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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.
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.
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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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