Kenobi vs. Vader

Sure Biden should step down—but only if Trump does too

Image via Lovepop.

I. Senility

Tim Miller of The Bulwark, a month ago:

Biden didn't do that on Thursday, though he did really lose the thread for one awful moment early in, trying to process this torrent of falsehood, delusionality, and incoherence from Trump supposedly explaining the enormous budget deficits of his time in office

Because the tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to COVID, and even after COVID. It was so strong that we were able to get through COVID much better than just about any other country. But we spurred – that tax spurred. Now, when we cut the taxes – as an example, the corporate tax was cut down to 21 percent from 39 percent, plus beyond that – we took in more revenue with much less tax and companies were bringing back trillions of dollars back into our country. The country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt. We were ready to start using the liquid gold right under our feet, the oil and gas right under our feet. We were going to have something that nobody else has had. We got hit with COVID. We did a lot to fix it. I gave him an unbelievable situation, with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with. We – we gave him something great. Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration, and we were right in the middle of it. Something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about, but he had far more people dying in his administration. He did the mandate, which is a disaster. Mandating it. The vaccine went out. He did a mandate on the vaccine, which is the thing that people most objected to about the vaccine. And he did a very poor job, just a very poor job. And I will tell you, not only poor there, but throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership. They don’t respect the United States anymore. We’re like a Third World nation. Between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation. And it’s a shame the damage he’s done to our country. And I’d love to ask him, and will, why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country

When Tapper asked Biden to respond to "this question about the national debt", he managed to remember more or less what the question had been two minutes earlier, and started off fine, too, answering the question as he'd expected to get it, with the right numbers, though he sometimes struggled for them:

He [Trump] had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one. Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy. What I’m going to do is fix the taxes. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt...

But he wanted to add a word about the spending that the additional taxes he is proposing on the rich would support, and came to grief on the rocks Trump had strewn in his path

...We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID...excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with...look, if...we finally beat Medicare...

and couldn't remember the point he'd been trying to make. I don't think he did that again for the rest of the hour and a half, and I don't think it was senile. His voice quality was terrible, as has been noted, and it wasn't always easy to know what he was saying at all, which is why it's worthwhile looking through the transcript, where you find he's what he's always been: a typical Democrat, with a typical Democrat's vices of lingering too much over the technical details and assuming that the audience will care about them, and a typical Democrat's virtues, of knowing the stuff cold, numbers and all, just being better informed. 

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It wasn't a great debating technique for Mondale or Dukakis, let's stipulate, or Gore or Kerry, who were nowhere near 81 years old when they ran for president. It wasn't really a great technique when one of my favorite 2020 candidates, Julián Castro, took his strongest argument on the unfairness of the US immigration system and turned it into an incomprehensible dig about "Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationalities Act" without explaining what that was, so that not even his rivals knew what he was talking about, let alone the simple voters out in TV-Land. He was 46 at the time.

(Incidentally, Biden's recent immigration move deals with the 1325 problem, in a way that doesn't seem especially nice but is at least legally more acceptable: rather than treating asylum seekers crossing the border at improper places as felons who have to be jailed, as Section 1325 suggests in defiance of asylum law and Stephen Miller implemented, it treats them as queue jumpers who have to go back to Mexico and get in line with the people using the phone app to get their interviews. It is not deporting people into the horror that they may be fleeing in Venezuela or Haiti or wherever; it is sending them back to the waiting game on the other side of the border, admittedly not a completely safe place, since congressional Republicans refuse to give the US the means to handle it in a better way, even though the bill they wrote to do it with is stuffed with Republican nastiness, because Trump commanded them not to.)

(Also incidentally, I think I know why Trump keeps screaming about the millions of migrants "sent" to the Mexican border coming from "mental institutions", without any evidence for such a phenomenon; it's because he finally heard that the migrants in question are "asylum seekers", so he figures they've been kicked out of insane asylums. That's because he is really that stupid.)

But at worst Biden's debate conduct is a whole lot more like Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton (who did lose, sort of, to Trump) than like my great-aunt Emma, who occasionally put a linen napkin on her head for no imaginable reason, and no longer emerged from the world of 50 years before.

That's not even what I wanted to talk about, though.

II. Deal

What Tim Miller is arguing about is his bona fides, his and that of the other "centrist" Tump opponents, like Scarborough and Bruni and Friedman and the rest of the Times folks, assuring us that no, they hate Trump just as much as we do, in fact more so, and this is specifically why they are agitating for Biden to drop out of the race. The practical argument, which is the one we should be paying attention to, as opposed to Friedman's tears, is that Biden's performance made him not less able to serve as president (they don't say he must resign immediately, because they know there's no need for that), but less likely to win in November than some arbitrarily chosen younger Democratic politician, Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer (they rarely name Vice President Harris); that unless we get rid of him as a candidate the party is doomed. 

My view is that this is exactly wrong, for reasons onto which Josh Marshall (here's a gift link from me) has tacked a little math:

switching candidates now is the equivalent of pricing in 10 or 20 debate-night disasters...The election is not just about two people. It’s about two teams, both strutting on the national stage saying we’re smart, we’re strong, we know how to do this, give us the keys. Switching candidates amounts to saying, “In fact we were idiots. We said it was this guy. But actually we were wrong, or maybe we lied to you. And to be clear we are formally affirming that we were wrong and we’re agreeing to talk about being wrong for the rest of the campaign. And now we’re kind of desperately scrambling to come up with something totally different. 

We're so frightened by what Frank Bruni and David Plouffe (and Bret Stephens!) said that we're ready to do this to ourselves? I'm not! I don't think we were idiots! I think the presumption should be that those guys are wrong, even if they include Krugman (for now, and I hope he'll back off in the next days). 

The horror and embarrassment we experienced while we were watching the "debate" is understandable, but it's not a rational basis for action. If he's so infirm he needs to resign, then he should resign and we'd have to live with it, but if you think he's fine for presidenting from now to January, just not for campaigning, then you're thinking it for the wrong reasons: not that he's unfit for office, but that Somebody Else wrongly thinks he is. This is a case, finally, where we should do what Republicans would do, as long as we can: double down.

I say that partly because I think we can do it without dishonesty, and Scarborough and Friedman know it. Biden is fully capable of carrying on the work of the presidency under the normal circumstances of the job that don't exist in a TV "debate"—with his army of assistants, as we've seen in action from the North Carolina rally on Friday to tonight's statement on the appalling Supreme Court opinion on presidential immunity in Trump v. United States (he's reading it off the prompter but you can tell he was involved in writing it, which is never the case when Trump is doing his improv on a Baroque text from Stephen Miller), and a well-qualified and thoroughly prepared vice president ready to step in at any time things go really wrong.

As Simon Rosenberg might say, Democrats are in a relatively bad position at the moment, but it's still better than that of the Republicans. Biden had a bad night Thursday. Trump is a convicted felon and a defendant in three other serious felony cases, an adjudicated fraud and rapist, a fool unable to learn what tariffs are or how NATO works, a shameless liar and bullshitter whose lies are impossible to distinguish from his bullshit, and a profoundly disordered mind that can't be coherent for a full two minutes at a time or answer a simple question without deviating into some entirely different world, who also just signed a deal for a Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia. 

Why doesn't Trump step down from his candidacy? Because Republicans assume, rightly, that none of these things are going to make any difference to his success, which is all they care about. They can't say the same for any of the beclowned turds they could put in his place, whether it's Vance or Hawley, Cruz or Rubio. They stick with Trump because they understand he's the only candidate they have with a chance of winning, though he's plainly desperately unqualified, because his fans don't care about that. 

Why should Biden step down, with his one bad night? Maybe he shouldn't!

I started working on this post with the idea of a challenge: Trump is a candidate mainly because he's the only candidate with a chance of beating Biden. Biden's a candidate because he's the only candidate with a record of beating Trump (he's never lost an election, in his 50-year career). I'd be happy to have Biden drop out of the race if Trump dropped out of the race as well: to see a contest between Vice President Harris and whichever beclowned turd the Republicans can come up with—Trump's the only one I'm afraid she couldn't beat, because his appeal is purely irrational, or fascist if you want to use the word. (And indeed she comes closer to beating Trump in head-to-head polls than any imaginable candidate other than Biden).

Somebody posted a meme, I can't be arsed to hunt it down, suggesting Biden had to fight Trump the way Obi-Wan Kenobi had to fight Darth Vader (somewhere in the canon that I'm willing to not be familiar with) on the barren moon. Sure Obi-Wan is old, but who else can? I'm not, as Joe himself would say, being facetious.