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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29333 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Hot Swap time?

On the All-In podcast, a couple of the podcasters have been making bold claims that Biden would be "hot-swapped" out for a different candidate (presumably Gavin Newsom) after the first debate. I thought their claims were pretty outlandish, but after last night they are seeming a lot more, um, inlandish.

I concur with a lot of the Mottizens below that Biden's performance was not that bad. I thought he landed some decent punches and fought Trump mostly to a draw. But expectations matter. Like most people here, I am well aware of Biden's state of decline, whereas perhaps the average voter is not. I was not expecting vigor, so was in no way shocked by Biden's lack of it. Furthermore, Mottizens tend to actually listen to the words that are said. Normies react more to feels. Biden's blank-eyed stare and gaped mouth said more than words ever could. If this was your first exposure to Biden in the last 4 years, it would be unsettling.

What I was shocked by was the immediate consensus by CNN's post-debate panel that Biden's performance was a disaster, and the immediate speculation about a new candidate. I had expected them to rally around their leader. There was a plausible argument to be made that Biden did okay. Instead, they threw him under the bus.

The timing of the debate certainly seems a bit suspicious. This was the earliest Presidential debate in some time (ever?). Conspicuously, it comes before the convention, but after the primaries. If Biden can be pressured to resign, the DNC will be able to handpick their preferred candidate without the pesky need for voters.

As Bill Ackman and others have pointed out on Twitter, everyone in Biden's inner circle knew that this was Biden's ability level in 2024. They didn't have to agree to a debate. Why did they send him out there to get slaughtered?Seen through this lens, Obama "helping" the elderly Biden off the stage a couple weeks ago take on a darker tone.

Shares in "Biden 2024 Democratic nominee" crashed during the debate and now trade at just 63%. Newsom is at 22% and Harris at 13%.

I don't know. All of this seems very conspiratorial. The real world is messy and boring. I doubt that the DNC are sitting around in a smoke-filled room, twirling their mustaches. But, however it shakes out, odds of Biden being replaced are shooting up. This seems very undemocratic. There was a time to replace Biden, and that was during the primaries. However it shakes out, the election season just got a lot more interesting.

The editorial board of the New York Times now asks Biden to step aside.

Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader. The confidantes and aides who have encouraged the president’s candidacy, and who sheltered him from unscripted appearances in public, should recognize the damage to Mr. Biden’s standing and the unlikelihood that he can repair it.

Mr. Biden answered an urgent question on Thursday night. It was not the answer that he and his supporters were hoping for. But if the risk of a second Trump term is as great as he says it is—and we agree with him that the danger is enormous—then his dedication to this country leaves him and his party only one choice.

The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.

It is the best chance to protect the soul of the nation—the cause that drew Mr. Biden to run for the presidency in 2019—from the malign warping of Mr. Trump. And it is the best service that Mr. Biden can provide to a country that he has nobly served for so long.

There is no reason for the party to risk the stability and security of the country by forcing voters to choose between Mr. Trump’s deficiencies and those of Mr. Biden.

This, for both parties. Seriously, Trump and Biden are both way too old to be POTUS in a term that could very well include literal WWIII. I've been hoping for ages that one of them has a heart attack* and gets replaced by a non-geriatric candidate (preferably Trump, because a lot of non-Biden Democrats are true believers in extreme forms of SJ and some of those beliefs are relevant to fitness to preside over WWIII, but I'll take a Biden heart attack if that's what's on offer). Accomplishing the same without a death required would be even better.

*NB: hoping that someone dies of natural causes =/= hoping that someone is assassinated; the latter would lead to chaos and I don't want that.

I didn't see the debate, so I don't know how awful it went for Biden, and I don't generally follow presidential debates, but I just wanted to ask if it's possible that all of this might blow over, and no one will even think of it come next debate, or even in a week. Sure, if Biden is really on death's door, he'll probably appear in poor condition in future events, too. But on the other hand, politicians oscillate in their presentability sometimes, and it doesn't always bear out. People cling to the latest thing saying "this is the most important event ever!", and at least 80% of the time, it ends up not being the most important event ever. Other politicians have had weird moments before, like when Hillary suffered some sort of temporary mental break or heat stroke or something during an interview back in 2016ish (I can't seem to find the video) and seemed completely unaware of her surroundings for a minute or two.

I've said this before, but man, I wish we could pause time and not move forward into election season. No matter what the outcome is, I'm going to feel terrible.

These things usually don't matter, until they do. Trump was the first presidential candidate in decades to win his primary without endorsements, and to become president without experience in any elected office. Debates usually don't move the needle much, or in a permanent fashion... Until now.

Lots of voters have expressed concern over Biden's age. Lots of Democrats have. And so far they've done an alright job of sowing doubt about the veracity of that claim. So to see him, mumbling and stumbling, makes a difference.

Debates usually don't move the needle much, or in a permanent fashion... Until now.

The Nixon/Kennedy debates were said to have moved the needle also. It's not new. The Reagan/Mondale debates probably would have moved the needle if it wasn't already pegged.

I don't think it went quite as bad for Biden as had been suggested (he did make some cogent points and even landed a couple of good hits) but he was visibly struggling to keep up and because the position of the Whitehouse plus much of the mainstream media up to this point has been that anyone expressing doubts about Biden's health and vitality is a russian troll, it wasn't a good look. In order to meet expectations he needed to show up and kick ass, not just barely hold on.

Edit to add: short version is that Trump showed up and appeared to be much more prepared and ready to play than Biden did.

It appears that the Democratic establishment has recovered and is backing Joe's horse again. They're going to try to memory hole this but there is still the matter of the second debate. I think it goes much like the first, but the spin will be fixed this time. Something along the lines of "Comeback Kid! Biden sparkles in second debate". And if Biden's performance was like last night's they might just pull it off.

But it's not impossible that it goes even worse. The poor guy must have trouble simply standing at a podium for two hours. He seems to be vanishing before our eyes. I have no idea how he makes it another year, let alone 4.5.

Well at least we have some interesting horse race aspects this time around.

In the end, I'm hoping for a Trump landslide as I think that's the only path that leads to introspection, and then hopefully healing. I've come to terms with him personally. He's a liar and a braggart with the attention span of a goldfish. But he's his own man, and he's not evil. And sometimes that's enough.

In the end, I'm hoping for a Trump landslide as I think that's the only path that leads to introspection, and then hopefully healing.

I really hope you are right. But the only introspection we got last time was "Trump's election proves the legacy of racism, sexism, colonialism, xenophobia, homophobia etc is real and strong and we need to feel bad/crush fascism"

Barack Obama -

"Bad debate nights happen. 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. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November. joebiden.com"

Obama is the one man who could have made the switch happen. If he had tweeted, "Biden must go," Biden would be gone. He has decided not to tweet that. Biden will not be removed.

Clinton too now: "I'll leave the debate rating to the pundits, but here's what I know: facts and history matter"

Feels like being in some south American country where multiple coup plotters have captured different radio stations. Absolute civil war behind the curtain while everyone pretends to be the ones in full control.

Obama is the one man who could have made the switch happen. If he had tweeted, "Biden must go," Biden would be gone. He has decided not to tweet that. Biden will not be removed.

Obama also doesn't always say publicly what he thinks or says privately.

Obama might be worried because if Biden has a chance at all to win, it would be by a slim margin, and if Biden won't step aside, disunity might cost the dems that margin, and Obama would be one of the obvious ones to blame for it.

Obama is highly influential in Biden’s administration to the point that a pretty common D.C. belief is that he’s running large parts of it behind the scenes. If Newsom or some other Democrat with their own infrastructure and large state political operation becomes President it’s more likely that they replace Obama’s guys with their own and his power fades.

Interesting that he would throw in his two cents/blow his load now, this early in the election season. Maybe this is a more serious event than I was suggesting.

Biden was not selected democratically (a great deal of maneuvering was done to give him a royal road through the primaries) in the first place. And bemoaning the lack of democracy now is silly. If Trump was hit by a meteor tomorrow, would that be antidemocratic, in that it would deny many people their favoured candidate?

This seems like a silly hypo. Yes, force majeure is always an exception. Biden’s infirmity has been a known problem for years. It is just that he had one of these moments at a very inopportune time. The two aren’t the same.

If Trump was hit by a meteor tomorrow, would that be antidemocratic

I'm voting for the meteor.

It would be antidemocratic unless we took a vote first.

I don’t really know what Joe Biden is about from this debate itself. I know Trump is about stopping the border.

I think even if you took away the style points (huge win for Trump) the merits were also for Trump. Biden’s policy seemed to be free puppies for all paid for by billionaires (I love how supposedly raising 500b in ten years covers anything when we are borrowing 1t ever 100 days). It was all over the point with no specific goal or vision. With Trump, he also was very airy fairy but it was obvious what he cared about: immigration, immigration, and immigration.

Completely agree with this. I watched the whole thing and just don't understant the argument that Biden won on substance. Over the course of the debate, Trump made a couple things clear about his 'platform', whether you believe he can get it done or not aside:

  • Keep abortion at the state level
  • Address inflation
  • Address the border crisis and as a consequences, jobs, crime, social security, and medicare funding
  • Be economically aggressive against China (and others)
  • Return to the 'quiter' level of global conflict under his term, and reign in the foreign spending.

Biden on the other hand closed with an "everything is great America is great" statement with a dash of 'there's work to be done'. Sure it's always hard for the incumbant to thread the needle of bringing improvement without admiting your first term has been lacking. But just so. Shit sucks now, and Biden didn't offer much about how it would improve under a second term.

Biden dug in hardest as his strongest theme that Trump is a liar, but 1. That's irrespective to Trump's assessment of the issues to be addressed, vs Biden's lack thereof. and 2. Biden went hard on two debunked hoaxes: Fine People, and Suckers and Losers. (He also made passing references to other debunked hoaxes like injecting bleach). This alone, should have undermined his ability to portray himself as an arbiter of 'truth and lies' by any honest critic.

In other areas, Biden's arguments were just contextually irrelevant, despite the fact that he spoke with more 'detail'. The biggest example that comes to mind is the abortion exchange. After Trump made it clear that he personally beleived in exceptions that include rape and incest, but beleived that the states should decide democratically, Biden went on and on about different examples of rape and incest. Sure he was exhaustive in the different relatives that could rape a woman, but what counterpoint was it making to Trump? Trump already pre-agreed that those are indeed scenarios he believes in allowing abortions for.

This is why I made my original post about "what people heard" rather than the direct what-they-said. Your bullet points almost exactly reflect what people heard. With one exception: Voters who did watch the debate almost universally notice, and are annoyed, when candidates do not answer questions. Trump noticeably dodged at least three questions. Whether this matters long-term is up for debate, but the answer is probably not to a big degree. Which is why I expect the current (swing-voter) narrative/impression for the next two months to be about how Trump is directionally correct even if he's light on details and a bit mean, but at least he's not in charge of a failing economy and a failing intellect. People still dislike Trump, so the situation can still change, but he currently has a significant advantage. Even as a lean-left moderate, who hates Trump, I still came away from the debate feeling better, not worse, about a Trump presidency again, which is not "supposed to" happen.

Yep agreed. I think people are confusing high level policy statements (we will spend 50b on x) as policy when it was untethered from any over arching goals etc.

And I actually think while Trunp exaggerated more he was directionally true most of the time while Biden lied and lied frequently.

Worse yet Biden launched into talking about illegal aliens raping and killing a young girl in response to softball abortion question. Pivoting away from his strongest position to Trump's strongest position. And then followed that up with an exhaustive list of family members who could rape you, including step-family members and your sister. So anyways illegals raping and killing children isn't so bad in comparison to other rapes and, oh yeah, keep abortion legal.

I'm paraphrasing, but it was a roller coaster of an answer.

On at least three different occasions, Biden responded to a predicted Trump attack before it even happened, but still framed it exactly as if it had. Which I think speaks to both piss-poor debate prep, plus some diminished mental nimbleness. The whole debate I was kind of thinking, "what if a real person were up there instead of an old guy?" That's really not what you want a viewer to be thinking, ever, that they could do better.

including step-family members and your sister

A large body of online internet documentary research suggests that this a common source of sexual partnerships.

Stay strapped or get clapped.

And for God's sake don't get stuck in the washing machine door when your step brother's around.

This seems very undemocratic.

I'm very interested if anyone has any ideas for how this could be done in a way that doesn't feel awfully undemocratic. So far, the dominant position seems to be that the only mechanism would be if Joe willingly stepped back, said he'd refuse the nomination, and supported someone else. Josh Blackman suggests that maybe a deal could be made to give him some things he'd want in return. "Look Joe, we'll hook you up with two more SCOTUS nominees and _____. You have the ability to take an easy out by just saying that you've had a very recent health issue. No one will view you too negatively, and the history books will mostly forget about this."

At the same time, looking in from the outside, it will be hard to distinguish between positive, log-rolling like trades here (which I wouldn't view as too undemocratic) and negative, coercive ones ("Joe, if you don't step back, we're going to X,Y,Z to hurt you in whatever ways"). The latter feels more undemocratic to me, but again, it will be hard to distinguish from the outside.

All that said, has anyone seen any other credible ideas for how the DNC could pull off a switch without Joe's explicit agreement and without it seeming too terribly undemocratic?

A critical mass of Democratic operatives saying out loud they want Biden to step aside does functionally make Biden step aside, even if he does not want to. It's partly why a lot of people end up resigning from their jobs, even if they don't actually need to. As I like to say, numbers matter. No threats or coercion need take place. Only enough donors, campaign staff, polled regular people, media saying stuff loud and often. And/or a few very high-up people. Or even some type of "strike". If this doesn't happen, it's because enough people are, by revealed preference, actually still OK with Biden being the candidate.

In other words, a process can be "democratic", here meaning reflecting the will of the people, without explicit votes needing to be cast. The key here is that "people" is not the general public. It's the average Democratic partisan. Most of the people in charge are still people with opinions, and though they diverge from everyday voters, they don't diverge that much.

All that said, has anyone seen any other credible ideas for how the DNC could pull off a switch without Joe's explicit agreement and without it seeming too terribly undemocratic?

I don't understand the "undemocratic" argument. The general election is meant to be decided democratically - political parties can decide who their candidates will be any way they like, including in smoke-filled back rooms. Nowadays they generally don't do that (at least not overtly) because it pisses off their base, but political parties exist to select winners by the most effective (legal) means possible.

This seems to be the same fundamental misunderstanding of party politics that I saw in 2016 when the Bernie Sanders supporters were enraged that the DNC "picked" Hillary instead of Sanders, and made similar complaints - "This isn't fair, it's undemocratic, it's crooked!" Uh, no, the political party picked the candidate who has been a party insider and supported other party candidates and raised money for the party for years, over the outsider who wants to crash the party. That is how political parties work!

Here is where once again I make my pitch for reading early American history. You all know that it's relatively recently that conventions became essentially coronations for a pre-selected winner, but in the 19th century party politics were even rougher and more arbitrary. Abraham Lincoln's VP got switched on him for his reelection campaign and he really didn't have much to say about it. Several presidents either were not selected by their parties for reelection, or chose not to put themselves forward because they knew they would not be selected. Lots of negotiations were very much smoke-filled room sort of deals, and no one cared much about which candidate the public would prefer, except in the general election. It was interesting contrasting, say, Thomas Jefferson's view of party politics (he claimed to hate political parties while being extremely partisan) with Martin Van Buren's (a pure and unabashed party creature who thought party politics were fundamentally good politics).

Or even at least one president who was strong-armed into it by other people in his party! Garfield. Also relevant that for a long time, it was seen as "unseemly" for a candidate to do the actual vote-asking themselves. Many candidates would sit at home and chat with visitors, and surrogates would canvass the country and make speeches and raise funds on their behalf!

I'll admit that, coming from the outside, the American primary system has always seemed absurd to me. Maybe this is a result of being Australian instead, but I am much more accustomed to the approach where the party selects its own leader, and the public don't get a say. We get to vote later on. But of course the party get to choose their own leaders. Why wouldn't they?

It's become tradition in America that the way the parties do that is with primaries, but there's no in-principle reason why they couldn't do it any other way, and frankly I suspect it would be better for America if they did. If the party establishments or members of congress had gotten to pick their presidential candidates (approximating the way it works in Australia), Bernie Sanders would never have been a concern, Donald Trump would never have become a political figure at all, and America would have been spared long, divisive primary seasons. As it is, they have a system that rewards extremist candidates playing towards the base, rather than one that rewards trying to appeal to a genuine majority, and that seems like a poorly-functioning electoral system to me.

On the positive, at least, it means the American elections provide some very high quality popcorn.

Well, party leaders often can get pulled into their own insular "bubble". The leader of a party is sometimes chosen despite being a poor candidate simply because of their internal connections. Corruption can happen. Why wouldn't the rank-and-file want more control over their candidate, not less? Why would voters trust someone else, much less a party elite/insider, more than themselves?

Parties can choose whoever and whatever they like, for whatever position they want. But democracy is sacred enough in America that there's always pressure for parties to select their candidates through a democratic process with an open vote, and sometimes parties cave in, probably because they think it will get them votes in the long run. No one wants to alienate that weird fringe who might wind up voting for the mainstream candidate, so why not give their fringe candidate a chance to compete in the primary? Of course that only works if your mainstream candidate is viable, or if you're good at rigging the process.

Yes, there are a number of reasons why Americans have primaries - it's just become an expectation at this point, it lets you judge popularity with the base because America is a system where turnout matters, and so on. It's more that in the aggregate I think it creates a weaker system than the alternative.

Well except for many elections now the process by which the party chooses their candidates has been largely democratic. An end run around that process is therefore undemocratic.

We've come a long way since the 19th century when it comes to rules for selecting major party candidates. And for good reason. Back in the day, a single party machine could control a city. Since the general election was a farce, the primary was the "real election". But the primary was fixed by party insiders with little to no oversight.

Fortunately, many states now require free and fair elections to select party candidates. Replacing Biden with someone who no one voted for is a terrible perversion of this process.

The days of elections being decided in smoke-filled rooms are in the past. May they ever remain so.

The Democrats mostly did away with party leadership selecting candidates after 1968. At this point the DNC has even defanged superdelegates, they're not allowed to vote on the first ballot. So the leaders only get outsized voting only if the nomination is still contested even at the convention.

They've also painted themselves as the defenders of democracy, that Trump is a would-be dictator who will end democracy in America. Yet it's Trump that won the primaries fair and square, and if the Democrats replace Biden it's them that's ignoring the will of the voters.

Because America shouldn’t be like Iran, where you are free to vote for any of the six candidates hand-picked by the Guardian Council.

You can vote for literally anyone you want to. At least, anyone who meets the legal requirements to be eligible for office. The constitution does not formally acknowledge the existence of political parties at all, they're not part of the official legal process. All the political parties do is provide a Schelling point so that all the people with similar ideas can coordinate votes instead of wasting them splitting among a bunch of candidates in a first-past-the-post election.

Now, informally this is an incredibly powerful tool that has become a de-facto necessary component of the election. But the political party is legally allowed to do whatever it wants, and if the voters don't like that they can try to figure out a different way to coordinate on a different Schelling point to vote for.

That's not equivalent, though. Iran has a central authority deciding who is allowed to run for office. A political party gets to decide who they want to represent them in the election. You don't have any democratic right to tell a political party (even your political party) how they will choose their representative. You can agree with their process, or you can choose not to support the party.

The general election is meant to be decided democratically - political parties can decide who their candidates will be any way they like, including in smoke-filled back rooms.

I disagree here. Both parties bill themselves on the plebs being empowered to select the nominees. Nothing wrong with cigar smoking back room deals per se. But not when you market yourself on the fact that you use democratic process to select the candidate.

Also states have rules about how primaries are conducted. It's not like political parties can just do whatever they want.

I agree with most everything that you say. However, I think that the Democratic Party, itself, bills itself as having a democratic process for selecting its candidates. They may be misguided in wanting to have this feature in their process, and they may ultimately turn back from it. I think that there would be nothing objectively wrong with them making such a choice. But if the question is whether they are able to proceed in running the party in a way that is not terribly undemocratic, while also managing to change horses midstream, I'm still interested in whether there are options.

All that said, has anyone seen any other credible ideas for how the DNC could pull off a switch without Joe's explicit agreement and without it seeming too terribly undemocratic?

It's not very credible, but it's not impossible: They could cause his death or complete disablement. He's probably on a bunch of drugs, a slight change in dosage and Biden goes from an incoherent old man to one in a coma or dead.

We don't need any such sinister scenarios. Honestly, if the DNC really, really wanted Biden to step down, they could probably lean on his family and friends enough to talk him into it. Does he, personally, really, really want to spend the last few years of his life in the White House? I think he's only doing it because he genuinely believes the country "needs" him and if he could be persuaded that he'll be a hero and not be handing over the country to Trump, he could be convinced to let someone else step in.

I don't think it will happen because as bad as Biden is looking right now, openly admitting "Yeah, our guy we've been talking up for months is in such decline that we're replacing him months before the election" would look even worse. I doubt Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom does better against Trump.

My understanding is that Biden is, personally, an incredibly stubborn person and prickly about his ability or lack thereof. that's not unusual for a politician, but I don't know if anyone could do this.

The issue is not that him being removed from the candidacy looks bad. It's better to admit a mistake and fix it than to soldier on. The issue is that it raises the question - who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?

The President mostly has advocacy powers, nomination powers, and a ton of power in a crisis. Functionally, Cabinet members run the government. This has almost always been true. And that part of the system does have checks to it, for example all nominees must be Senate-confirmed. The president doesn't even need to sign bills into law! They become law automatically without a veto. In other words, virtually all government functions can and do run just fine without a President by design.

Again, this is not new, and is on purpose. Even if the President were a potato, and no one invoked the 25th, the country would run just fine unless a major military conflict were to pop up, and even then presumably the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State could put their heads together and figure something out together.

who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?

There's a theory that it's Obama. Who is living in DC (which I think is highly unusual for a former President), and who has connections to a lot of the members of the Biden administration.

who the fuck is running the country today while Biden is apparently unable to carry a conversation?

My guess: To the extent that the United States Government needs anyone running it, it is being run by whoever is in the room with Biden at any given moment. Biden himself acts not so much as decision maker, but as a magical talisman, granting whoever is nearest to him authority over government decisions.

Like a conch... pass me the Biden so that I may speak.

Harris is a long shot against Trump but I think Newsom, without the need to appeal to primary voters, could take up the mantle of "generic Democrat". Trump's biggest play against him might be the LA train robberies and general law-n-order in California, but even given that he could get all the "we want a competent adult in office" types and get the base by default.

but even given that he could get all the "we want a competent adult in office" types and get the base by default.

Does he get the base by default? Are the black and/or female parts of the Democrat coalition going to accept Harris being looked over?

She got looked over by primary voters in 2020. It's reasonable to hope that the people who stan for her (are there actually any?) will come into the fold. And if they don't and the only plausible option for replacing Biden is Harris, then Democrats are cooked anyway, so better to jump into the unknown than face very likely defeat.

Wasn't the whole purpose of making her VP to appeal to black voters? The Democrats appear to at least believe she's valuable for that reason, and I'm not sure they want to risk that.

The #KHive hashtag is still gettin recent results, at least.

For me, Newsom gives off an "I am a sociopath" vibe. I mean this literally, and am not implying that the vibe is reliable evidence of him being a sociopath, rather a possible hindrance to him being elected president. Do any of you also get this vibe from him?

Why do you imply that sociopathy is a hindrance to electability?

I didn't mean to. I think giving off the vibe of being a sociopath is the hindrance because voters want someone who they think cares about them.

Well, he did get elected in California, so it can't be too big a hindrance.

Fwiw I don't like him myself and didn't vote for him.

I've had a dislike of Newsom long before it was cool, and I don't see it. He's more just a smarmy politician. Voters won't love it, but it's just a generic politician vibe, which would be a win for Democrats.

I think people are over-estimating how unified the Democrats will be on this. Pretty much anyone important in the Biden administration relies on him continuing to be president to keep their own position, and will not willingly go along with replacing him. If there was someone waiting and perfectly suited to step into Biden's position that would be one thing, and that's usually the role the VP holds, but it doesn't sound like the Democrats have much confidence in Kamala Harris to lead them to victory. On the other hand, they would be risking alienating many of their voters by passing over the black, female VP to pick someone like like Newsom instead.

There's also the question of how exactly they even could force Biden aside, assuming he wants to stay. Would the party rules allow it? And would he be good-natured enough about it not to cause a significant damage?

Would the party rules allow it?

I heard an interview with Lanhee Chen on the radio today and he said absolutely not. He's really plugged in to presidential campaigns and worked at high levels on previous Republican election campaigns. I take his word for it.

Legally, Biden needs to either die or choose to step aside. Practically, if enough of the party apparatus went against him, he'd step down even if he didn't really want to.

I have had similar thoughts re the timing of this debate. Why have it so early? It is very unusual and it seems like the only reason I can think of is so that people can point to either candidate in a public forum and say, see, this guy can't cut it and here's the evidence. It doesn't seem like either of them come off well.

Yup. It is a coup. The way the everyone got reprogrammed in an instant points towards coordinated action. But it is a very dangerous game - if you shoot at the king you better not miss. And I am far from certain that that big part of the party is on board - there are a lot of people willing to risk a lot on a senile biden second term - so they can be the real power. A protracted democrat civil war will be most welcome - and in this world lately - all blitzkriegs seems to end eventually into meatgrinders. I am more and more convinced that Trump will be sentenced to jail. And with the other candidate removed against his will in extremely undemocratic matter to preserve and spread democracy - well let's just say I will see what is the going rate for Helldivers jumpsuit.

This is just the Age of Twitter working. The consensus emerges very rapidly and takes hold.

My experience is that it doesn't emerge quite immediately, but happens by, oh, hour 72. As of hour 24, maybe even 48, there's still confusion and disagreement, but, after more than a day but less than half a week, an ironclad consensus emerges.

(This is at least how I recall things evolving around George Floyd. In the immediate aftermath, things were just "wow, that's really bad" - took a couple days for "BURN IT ALL DOWN" to fully blaze.)

Right now, the question "should Biden step aside" doesn't have an ironclad answer, but I expect one side or the other to effectively drop out of the argument as of early next week.

The way the everyone got reprogrammed in an instant points towards coordinated action.

It was deeply weird seeing all the CNN analysts saying the same thing, except for David Axelrod who at least stated factually that Biden is the nominee unless he voluntarily steps down.

But, in practice, how does this reprogramming happen? If you're in that CNN studio, who is making the call to throw Biden under the bus? Because I just don't see how it can happen from a top-down level. I really doubt they "got the call from the DNC" to deliver a narrative. Instead I think the narrative spreads through group think.

It does seem to happen awfully quickly though. Very few people within the Democratic memeplex were calling for Biden to step down until last night. The ones that were (such as Nate Silver) were heavily picked on. Then, on a dime, the narrative shifts. It's weird. Everyone who is paying attention knows that this is what Biden's face looks like now. No one should have been surprised.

I think it’s what you suggested in your first post, and why ‘we’ thought it wasn’t all that bad but mainstream Dem media and political figures did. They had spent years telling themselves that there were no cognitive issues and it was all a bullshit conservative media Fox News Tucker psy-op. Then they were unambiguously forced to confront it. Meanwhile people on the right or in places like this were largely unsurprised and perhaps even felt Biden did OK because they weren’t deluding himself about this decline.

For a lot of TV pundits I think being forced to spend an hour with no (other) distractions directly and uncomfortably confronting the President’s condition was a shock.

I think no one makes the call. This is flocking behavior, not central decision making.

One unusually brave or reckless person announces some latent opinion respectable people didn't previously announce. That gives cover for slightly meeker people to say it. That bold group gives cover for much meeker to say it. At this point if you don't follow the group then you've been left behind.

From our point of view all Democratic beltway pundits suddenly are repeating the same new phrase or have a sudden new opinion.

And also this small group all texts each other, so there's some regular coordination. But not centralized I'd suppose.

Agreed, it seemed like on the CNN panel Axelrod and Van Jones were the only ones flailing like I'd expect if they were actually blindsided. If you're a loyal Democrat I'd expect some grasping at straws, making excuses, and outright denial.

On Kamala's post-debate interviews, the most she'd say is that Biden had a "slow start." I'm guessing she was left out because whoever's running the show knows she can't be the nominee, so they can't let her know the plan and try to position herself.

Everyone else got the memo that if Biden can't hack it they're free to call for him to step down, so they were prepared to see him fail.

They probably have a literal groupchat and are able to peek at how the chat is feeling and adjust own opinion in real time.

This is exactly what John King said on TV. "I've been getting texts non-stop."

Ok, I don’t agree with ‘Biden’s performance wasn’t that bad’. It was. Biden had to show that he was mentally fit to be president. This he majorly failed to do.

If your pitch for Biden was that the evidence for him being senile was cherry-picking and deceptive editing, this debate has blown that narrative out of the water. I agree that this was not a perfect performance for trump, but it achieved his goals of showing people that Biden is senile and he’s not.

That being said, I’m not sure the DNC can solve the coordination problem of swapping out Biden. Harris is a bimbo but she’s also a black woman and her supporters will cry foul for that reason. It’s ultimately worse for the DNC to have a convention fight. Plus swapping in a candidate this close to the election is probably a major handicap and whoever does it is going to have to eat a high profile loss for the rest of their political career.

I believe the DNC would swap out Biden if they can do it with a minimum of fuss. But I think it’ll be a Kamala-Beto-squadmember-last of the blue doggers slugfest.

Harris is intelligent and well-spoken and apparently just fine in-person, if often prickly, but the instant a camera turns on she becomes one of the most vaguely unlikeable and stilted candidates I've ever seen, maybe even worse than Hillary. Nothing to do with her race, purely her personality and way of speaking. Her camp does nothing but complain either, which doesn't win them any favors internally. For example, they were complaining forever about her not having anything to do, then Biden gave her the border as her issue to work on, and then they complained about how they were given an assignment that was too hard.

Harris is intelligent and well-spoken and apparently just fine in-person, if often prickly, but the instant a camera turns on she becomes one of the most vaguely unlikeable and stilted candidates I've ever seen

I hope you can recognize the troubling parallels with the torrent of claims we’ve endured for three years from Biden loyalists that no, actually, Joe is incredibly sharp and in-control behind the scenes, he’s just bad at public speaking and seems doddering when the cameras are on.

I’ve personally never seen any indications from Kamala Harris that she’s intelligent, or talented, or even interesting. Her political origin story is… inauspicious, to say the least. (Look up her relationship with Willie Brown to see what I mean.) I found her absolutely unwatchable during the Kavanaugh hearings; now, I understand that my perception may have been clouded by the fact that I believed (and still believe) that the proceedings against Kavanaugh were an obscene miscarriage of justice, and Harris happened to be one of the figures they appointed to go after him the most aggressively. Still, she came off as vain, preening, unserious, and performative, in a way that even the average DC pol doesn’t. I think she’s a bimbo, and unlike the average bimbo she appears to have a deep-seated need to be perceived as hyper-intelligent and competent. (In that sense, she’s similar to Biden.)

Haha, fair play. I didn't realize that a good chunk of her law career was nepotism (though passing the bar is at least, I think, reflecting some level of intelligence, even if it took her a second try). I don't know if I've thought about her competence that deeply, so I guess I should take my own advice and put some caution in there, though I had never seen much need to look into it given how much I dislike and don't support her in the first place. She's probably even a drag on the Presidential ticket, and this is still likely true even after Biden's debate disaster, which I think is saying something. There was this (edit: dug it up here) long Atlantic piece I read that went into some detail trying to explore why she was a terrible communicator and politician, which was an interesting read that informed some of my comment, and though it was overall sympathetic to her it also had some harsh criticism, including about how she has a super thick shell even the veteran reporter had a hard time with.

Upon a reread/skim, maybe I came away from that article too positive. It seems to have talked about how useless she was at least politically, and in contributing as well, several times. One nice one underscoring how both ignored and non-contributory she is:

This summer, I asked Jeff Zients, the current White House chief of staff, if he could recall a moment when Biden had noticeably leaned on Harris for guidance, or when her input had meaningfully changed the administration’s approach to an issue. He had mentioned earlier in our interview that Harris had been instrumental in putting “equity” at the forefront of the administration’s COVID response—ensuring that public-health efforts reach the underserved. Other examples? “Let me think of a specific anecdote, and I’ll have somebody follow up,” he said. His spokesperson texted after the call to confirm that the office would get back to me. Despite my follow-ups, that was the last I heard

Yeah, her origin story is fascinatingly similar to Barack Obama’s in a lot of ways. Raised primarily outside of the U.S. during her formative years (Montreal, Canada in her case), with apparently little to no involvement from her non-American black (specifically, Jamaican mulatto, basically an endogamous Brahmin-style racial elite in that country) father.

Exposed heavily to a non-Christian religious tradition (Hinduism, by her Tamil Indian mother) with which she maintains an affinity which some of a more nativist bent might find somewhat concerning.

Only developed any real relationship with Black American culture in college, and now insists that people affirm her blackness, despite many blacks privately questioning whether or not she can claim any authentic connection to the culture.

There’s also an interesting additional family dynamic which Steve Sailer has noticed; Kamala’s younger sister Maya, who seems genuinely impressively brainy (taking after their parents, a biologist and a Stanford economics professor) and who excelled academically, whereas Kamala seems to have been a mediocre student who had to attend an HBCU and a non-prestigious law school due to unremarkable grades. This might be part of what drives her thin-skinned need to be affirmed as intelligent and valued. (In this case, the Obama parallel is with Michelle, who similarly seems to have grown up in the academic and social shadow of her brother Craig, and who seems to have nursed a chip on her shoulder ever since.)

Ultimately, though, like I said, her political career seems to have been propelled almost entirely by having slept with a married politician, who then paved the way for her, and subsequently by having the correct combination of melanin and sex organs. All of which would be less frustrating if she wasn’t also so obnoxious, phony, and visibly dimwitted. If Biden had selected a VP even marginally more competent and less grating than Kamala, we likely could have seen him step down years ago in favor of someone who’s actually capable of doing the job.

The argument for Newsom is that he's a tall, very good looking man with a hot wife and four beautiful children.

Obviously, his record as California governor and SF mayor is beyond awful. But how many people in the country even know who Newsom is? 10%? 20%? So he's kind of a blank slate to the low-info independent voters.

He'll run a very vanilla, centrist campaign. People want someone besides Trump or Biden. He's someone. And once in charge he'll be a reliable cog. The only thing the Republicans can tag him with is his dismal record in California. But that requires voters to know something.

But Newsom doesn’t want to run for president this round.

Caesar refused the crown twice.

If I'm Gavin, I take the nomination if offered. This a golden opportunity. Primaries are tough and random. Hillary probably felt pretty good about her chances in 2008. Jeb felt secure in 2016. Then they both got demolished by a prodigy who wasn't on anyone's radar 4 years prior.

I think it might be hard for the GOP to say Newsom did awful in SF/Cali. The tech industry has been so overwhelming successful that I’m sure it gives Gavin plenty of stats that make him look amazing.

Not that he had anything to do with the success of tech, but he will no doubt take credit for growth numbers that are a result of tech.

I think it might be hard for the GOP to say Newsom did awful in SF/Cali.

Should be sufficient to run some ads of what actual streets look like in SF and LA nowadays. I'd run an ad with a Back to the Future II theme, comparing California today to the alternate Biff timeline in which Hill Valley becomes a shithole.

But that assumes anyone is even paying attention, which is doubtful.

I still don't get the "conspiracy" thing. You can't organize a middle school party committee without all the actual decisions being made in private chats between "the serious people."

Like, they can't change FAA hiring policy without giant conspiracies of leaking, cheating, and backroom dealing. That's just how things work.

If you could hide microphones in all the DC coat rooms, bathrooms, and small back offices used for quickies and mid-morning coke bumps, you'll hear the same conversation happening over and over. And that's how the party makes decisions.
They all saw the same thing, know it's finally socially acceptable to believe their eyes, and see an opportunity to influence the next "socially-constructed reality" they're going to impose.

To temper this sentiment: there were famous conspiracies with zero leaking that were discovered by much later happenstance. COINTELPRO was not leaked, it was a watertight criminal conspiracy perpetrated by federal law enforcement. Leftists breaking into an FBI field office late at night and ransacking their files found it by accident.

And I thought MKUltra had a similar flawless lack of leaking but the modern crippled version of Google won't give me confirmation.

If it helps: MKUltra was discovered via FOIA because the CIA missed a spot when cleaning up the crown jewels. Fairly easy IMHO to imagine a world in which it existed only in urban legend and conspiracy myth.

Link is broken, at least for me.

Hmm! Here's the full URL as it's supposed to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#Revelation

That's it.

And I believe there's many similar conspiracies we never found about because they didn't have their documents in that one FBI field office and didn't accidentally fail to entirely destroy their records.

I don't think there's probably any sort of a fifth-dimensional chess element. They thought that Joe is demented but not that demented, so they can beat the expectations and get a bit of a boost in the midst of middling-to-flagging polls before the conventions and Trump sentencing (not that Trump sentencing is probably going to affect anything, at least). Instead, they didn't beat the expectations, and all the talking heads simultaneously realized they're going to have to react accordingly or lose all credibility.

Furthermore, Mottizens tend to actually listen to the words that are said.

This line going around today feels like a motte-rat ingroup circle-jerk. Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance! It's a presidential debate, there is little substance, the words have always been made-up and meaningless. Does Biden debate Trump to a draw because, although he looked horrible, and although nobody is persuaded by anything he said, he did manage to say things? I feel as though people have always been a little disingenuous about debates. Everyone pretends that there is a reified debate format, where people say things like, "Well, Biden's answer doesn't convince me, but it's an objectively-strong argument and might move somebody else." But there is no imaginary modal voter. There are not actually rules for deciding who won. It becomes an exercise in imaginary terms that nobody is actually thinking in, but everyone assumes everyone else is thinking in. This is all a little too self-congratulatory for me.

Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either. It's an intellectual exercise. I don't care what Trump did on January 6th, you do care what Trump did on January 6th, so does anybody care that Trump gave this answer instead of that answer? Is there some hypothetical voter who does?

The style is much more important. Bring back the smashing and yelling and interrupting and crass. I actually want to see Trump walk all over the other guy kicking and fighting. Show me that Jeb actually can't stand up for himself when called out and attacked. Give me the Hillary who glowers but doesn't back down. What did Andrew Yang say in the first 2020 debate that showed how impressive his policy credentials were? Who even knows. I do remember Chris Christie decimating Marco Rubio over repeating the same canned stock phrase on three separate occasions. I don't remember a damned policy argument Amy Klobuchar ever made, just that she was boring, and uninspiring, and lacking the actual qualities of a leader.

Imagine how boring politics would be if we all went back to this frame: Biden tied Trump because, when you strip away how he spoke, how he looked, how he stood, how he argued, and how he lead, his stock canned prepared statements were just as technically sensible as Trump's, or maybe better. No, Biden lost, because he looked like an old man who didn't even know what room he was in. He froze up. He couldn't get the words out. He made uncomfortable faces when he wasn't speaking. He sometimes didn't know what he was saying. He looked old. Trump lightly bullied him and except for a few moments he couldn't fight back. This is how politics works, this is literally what matters. The motte-rat insistence on some sort of Nixon-Kennedy radio interpretation of disembodied words floating in space actually feels deeply anti-rational, because it is obviously not how things work. Nobody cares. The exercise in imagining that we can care about "the words that are said" but also imagine the mindset of "the average voter" is vanity. No!, actually. Those things literally do not exist. They are endless rationalizations. If you live in this plane of unreality, you could completely swap Trump and Biden's policies and ideas and visions, and it wouldn't matter.

Thinking about these policy wonk ideas isn't a more elevated form of politics stripped from emotion and chance. It's actually a degeneration. Because this is what people care about. A robot could make the words, it's the emotions that count.

Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either.

Maybe the folks here do, because we're all policy wonks ignorant of politics. But I've run into people in the wake of the 2016 election who didn't know what Clinton's position was on opioids, or on Appalachian economic development, or on climate policy, or on Net Neutrality.

This is enough of a problem that if you explain Republican policies in a reasonably objective way to people, they'll frequently think that you're making things up, because of course no one would do something that evil. (Example, example, example.)

The modal voter isn't nearly as well-informed as you seem to think they are. I don't know to what extent the debates would inform them on policy (I've written elsewhere on the potential value of the format), but the starting place isn't where you're describing it.

(Example, example, example.)

Matt Yglesias. Data for Progess. Vox.

Dude....Sources matter.

You may be right to dismiss biased sources. But you’ve got to put in the effort instead of skipping to dismissal. Make your objections clear so that other people can engage with them.

Okay. Fair.

Yes, but the contents also matter, and this is just lazy of you. Who do you think is going to write about this sort of thing? The right?

Yglesias is pointing out that the stated positions of conservative interest groups (e.g., no abortion even in cases of rape our incest) are sometimes really unpopular (per Gallup polls quoted by the FRC), and conservative politicians have become quite good at tiptoeing around this.

DFP did some surveys that discovered that Republicans specifically had some weird ideas about the party's platform; a majority thought they had a healthcare plan that would protect people with pre-existing conditions and opposes the rollback of certain environmental protection rules, nearly half thinks they want to expand Medicaid. These are all wrong. People don't know the party's platform.

The Vox article involved Sarah Kliff interviewing a lot of people who had lost their healthcare under Republican policies, who said things like:

“We all need it,” Oller told me when I asked about the fact that Trump and congressional Republicans had promised Obamacare repeal. “You can’t get rid of it.”

Or:

“I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives,” says Debbie Mills, an Obamacare enrollee who supported Trump. “I mean, what are you to do then if you cannot pay for insurance?”

What part of this do you think is fake or misleading? A significant portion of voters don't know their party's platform, and won't believe it if you tell them because it sounds bad.

Yglesias is pointing out that the stated positions of conservative interest groups (e.g., no abortion even in cases of rape our incest) are sometimes really unpopular (per Gallup polls quoted by the FRC), and conservative politicians have become quite good at tiptoeing around this.

True, but he's told but half the tale. As Trump accurately pointed out on stage (to little fanfare) Biden, and the mainstream (not even progressive) Democratic position is that abortion should be legal at all points of the pregnancy, even during labor of a viable fetus. Even "borne alive" bills cant get DNC votes (although Ill admit I think this bill is unconstitutional, as would be all federal abortion bills, but that obviously doesn't factor in the voting for your average Democrat given they voted for the one above). The extreme left position seems to be something like a child acquires the right to life some unspecified time after leaving the womb, but will not specify that amount of time, and it is much longer than 1 second.

I don't think there's the symmetry you think there is. Institutions on the right are specifically very keen on women in those circumstances carrying to term.

On the left, it's not so much the idea that women in the 40th week can and should and would just change their minds like that, but rather that in situations like, say, this one, having the heavy hand of the government involved will just make things worse. And that narrowly written exceptions don't actually help, given situations like this.

The idea is, if I understand correctly, that the heavy hand of the law will just make things worse, because the Shirley exception is not an actual usable piece of law.

I think that the first half of your post is the very charitable explanation that I think is false for the majority.

And that Shirley exception post is like, one of the worst examples of deceptive argumentation I've ever seen and is a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.

And that Shirley exception post is [...] a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.

I saw this this week, and I thought of you.

Rather than stay at the hospital to wait for infection to set in, Farmer went home to wait, monitoring her temperature and her pain. On Aug. 4, she called her state senator, Bill White, and explained her situation to an aide.

He told her, "That’s not what the law was designed for. It’s designed to protect the woman’s life."

"It’s not protecting me. We have to wait for the heartbeat (to stop). There’s no chance for a baby; she’s not going to make it. It’s putting my life in danger. We have to wait for more complications. I’m 41, it’s not something I can recover from quickly. I could lose my uterus, there’s a lot of things that could happen," Farmer said she remembers telling him. "We just want to move on, we just want to grieve."

The aide told her he would reach out to Attorney General Eric Schmitt, and also connected her with Choices Medical Services, "which is basically an anti-abortion clinic" in Joplin, Farmer said. She never heard back about what Schmitt said.

Sorry, can you be clearer about what you think is "false for the majority"?

I understand that you may not have seen that precise argument... but it's in the quotes upthread. “You can’t get rid of it.” “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives." Surely this bad thing can't actually happen.

As it's written:

Once upon a time, I believed that the extinction of humanity was not allowed. And others who call themselves rationalists, may yet have things they trust. They might be called "positive-sum games", or "democracy", or "technology", but they are sacred. The mark of this sacredness is that the trustworthy thing can't lead to anything really bad; or they can't be permanently defaced, at least not without a compensatory silver lining. In that sense they can be trusted, even if a few bad things happen here and there.

There absolutely is disbelief that awful things could actually happen; you see it everywhere. Surely it won't be that bad. Surely people will be reasonable. Surely it will work out for the best.

I think you're being overly narrow in what you think of as The Shirley Exception.

More comments

Your comment is highly voted, but attacking a strawman argument that doesn't truly exist. Everyone, and I mean almost literally everyone, including here, knows that debates are only important for two things. Media reactions, including maybe a few clips, and the narrative it sometimes establishes; and the impact on swing voters. That's it! That's the whole list! And swing voters are well known to decide things on vibes and gut feelings and impressions. Also not new news.

Partisan or pre-decided viewers, who we all know are not the target audience, have different feelings. That's what will show up in a number of formats, because they are the people writing many of these opinions, and virtually everyone likes to hear themselves talk.

We are in the latter category almost all of us, the ones who want to talk. We are discussing the debate because it is fun. At least on some level! And virtually everyone in this thread agrees about the fundamental points about what actual swing voters probably thought. So I'm not too impressed by a rant against people who basically don't exist, and don't understand the hostility against "motte-rats", because I was under the impression that we all know how much of a bubble this place is, and use it as some form of entertainment or vague intellectual hobbyism? Or are you not aware of this?

That argument is a strawman, the real argument is [the same argument].

There are plenty of posters in this thread arguing that Biden might have looked old, but he still won because blarglemumkas. Likewise, I watched the debate with (conservative) friends who said things like, "That argument doesn't work on me, but I bet it plays great with normies!" These are all rationalizations. I want to remove the word "normie" from our vocabulary. I want to stop analyzing how some hypothetical person who doesn't exist might have reasoned. (To the extent that "normies" exist, they reason in a million idiosyncratic and personal ways.)

My position is that this substance is style, that these political facts-and-figures arguments are not real, that discussing these things are an empty trap. It doesn't matter what Biden (or Trump) said as much as how he said it: the substance is style, the style is the real substance. I think much of the discussion here is focused on the wrong half of the debate. I think it's masturbatory. And I'm not impressed by the argument that, of course it's jerking off, that's what we're here for.

For those who still don't realize SlowBoy is correct, read Parable of the Dagger until you are enlightened.

I usually stay out of political discussions but I want to endorse this stance on all counts. Imho the very essence of presidential debates is pitting two directly opposed people against each other and watch them sink or swim in a marginally-less-scripted-than-usual environment. It's pure PR/show business, entirely driven by the personalities of the debaters. If you're reading it, it's not for you. I agree that watching debates for thoughtful policy takes is like watching porn for the plot - I will concede that sometimes you need a convoluted narrative to really get off, but I will dare say that is not the actual point. At least the faintest semblance of passion is absolutely vital, have people forgotten why they call red/blue tribes tribes?

Additionally, style/memes/whatever you call a winning scenario in debates is literally all that matters with non-Americans - strictly speaking this show is domestic audience only, and Americans are under no obligations to give a shit about how they look from outside, but it's current_year+8 and like it or not everyone is watching. At risk of invoking "whomst inquired", I will cast my vote as a filthy second-world pleb and say the 2024 season so far is fucking boring. Not that the others weren't - if you ambushed me on my walk home and demanded at gunpoint to recite a crumb of Hillary's proposed policy or a single meme of the Blue campaign circa 2016, I would've just resigned to getting shot. At least with Reds I can shout LOCK HER UP and make a run for it. Memes matter. {russell: Passion|Belligerence|Hostility} matters. You can be annoyed that this is what gets lodged inside the normies' unconscious id, sure, would you be surprised to know normies don't watch porn for the plot either?

Maybe I'm not online enough but what does current_year+8 mean and what is "whomst inquired", and what is a second-world person?

The 8th year of the Permanent Current Year of 2016, I think.

2015 is Current Year, so we're in Current Year + 9 at the moment

"Current Year" started as a meme on places like 4chan. It was observed that a common specious argument would go something like: "You don't support gay marriage? But it's 2014!" "How could you not have socialized healthcare? It's 2015?" The idea was that people were advancing incredulity and consensus instead of an actual argument. After a few years of this argument being popular, it became mocked in the phrase, "It's current year!"

After Trump's election in 2016 and the shock that engendered, it became common for some people to refer to the year 2016 as "Current Year." With the implication that we never mentally left the shock of those events.

"Whomst inquired" is a specific instantiation of a more general meme that essentially made fun of the word "Whom". First you have "who," then in more formal contexts you use "whom," so, obviously, there must be "whomst," "whomst'd," "whomst'd've," and so on down the line. "Whomst inquired" is a whimsical way of saying, "Who asked," i.e., "nobody asked for this but..."

"Second-world person" has a few different meanings because it doesn't exactly have any meaning anymore. It sits between "first-world" and "third-world," and is a leftover term from the Cold War. (US and its allies were first-world, Soviets and its allies were second-world, the non-aligned world was third-world, which is also sometimes a synonym for the world's shitholes.)) In this case, it means he's not an American.

Thank you for the detailed and accurate summation. I really do appreciate it!

I'm guessing current_year+8 refers to 2016, where the election of Trump broke the brains of the American left. But I thought the eternal current_year began in 2014, when the culture war really started to take off in its current iteration.

I thought it started in 2015 with Justin Trudeau's election. When he was questioned about the diversity of his cabinet he answered "Because it's 2015?" and that got memed into all sorts of "Because it's current year?" nemes and when 2016 came around it became current year + 1.

Edit: looks like the earliest known instance of the meme is from 2014, but it became a popular meme in 2015 making fun of John Oliver (and later Trudeau). So 2024 is current year + 9 for standard usage of the meme:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/come-on-its-2015-current-year

I think a reified debate format is possible. Take this interview:

https://youtube.com/watch?si=zc3iAibHgxxf6gir&v=fPQ9uA_M1Eg&feature=youtu.be

In it, Tucker Carlson pushes back against a member of the media who said that Tucker's head was in the sand about the Assad regime being responsible for gas attacks. Carlson comes off increasingly hysterical as the debate goes on, as the media member stays calm and lands good points. That sort of debate is absolutely possible, if Biden behaved like that guy and had cool and factual responses to Trump, he could've knocked it out of the park. Instead, Biden flubbered on abortion that should've been an easy popular issue for him, and didn't press Trump on stuff like Ukraine that he has no plan for beyond asking Putin to pretty please stop the war.

I do think verbal debates are over hyped and in an ideal world they would write oppositional essays to each other, and the media would do honest fact checking to explain context on any misleading statements in the essays, and we could have actually trusted experts to summarize the most important take aways. But obviously even that is too boring for most voters.

At the very least it might be interesting if both candidates had to provide their sources to the opposition ahead of time like how lawyers have to tell each other which witnesses will be involved ahead of time. That way debunkings can be prepared for bogus sources.

This line going around today feels like a motte-rat ingroup circle-jerk. Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance!

Relative to the general public, we probably do. I don't think it's circle-jerking to say this forum is, on average, more intelligent, more educated, and more political aware than the average American (or the average redditor or Twitter poster). That doesn't mean we're a bunch of geniuses or that people here don't fall into the same predictable mindkilling partisanship as everywhere else, but yeah, the entire point of this forum is to try to make discussions more than exchanging insults and memes. The majority of the flack we mods get is because someone just wants to shit on his opposition and then feels mistreated when told he can't.

To answer your real question:

Is there some hypothetical voter who does?

Yes. The overrated "undecided" or "swing" voter. They exist. They may be less than 10% of the electorate (maybe 5% or 6%?) but they are the ones who decide the election in battleground states. You're right that most people in the general public, and also most people here, are very unlikely to change which way they're going to vote even if Biden shits his pants or Trump eats a puppy on live TV. But there are people who are still swayable, and they're the ones who matter, basically.

You may also underestimate the impact of actually getting the vote out. A lot of people may be unwilling to vote for the other candidate, but if they find themselves thoroughly disgusted and demoralized by their candidate, they can just choose not to vote. Speaking personally - I do not like Trump, and do not want him to win (although I have to admit that if he does, I will feel a tiny frisson of schadenfreude enjoying meltdowns in certain quarters), but I am so unimpressed and unenthused about Biden that I'm almost in the "fuck it" camp myself.

Yes. The overrated "undecided" or "swing" voter. They exist. They may be less than 10% of the electorate (maybe 5% or 6%?)

I don't deny the existence of about this level of self-reported undecided, but I'm starting to develop an alternative theory.

I believe it was NBC (could've been CNN) ... after the debate, they had an "instant reaction panel" populated by "double haters." These are people who say the don't like either Biden or Trump, but still, I guess, intend to make up their mind and vote for one or the other. My pre-existing suspicion here was, "what new information are you waiting to see from either candidate?" For a time, the strongest answer to that was waiting to see if Trump got convicted. He did and that is legitimate new information. For those who are still undecided, I am having trouble identifying what new information is even out there for discovery?

But I digress. What came across as incredibly obvious during that "insta-panel" was that 4 of the 5 people there were obviously not double haters and were going to vote for either Biden or Trump. It was plain to see by how they answered the open ended question of "What's your initial reaction to the debate."

And I think there's a sizable about of voters like this. They say they're undecided or a double haters for a variety of vapid, stupid reasons. It get's them attention (in that people will try to convince them one way or the other), they get to demonstrate how "above it all" they are, or how they have these amazing nuanced and complex views that don't fit neatly into blue vs red.

Except that it's all made up and they probably know exactly who they're voting for.

A televised panel is never going to be actually any good. There's way too much "look mom I'm on TV". A well put together focus group is superior, and these actually do tend to reflect actual campaign trends pretty well. Even survey takers are subject to "this is a survey" bias, but we've gotten better over the years at comparing these surveys to physical realities, namely the public vote counts broken down by polling precinct, that most of the time we can figure this out and make appropriate adjustments. And all of these methods have found that yes, swing voters do exist as a small group, and yes, things like enthusiasm do predict turnout.

I believe you are correct.

How many "double haters" would voluntarily show up for a no-cameras focus group? It certainly wouldn't be zero, but I think it would be drastically less than the "10% of likely voters" number I see thrown around all the time.

In my opinion, Presidential campaigns since about Bush-Gore in 2000 come down to 47%/47% Blue vs Red default vote. We know the two big structural variables are the economy and incumbency advantage. Sometimes war is also that, but generally only one the U.S. is fully and obviously involved in and that has some strong immediate emotional saliency (Vietnam in 1968, Iraq in 2004).

Beyond that, it's mostly about the candidates building competing narratives targeted at the most important voter demographics in swing states and a little "get out the vote" party machinery. Therefore, running an effective campaign in the sense of management and execution - almost at a corporate level - isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing. Substance, issues, vision kind of doesn't matter if you can't get it into voters heads, and you do that with a lot of activity that looks more like a corporate marketing campaign than you do with impassioned Patrick Henry level speeches.

The accurate knock against the 2016 Trump campaign was that it was poorly run. It absolutely was. But it was better run than the Hillary campaign that (a) Took off the month of September and (b) routinely dismissed highly reliable polls on the midwest and didn't focus her visits there when it mattered.

So when I look at Trump vs Biden in 2024, I'm looking at who's running a better campaign like an investor looks at the operations of a logistics company. Obviously, I can't get into the various war rooms on a day to day basis, so I have to use public appearances and general messaging as a proxy. The debate on Thursday showed me that with a full week of preparation and multiple months of "he's cognitively sharp!" messaging, the Biden campaign couldn't turn in the basics. This is like my analogous logistics company failing to print shipping labels. It's a failure at such a basic level.

Whatever the recovery plan might be - Biden stays in, but Harris becomes more visible, a ticket flip (Harris-Biden instead of Biden-Harris) - it doesn't matter. The ops are broken. The basics aren't in place. Certainly not at the level to achieve an insanely high risk stunt that they now have to do because of the Debate.

How many "double haters" would voluntarily show up for a no-cameras focus group?

There is a reason why focus group participants are paid. How many double haters would explain just how much they hate both candidates in front of a sympathetic audience for $100? Quite a lot.

The point of a focus group isn't to get a large enough sample for statistically meaningful results - it is to listen to what people say. You only need 5-15 people to hear all the common opinions, so you can afford to pay them.

I imagine there is more movement in who votes than in changing votes.

For those who are still undecided, I am having trouble identifying what new information is even out there for discovery?

The price of gas in late October, cynically. Optimistically there are always a few candidate specific issues we can learn more about as time goes on, although the biggest one in this race is probably 'how senile is Joe Biden, exactly?' and normies are taking last night as a definite answer.

I think there are probably very few people who are genuinely so undecided that it's a coin flip which way they'll go. But I think there are a fair number of people who lean towards one or the other but might still be convinced (by a disastrous debate performance, by some new breaking scandal, by an emerging crisis) to go the other way.

That said, I agree that a lot of "undecideds" just like to pretend they're open to being persuaded so people will fawn over them.

but yeah, the entire point of this forum is to try to make discussions more than exchanging insults and memes

Pretending that canned practiced debate lines is meaningful is worse than insults and memes. It is actively refusing to understand. The guy making memes has a better worldview: he sees Biden looking old and lost, and he feels panic or glee. Only in this highly reified artificial fake turfwar debate do we say, "Aside from the stuttering, the mumbling, the bad faces, the halting voice, the aged walk, and the glazed eyes, how did he do?"

I appreciate that the Motte is smarter than average, which makes it even more frustrating to argue made-up intellectual exercises. The guy posting memes of Biden in a diaper has a better understanding of the debate. The guy saying he doesn't care because he hates Trump has a better understanding. The guy saying Biden looked horrible and needs to drop out has a better understanding. The guy saying that Biden did fine, because he did better than he expected, has no understanding. He has negative understanding. Normies are just seeing Biden's decline for the first time, but I'm smarter and world-weary and cynical and jaded and I can judge Biden's real performance. Using more intelligence asking the wrong questions means a worse answer. That's what we're doing.

Your whole premise is flawed. It might make sense if we had some rule that everyone has to watch the debate but we don't. Normies wouldn't be caught dead spending over an hour watching two old people spittle on each other. CNN seems to have claimed somewhere between 50 to 80 million people tuned in, many of which could be internationals. What does influence normies is what their politics brained friends and collogues tell them happened and that is downstream of the words and the performance.

I think normies tune in for the first thirty minutes or so.

A single poll before the debate very roughly broke it down into one third of US adults were very/extremely likely to watch live. Slightly more than that were going to watch clips or analysis after the fact. Due to splits in response, this was a bit over half overall of respondents who were very/extremely likely to get some form of debate content, and only a quarter who weren't going to tune in or look after at all.

Anecdotally, even some of the more politically-engaged people I know only tuned in for about 15-20 minutes, in most cases near the beginning, and in many cases a random stretch out of curiosity only. The actual viewership implies that the poll was either a significant over-estimate, or there were a lot of people why couldn't bring themselves to watch despite intending to. Probably the former, this kind of survey is not very accurate for this type of question, in part because the question reveals the simple fact that there is a debate happening! A fact most are only vaguely aware of, much less the exact day. Plus maybe some survey bias and personal overestimation of probability. I'm betting a massive chunk of the viewership were these already extremely-likely people.

I'm not sure what this has to do with me. Normal people don't watch presidential debates (?), therefore... we should debate made-up talking points made up by the politicians?

Normal people don't watch debates, they get their info from people who do. People who watch debates can take all sorts of things from them some of which are the actual policies hit on. It's a very dynamic thing.

Pretending that canned practiced debate lines is meaningful is worse than insults and memes.

I don't think your description of what the discussion here looks like is accurate. I mean, in the mainstream media, yes, there is a lot of cope and denial about Biden's mental acuity. Here, I don't see a lot of people denying that Biden is cognitively declining.

The guy saying that Biden did fine, because he did better than he expected, has no understanding. He has negative understanding.

I think Biden did better than I expected (which was a very low bar). I don't know that I'd say he did "fine" - he certainly bombed with the audience. But it's not clear to me what you think the "correct" understanding of the debate would be that you think is being missed here. It seems like you want everyone to vigorously nod their heads at your own highly partisan take. Instead, we dissect what the candidate actually said, and we also evaluate to what degree Biden's faculties have declined, and also we evaluate how it's going over with the "normie" voter. Those all seems like fairly rational takes to me. No back-patting and circle-jerking required for us to be offering better discussions than people lobbing grenades at how much their guy sucks less than the other guy.

I appreciate that the Motte is smarter than average, which makes it even more frustrating to argue made-up intellectual exercises. The guy posting memes of Biden in a diaper has a better understanding of the debate.

He has a better understanding of what plays well on social media, so I don't blame Trump partisans for posting memes of Biden in diapers. But this isn't that place.

I think the idea is this:

Imagine if Biden been a bit more together, and had successfully given a line about, say, "we spent 300 million more on Medicare". Realistically, that number would almost certainly have been Sir-Humphrey'd to death. 100 million of it would turn out to be money that they were already spending, classified in a way to allow it to be used for the factoid. Say, reclassifying 'elderly medical support' as 'medicare assist for the elderly'. Another 100 million would be money that hadn't actually been spent yet, but had been put aside on the budget and probably would be spent this year unless it got used for something else instead.

We, and the partisan media, would get to work on this. Some people will say that it's all bollocks and he hasn't done anything. Other people would say that no, the money is there and it's being spent. And in reality, very little new information would have got through. Biden is spending a bit more on Medicare, probably.

So I believe that @SlowBoy's argument is that paying attention to what is actually said in debates (or elections) is a fool's errand. Everyone knows that the promises will not be carried out, that the numbers will be carefully constructed houses of cards, etc. All the promises, the statistics, are intended to produce a vibe. The real message that Biden is trying to convey is "Biden cares about medicare. Biden strong."

According to this argument, people paying attention to what is said, rather than the vibes and the character that is revealed, are paying attention to the wrong thing. The debate is supposed to be a vibes-based slugfest.

It seems like you want everyone to vigorously nod their heads at your own highly partisan take.

My takes are highly partisan, your takes are... neutral and objective?

I don't think you are understanding me Mayne you want to reflexively defend the Motte. I am not arguing that anyone here is coping over Biden's decline. I am arguing that there is a lot of discussion along the lines of...,: -- "Besides that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" "We discuss what the candidate actually said." Yes, that's the rat trap. We all know that the promises politicians make are not enforceable. They are riddled with lies. They were rehearsed in a backroom focus test to sound good. They were designed to manipulate us. So why are we discussing them seriously?

As the "highly partisan take"-maker, I have a coherent interpretation of the debate: Biden showed serious mental decline, and lost. The actual specific answers aren't really important. And I don't think anybody cares really what either guy said.

So let's come back to this:

we dissect what the candidate actually said, and we also evaluate to what degree Biden's faculties have declined

If Biden is in serious decline, why would you "dissect what he actually said"? How is that not an act in rationalizing?

We all know that the promises politicians make are not enforceable. They are riddled with lies. They were rehearsed in a backroom focus test to sound good. They were designed to manipulate us. So why are we discussing them seriously?

Ultimately that's what bugs me so much about the whole "Trump lies" schtick I hear from the media and the PMC.

It's tone deaf and insulting to the public, because the public knows very well what they have in front of them. They know politicians are salesmen, pitching a product. Usually, pitching that product will involve some sort of lie if we take that word in an narrow sense. The car salesman who tells you the deal he's offering you is the best in the industry, is that a lie? I mean, maybe technically, but only a very socially stunted person would get offended by it, stand up and point at the car salesman and yell "LIAR! THIS ISN'T THE BEST DEAL, AT HONDA THEY MADE ME A BETTER DEAL!" The dude's trying to sell a car, you know that coming into the dealership.

And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors. But both are selling something, trying to make their product look as good as they can, and yes, technically lying. Or omitting important truths. But the public already knows this, they've interacted with salesman, they know that not everything you hear from a salesman is to be taken at face value. But the media thinks that since Trump talks like a blue collar worker and Obama like a university professor they can make you "realize" that Trump is lying but since he uses big words maybe they can fool you into thinking Obama is not. Which is insulting because the public knows they're both just as much salesmen one as the other for a long time, it's all been priced in already.

I think this is an especially important understanding because to a large degree, the job of United States CEO is about being the face man, in effect the salesman selling the United States position to the rest of the world and his federal government policy to the rest of the country. Therefore, being an effective persuader, i.e. being an effective salesman, is actually a major qualification for the job being sought!

And ultimately I'm in the camp that the debate is probably not going to move the needle much, unless it causes Biden to be replaced, because of the same reason. People know what they have in front of them. The only thing it will change is independents who already knew they would like to vote Trump but needed an excuse to voice it now have it.

I don't think anyone doubted since 2020 that Biden was not reaaaally going to be in charge. The guy was always entirely a vote in favor of letting the PMC/The Deep State/the Cathedral/the Swamp/The Adults In the Room/whatever you want to call it reassert control of the government, and they on-purpose pushed a candidate with little ability to assert himself to represent that choice. Biden's cognitive state never mattered, except that now they think they have an excuse to saddle him with the blame for all the failures of the last 4 years and replace him with someone who's going to come into this looking like a fresh start.

My takes are highly partisan, your takes are... neutral and objective?

I wasn't really talking about my takes here, though yes, I do think I am less partisan and more objective than you.

I don't think you are understanding me Mayne you want to reflexively defend the Motte.

I don't reflexively defend the Motte - I have a lot of criticisms of the discourse here. I just don't think your criticism is accurate.

I am arguing that there is a lot of discussion along the lines of...,: -- "Besides that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

Well, the general consensus is that Biden did very, very badly but for all that Nate Silver seems to think Trump is virtually a shoo-in, people have been dramatically wrong about how an election will turn out before, so if you want everyone to just settle on the consensus agreement "Biden lost and the election is over," I am not surprised you aren't seeing that.

If Biden is in serious decline, why would you "dissect what he actually said"? How is that not an act in rationalizing?

Because it matters how serious the decline is. If he is (as some people seem to think) virtually non-compos mentis and only able to handle public appearances with serious drugs, that's different than if he's still more or less got all his marbles and has just slowed down a lot. If he's still functional but declining, then what he believes (and would do) as President matters. If he's a zombie being puppeted by his handlers, then no, what he says probably doesn't matter.

You seem to have misunderstood my argument as something dumb like, "Joe Biden is senile and poops in his pants and Trump is awesome the motte suxxxx hahahahaha BTGO".

What I'm telling you is that your objectivity doesn't exist, and debates are fake and gay, and I want to see Trump and Biden gorilla smash funhouse wrestlemania. I want us to stop reading fact-check statslop fanfic and pick up some Byron or Keats. I want to watch Rocky and Drago slug it out until somebody dies. I want to see Trump yelling. I want to see Biden yelling. I don't care about whatever some focus-tested Dem-Rep slogan-pollster convinced Biden to say. I don't care about made-up technical details. It's beneath my dignity to be manipulated.

Thinking empty things isn't thinking.

It's beneath my dignity to be manipulated. Thinking empty things isn't thinking.

Well said.

I loathe fact checking. So many times the fact checkers are wrong, or take claims that obviously are claims of opinions as testable fact, or focus overly literally. It isn’t an honest enterprise.

I don't think anyone is truly "objective", but not everyone wants the same thing. You want wrestlemania; fine. I care about facts, even if those aren't the things that win elections. The Motte leans more towards the latter, and "debates are fake and gay" I can get on Twitter.

Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance!

Motte being the upspring of rationalist culture does harbor people that care more about whether something is actually true. And this is generally very good metric for politicians. Because they will make important decisions and when they do it doesn't matter how flashy or rethorically potent they are. And it's historically been the case that competent technocratic leaders were better for their populace than loud demagogues.

Yes to your previous points, but:

And it's historically been the case that competent technocratic leaders were better for their populace than loud demagogues.

That's sure one opinion. I'm not entirely sure you are even wrong, but "competent technocratic leaders" is so poisoned by the modern EU and American Democrats.

This is the Elizabeth Warren of political views.

people that care more about whether something is actually true

That's the problem! Nothing anyone says in a presidential debate is true. The highest apex virtue peak of substance-over-style is empty words. Biden says that a seven-point-four tax whatever is marginally more efficient at generating revenue for solar panels, and Trump counters with seven-point-three. When I'm elected, we'll make progress on making progress. We are beyond true and false. Politicians are constantly making promises they don't intend to keep, that nobody expects them to keep, that we have no means of making them keep. And we sit around debating whether those promises sound good!

No! Bring back the slaughter! Give me screaming and yells. I don't care if Biden's tax plan is technically more correct than Trump's. (How would you even know if it was? Who "decides"? Sixteen economists?) It doesn't mean anything. I want to know if Biden will shrink under pressure. I want to know if Trump has a vision. I want to know if the Vice President is a cringelord wineaunt Machiavellian doomerpilled femcel broke-a-loid edgy based-woke calmchad. Is God on his side? Does he have the mandate of Lady Heavenluck? Does he swing a big dick or is he going to get schlonged because he's a technocrat who can't lead smoke out of a fire?

Who cares about "the actual truth"? There isn't any! We all know that campaign promises are a lie. We all know what we already think about both candidates. We already know our hopes amd fears. Why do we put on this useless pretension of evaluating their technical words as though anybody cares? I also love highly ritualized choreographies of martial valor. This isn't a parade. This is war!

Personality is important. So is policy. For all that Trump is based and chad, his inability to grasp policy has prevented him from getting much done. And yeah, part of that is being able to use technical language. That doesn't mean that they need to be able to rattle off trivia like an Aaron Sorkin character, but it does mean they need to know the difference between Iraqi immigrants, Iranian insurgents, immunocompromised indigents, industrial incentives and indignant indigenes.

I doubt that the DNC are sitting around in a smoke-filled room, twirling their mustaches.

I doubt any cigars are in play, but the DNC has a history of executing conspiracies at this level far more effectively than the GOP. They own the "Debates" - whether you're talking about leaked emails lining up softballs or the rules updates this year to favor their desired outcome.

They struggle to control their idealogical upstarts in the party every once in a while, but they are in absolute lockstep with the mainstream media. Command and control here doesn't have to get everyone in a room. It's a couple texts here and there, conversations over cocktails in Manhattan, DC, and LA.

I've been wondering if they were just going to hurtle headlong into disaster, keep trying to hide Biden indefinitely, or what. I'll pick a side of the fence here and say the pressure on him to back down is going to be ENORMOUS, and he'll do so in the next few months.

Can Kamala or Harris save the election? Maybe. It has to be very difficult for anyone to look another human being in the eyes and say that Biden at this stage is worse than Trump. There is such a thing as mentally and physically unfit for office. I was filled this morning with, honestly, just pity. I've been extremely angry at Biden the past few years, but I think if you were to look at his whole career, he isn't even close to the worst politician in this country, and it feels like the dems are just riding his miserable corpse into the grave.

I was filled this morning with, honestly, just pity

I agree. I felt the same way. I've absolutely hated him for his Covid policies, and for his lawfare, and for buying votes with student loan forgiveness.

But last night all I felt was pity as the CNN analysts tore into him. He's still with it enough to know that this was an epic disaster. His legacy is now in ruins, no matter what happens. Once he got home and it was just him and Jill, did he break down and cry? I don't know. Maybe politicians at this level don't have those feelings. But the non-thinking part of my brain felt a lot sympathy for him personally.

But last night all I felt was pity as the CNN analysts tore into him. He's still with it enough to know that this was an epic disaster. His legacy is now in ruins, no matter what happens. Once he got home and it was just him and Jill, did he break down and cry? I don't know. Maybe politicians at this level don't have those feelings. But the non-thinking part of my brain felt a lot sympathy for him personally.

One of the points pressed by the CNN panel was, "How did the DNC/Biden's campaign let him get this far without intervening?"

I would be shocked if half of that panel wasn't already aware he was this bad. David Axelrod (who was oddly half-covered in water droplets for the first segment, like someone had thrown a cup of water at him right before cameras), Obama admin heavyweight, didn't know? Van Jones didn't know? It's their job to know. It's hard to buy the feigned shock from a bunch of high-level DC journos and politicos who surely never gossip.

As for Dr. Jill, if anyone knows, it's her, so it would be rich to assume that last night was some dam-breaking revelation for her. If she's let him get this far, it's either out of cynicism or a sense of entitlement, and I would guess neither of those states at this stage are penetrable by actual self-reflection or honest emotion.

I would be shocked if half of that panel wasn't already aware he was this bad.

My guess: they did and they didn't. In the Orwellian sense of doublethink. They had to know, because they were among those covering for him. But on the other hand, they also fully believed the narrative that Biden's decline was not real, a product of cherry-picked clips and misinterpretations from MAGA types.

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