was just passed over for the top of the ticket
One gets the sense that the desire for nominee Harris doesn't come entirely from pragmatism. She's the First Black Woman Vice President, and denying her the nomination SHE deserves is an insult. I get the same feeling from other pro-Harris arguments - "voters will be outraged that you passed over the Black Woman VP". Someone will be outraged, sure, but is it really voters, or is it the author? I taste notes of RBG's and Sotomayor's potential retirements here. It's not just that though, speculating, I think a novel and complicated plan like 'hold mini-primaries' is difficult to believe in, and feels dangerous in, in an environment with a weak 'party' where power is very decentralized and depends on networks of relationships. "The CEO will just declare it's time for primaries and pick someone good to run them" isn't the kind of thing that happens, but "she's my guy so I'll support her" and "looks like the consensus is moving towards her so i'm moving there too" is something that happens a lot. It's not an environment that cultivates the agency of individuals or the group.
A Matthew Yglesias post, "VP selections aren’t taken seriously enough" (of course with Matt, there's a framing making it look like he isn't picking on Harris), touches on all of these issues.
All the wrong reasons
The Herndon profile in particular is really clear on two things:
Biden was facing a lot of pressure from various inside party actors to select a Black woman, which in practice meant Harris.
Despite this, nobody was telling Biden that selecting Harris had significant electoral benefits. There was no polling or data or demographic analysis that suggested this “you should pick a Black woman” vibe was correct.
Here’s how Herndon describes the final showdown between Harris and Gretchen Whitmer:
After Whitmer impressed Biden during an in-person meeting in the veepstakes’ final stages, one question rose to the top: Could two white Democrats win?
Campaign research said yes — Biden could win with any of the four. Klain argued for Harris specifically. Obama played the role of sounding board, weighing the pros and cons of Biden’s options rather than backing anyone, including Harris, according to a person familiar with the conversation. But Harris was the only candidate who had the full complement of qualifications: She had won statewide, was a familiar name with voters because of her presidential run and enjoyed a personal connection with the Biden family, having been a close working partner of Biden’s son, Beau, when he served as attorney general of Delaware.
And she was Black, meaning the announcement would be met with enthusiasm rather than controversy. On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.
None of this is wrong, exactly. But note that in his telling, there is not a point in the process where Biden stops and thinks “who will be the best candidate in 2028?” or “if I die, who will be the best person to take over?” But note that even leaving Biden’s age out of it, the base rate for presidential death or resignation is nearly one in five!
Instead the decisive characteristic was that Harris would generate more enthusiasm.
And here I do think I should be clear about what I think this meant in practice: Picking Harris minimized short-term complaining. Plenty of people would have been thrilled with Whitmer and plenty of people were not thrilled with Harris. But as a rare person who criticized the Harris selection at the time, I know that given the atmosphere prevailing in the summer of 2020, that made me a kind of un-fun skunk at the party. By contrast, Harris proponents would have felt empowered to complain about a Whitmer selection. And to be clear, in Harris’ defense, she really is a properly qualified choice. The discourse around her has gotten so mean you’d think this was the greatest debacle in VP selection history when it’s not even close.
The problem is that this kind of fuzzy, short-term thinking is extremely common.
Again, the core absurdity of Democrats’ current Old President problem is that if you go back to the 2008 coverage of the Obama/Biden ticket, he was picked precisely because he was too old:
The choice by Mr. Obama in some ways mirrors the choice by Mr. Bush of Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000; at his age, it appears unlikely that Mr. Biden would be in a position to run for president should Mr. Obama win and serve two terms. Shorn of any remaining ambition to run for president on his own, he could find himself in a less complex political relationship with Mr. Obama than most vice presidents have with their presidents.
Oops!
Yes, indeed, Matthew. Oops. Oops all around.
But, of course, there are many worse screwups than this. If you go back to the fateful election of 1840, the Whigs put John Tyler on the ticket because he didn’t like Andrew Johnson without checking to see if Tyler was on board with Whig policies. William Henry Harrison died after 40 days in office, Tyler became president, and it turned out that — oops! — he did not agree with those policies
In the scheme of things, Harris is actually a totally fine choice. She is in line with the party mainstream on policy and ideology and is of appropriate age to take over, which sounds like a low bar to pass but is actually impressive in comparative terms.
Framing!
I believe that in part because I continue to think there is a pretty obvious way for her to get her mojo back. The basic reality is that Americans of all kinds put a good deal of stock into the personal identity of our political figures. And progressive Americans put even more stock into it than average Americans.
By the same token, there are certain things that Harris as a Black woman “can” say that Joe Biden as a white man “can’t” say — i.e., things that are moderate-coded about race and gender matters.
Sure. If she does this and wins the mini-primary with that, more power to her.
More Matt, "Kamala Harris should try to be really popular ... In spite of all!":
Perhaps the worst-kept secret in Washington is that tons of Democrats are terrified of the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party presidential nominee at some point in the future.
Indeed, it’s such a poorly kept secret that it’s barely even a secret. For example, even though officially Biden has not announced a reelection bid — and given his age, this is formally an open question — absolutely everyone wants him to run again. But the terror is that he might not, or even if he does, he might not make it all the way through eight years. But beyond the possibility that Biden would die or step down, if he serves through 2028, it seems overwhelmingly likely that she’d win a primary.
Why are people scared? Well, mostly because her approval rating lags stubbornly behind Biden’s.
Personally, I am not that scared of her current approval numbers. What scares me instead is the reaction that you hear from the Harrisverse to these worries, which is mostly to accuse critics of sexism or to attribute her political problems to sexism. Indeed, just typing this paragraph I can feel the people getting ready to yell at me on Twitter. But my point isn’t to deny that sexism is real (it clearly is) or that it’s felt by women in politics (it clearly is) but that this kind of fatalism is paralyzing and politically deadly. There are women in politics who are popular and successful at winning tough races, and they didn’t do it by making sexism vanish from the planet earth any more than Barack Obama and Raphael Warnock ended racism.
Powerful framing. I do kinda enjoy reading matt's subtle contortions.
To give the dems some credit, there's been a lot of talk about nominating someone other than Harris and miniprimaries, it could even happen.
(matt's source for obama biden age isn't great, but other reporting linked from here confirms it)
The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden
The president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.
By Olivia Nuzzi
Just read the whole article. If not, the best parts:
Obsessive efforts to control Biden were not a new phenomenon. But whereas in the last campaign, the incredible stagecraft surrounding even the smallest Biden event — speaking to a few people at a union hall in rural Iowa, say, or in a barn in New Hampshire — seemed to be about avoiding the so-called gaffes that had become for him inevitable, the stagecraft of the 2024 campaign seems now to be about something else. The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there.
...
In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors. All people who supported the president and were working to help reelect him to a second term in office. Following encounters with the president, they had arrived at the same concern: Could he really do this for another four years? Could he even make it to Election Day?
When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that. Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”
Who was actually in charge? Nobody knew. But surely someone was in charge? And surely there must be a plan, since surely this situation could not endure? I heard these questions posed at cocktail parties on the coasts but also at MAGA rallies in Middle America. There emerged a comical overlap between the beliefs of the nation’s most elite liberal Biden supporters and the beliefs of the most rabid and conspiratorial supporters of former President Trump. Resistance or QAnon, they shared a grand theory of America in 2024: There has to be a secret group of high-level government leaders who control Biden and who will soon set into motion their plan to replace Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. Nothing else made sense. They were in full agreement.
...
[April 2024] The first person I saw upon entering the subterranean space was the First Lady...
In the basement, I smiled and said hello. She looked back at me with a confused, panicked expression. It was as if she had just received horrible news and was about to run out of the room and into some kind of a family emergency. “Uh, hi,” she said. Then she glanced over to her right. Oh …
I had not seen the president up close in some time. I had skipped this season’s holiday parties, and, preoccupied with covering Trump’s legal and political dramas, I hadn’t been showing up at his White House. Unlike Trump, he wasn’t very accessible to the press, anyway. Why bother? Biden had done few interviews. He wasn’t prone to interrupting his schedule with a surprise media circus in the Oval Office. He kept a tight circle of the same close advisers who had been advising him for more than 30 years, so unlike with his predecessor, you didn’t need to hang around in West Wing hallways to figure out who was speaking to him. It was all pretty locked down and predictable in terms of the reality you could access as a member of the press with a White House hard pass.
I followed the First Lady’s gaze and found the president. Now I understood her panicked expression.
Up close, the president does not look quite plausible. It’s not that he’s old. We all know what old looks like. Bernie Sanders is old. Mitch McConnell is old. Most of the ruling class is old. The president was something stranger, something not of this earth. This was true even in 2020. His face had then an uncanny valley quality that injectable aficionados call “low trust” — if only by millimeters, his cosmetically altered proportions knocked his overall facial harmony into the realm of the improbable. His thin skin, long a figurative problem and now a literal one, was pulled tightly over cheeks that seemed to vary month to month in volume. Under artificial light and in the sunshine, he took on an unnatural gleam. He looked, well, inflated. His eyes were half-shut or open very wide. They appeared darker than they once had, his pupils dilated. He did not blink at regular intervals. The White House often did not engage when questioned about the president’s stare, which sometimes raised alarm on social media when documented in official videos produced by the White House. The administration was above conspiratorial chitchat that entertained seriously scenarios in which the president was suffering from a shocking decline most Americans were not seeing. If the president was being portrayed that way, it was by his political enemies on the right, who promoted through what the press office termed “cheap fakes” a caricature of an addled creature unfit to serve. They would not dignify those people, or people doing the bidding of those people, with a response.
My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I always thought — and I wrote — that he was a decent man. If ambition was his only sin, and it seemed to be, he had committed no sin at all by the standards of most politicians I had covered. He took my hand in his, and I was startled by how it felt. Not cold but cool. The basement was so warm that people were sweating and complaining that they were sweating. This was a silly black-tie affair. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.
Exiting the room after the photo, the group of reporters — not instigated by me, I should note — made guesses about how dead he appeared to be, percentage wise. “Forty percent?” one of them asked.
“It was a bad night.” That’s the spin from the White House and its allies about Thursday’s debate. But when I watched the president amble stiffly across the stage, my first thought was: He doesn’t look so bad. For months, everything I had heard, plus some of what I had seen, led me to brace for something much more dire.
As context, Nuzzi's writing was critical of Biden's age in 2020, and Biden people have had a grudge against her ever since.
And from a tweet, when asked why she's reporting this now and not earlier:
I work on most of my stories for months. This piece is about a conspiracy of silence that made people reluctant to talk. I’ve been chasing down what I heard since January. That’s how long reporting takes. Debate changed people’s calculations about how candid they would be, and even then not on the record.
Not a great look, and especially bad to only publish it now. All that work covering it up, and it accomplished nothing for the Democratic Party, just significantly increased the chance of Trump winning. Few could put together the bravery to speak out about the age issues of the eighty year old, despite this being The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime v3. Sadly, no competent elites in smoke-filled rooms pulling the strings. At best Ezra Klein with a column and podcast or two saying maybe we should replace him.
I think my earlier comment that this was a surprisingly bad Biden debate performance was true, and that this wasn't a problem for him in 2020 (and Nuzzi agrees), but I was definitely underestimating his decline.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
I do not believe that this is an entirely rarefied position to have held going into the June 27 debate. Even my famously dumb Twitter followers, of all political stripes, managed to produce the following result in April of 2020 when asked about the matter (70% voted senile total)
This doesn't make the point Eigen thinks it makes. Biden was not senile in 2020! Compare his 2020 debates to his 2024 debate. In 2020 down due to age, sure, but not senile. And there were many reports during the first half of his presidency that was capably acting as the president. I think understanding and predicting is just difficult, and it's easy to blame other peoples' mistakes on bias when you're making the same mistake inverted. No incentives or experience exist that prepares most people for accurate predictions about politics, and both Biden and Trump's staff are strongly incentivized to mislead you, and just as reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, the truth isn't halfway in between both sides' propaganda!
given I watched the entire video and it led to the best comment of the week so far, I think it was a fine post, cheerleading or not
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