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Some of the latest Biden-camp excuses coming up seem plainly and on their face delusional. I'm paying close attention to who is saying what, using what words, to see their degree of participation in this farce. The obvious logical implications of these claims are, well, obvious.
Exhibit 0: Biden himself talked about his debate the next day. He said:
Are we supposed to be impressed about telling right from wrong? That he knows how to do the job he's been in for four years? These are not reasons to be elected President again, they are basic pre-requisites. For that matter, "speaking smoothly" and "walking" might actually be core requirements as well.
Exhibit 1: He traveled too much before the debate. He did go on some global travel, but then spent 11 days at Camp David afterward preparing and recovering. But who on earth takes a whole week and a half to recover and is still at the point where he, as he himself said at a recent fundraiser, almost fell asleep on stage? Even on its face, that's worrying. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.
Exhibit 2: Biden struggles after 4 p.m.. Staffers say that he really does everything between 10 and 4. Six useful hours is, on its very face, a very worryingly short amount of time to not "make verbal mistakes and become tired". The debate was at 9pm local time. But the job of President isn't really seen as a part-time gig! If I said to you, "yeah my grandpa has six good hours, but after that he gets tired and makes a lot of mistakes" I wouldn't go "great, let's put him in charge of the country for four years and hope that that window of time doesn't shrink too much". This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.
Exhibit 3: It was "preparation overload". Okay, fine, some candidates self-destruct for no reason on the debate stage, or lean too hard on canned phrases (Marco Rubio I'm looking at you). But usually this is limited to a few occurrences. Biden was consistently off all night and responded to comments Trump was expected to make, but did not yet make, on at least four separate occasions. If a candidate takes 11 days to prepare for one 90 minute stretch and still blows it, surely that says something about the candidate? That's like saying "I did poorly on the test because I studied too much". Like, it happens, but not to this extent. This is not an excuse, it is a condemnation.
Exhibit 4: It's hard to debate when the other person lies a lot, says Nancy Pelosi and others (though, credit due, just today she said whether it was a condition or episode is a fair and legitimate question). But a candidate lying in the debate should make your job easier, not harder, because even if the moderators don't fact-check, what's to stop you from doing so? Biden did at least once or twice, or tried to, so clearly it can work. Sure, you don't have notes per the rules, but surely if there are 20 false statements (per NYT's count) you can pick out at least a few with your week+ of prep. On its face, this is not a good excuse.
Exhibit 5: A columnist claiming replacing him would be undemocratic. Yes, he got votes in the primaries. However everyone knows that the party endorsed and supported him before other challengers even got going, which makes this argument eerily similar to the obvious horseradish of saying Iran is democratic because people vote (ignoring how candidates are selected). Furthermore, there's evidence the Biden team has withheld information and exposure to Biden on purpose, and as at least one media outlet likes to remind us, "democracy dies in darkness".
Sidenote, related: Here for example, you get stories about the insularity of his team recently. Corporate wants you to find the different between this picture:
...and this picture:
Pam: They're the same picture.
Okay, well to be fair, one is an intelligence briefing (Trump) about core national security issues and the other (Biden) seems to be more domestic political briefings (I think, from context), so the level of severity is actually quite different but... I'm still struck by the similarity.
tl;dr: We all know a debate is not the same thing as actual governing. But just like how excuses tell you hints about the character of the individual, I think the excuses given by the people around Biden give you hints about Biden, too. Good on the press for calling them like they are: excuses.
It would be undemocratic to replace Biden with another candidate. I think it's fine to admit that, I think almost everybody would prefer the "undemocratic" candidate to the "democratic" candidate in middle-stage senility. And, probably, if you were to run the primary today all over again, the voters would pick someone else. The problem is that the apparatchiks might not pick that same someone else.
If anything, this would look like a return to the older way of selecting candidates for the major parties. The primary process used to rely much heavier on backroom deals gated by rounds of voting to select a candidate, with the regular voting public mostly shut out. After the perceived meddling in the 2016 Dem primary (Sanders and Clinton), I wonder how this would play out among the democratic party electorate.
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