That Didn’t Help Joe!

By Jacob Weindling  |  July 6, 2024 | 10:40am
Photo via screenshot
White House Joe Biden
That Didn’t Help Joe!

In response to his disastrous debate performance where on a comparative basis, he made Donald Trump look 17 years old, Joe Biden has been pushed into a corner, forced to defend his ability to do the most difficult job in America as everyone can see Father Time chasing him down.

It doesn’t help that the media and Democratic donors have turned on him in such an acute manner that you cannot help but notice the symmetry, and the avalanche of “I have seen and heard this for months or even years but am only now disclosing the really juicy stuff” reports aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory. Even this interview that I’m writing about here won’t be released in full until Sunday, but ABC has already leaked the clips where Biden looks old and out of touch. You can’t help but feel bad for the old man.

Right up until he says self-centered bullshit like this. Then I don’t care that his brain is spilling out of his ears as he mumbles it while the weight of the world bears down on him. Fuck Joe Biden.

Excuse me? I thought this was about saving democracy. You doing as good as you can is what this is all about? Do you want an orange slice too bud? Should we get you a binkie? Let’s run you home before it gets dark since we know you can’t be president after 8 pm, but first let’s make sure to stop at a rally and tell everyone how super serious we are about opposing fascism.

That this has gone on this long without any type of coordinated pushback outside of the torrent of leaks to the press is how you know that the Democratic Party is the most weak and feckless institution in the West. Even the Tories, who just won like two seats in UK Parliament, still know when it’s time to kick a loser to the curb. I understand that their system allows for such things in a much easier manner, but you are kidding yourself if you think our political parties do not have their own methods to accomplish this too (see: 1968).

This whole situation is so incredibly fucked. The party picked the worst possible time to prove all their accused flaws and weaknesses to be true.

Biden did not look like someone fit to be president in the debate, and his polls tanked four months out from the election. Strip away all the craven media opportunism and cynical political machinations from this mess and you still have a seismic political development that Joe Biden must address right now. His legitimacy is rightfully at stake, and he only has himself to blame. Meandering, confused answers like this where he seems to be jamming multiple talking points into an incoherent response do not help make the case that he is up to this.

Not to mention that one of Biden’s problems through this crisis is that he is reacting like Trump, which doesn’t help his case that he is the man to oppose him. He has long reportedly thought the fake news polls were fake (except for the ones saying he was winning!), but he went and stripped the word reportedly out of that sentence altogether in this interview. I genuinely question at this point whether Biden’s “oligarchy” is feeding him any sort of political reality.

I wish I could have parachuted into George Stephanopoulos’s body at that point and asked Grandpa Simpson that if that is the case, why did a firm working for the campaign release internal polling after the debate that indicated the electoral map is currently constituted as such? Why wouldn’t you release the “tossup” polls?

None of this is helping! Who thought giving him the MAGA spray tan and doing a Trump bit was a good idea? Who the hell is captaining this ship?!?!?!

All the talk about democracy and blah blah blah has simply proven to be secondary to Biden’s immense ego. He even did his own version of Trump’s “I alone can fix it” quote in this interview. The situation is so dire that David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief strategist and a loyal low-key party guy to the end who tries to keep all his fights behind closed doors, is out here slamming Biden in public for being “out of touch.”

Democrats are not going to be able to talk their way out of this, and Joe Biden could win the next 100 debates against Trump, but it would not change the first impression he created last week that he has now reinforced in this ABC interview which reportedly did not quell many Democrats’ fears. He’s too old for this job and everyone knows it, except for him.

Biden wants to prove all of us wrong in service of furthering his own personal comeback narrative in his own head, and if he fails, well, I guess at least he did “the goodest job” he knows he can do, and after all, “that’s what this is about.”

God help us all.

 
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