When you've lost CNN's smooth-talking host John King, you've lost the American people. Well, most of the left-wing Americans anyway.
"There is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party… It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers," King said. "And they’re having conversations about the president’s performance, which they think was dismal… They’re having conversations as to what they should do about it. Some of those conversations include, 'Should we go to the White House, and ask the president to step aside?'"
"Aggressive panic"? Is that opposed to "laid-back panic?" This is CNN.
When you've lost MSNBC's Joy Reid, you really haven't lost much at all, but I needed filler for this article.
"My phone really never stopped buzzing throughout. The universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic… It’s not a full drumbeat yet, but there is talk of… I just happen to know a lot of politicians," Reid said. "They all believe that they have a unique ability to run the race that they passionately want to run, and I know for a fact that Joe Biden believes he is the only person who can beat Donald Trump… The problem is, after tonight, his party doesn’t believe that."
You can almost hear the weeping offstage.
When you've lost the entire liberal cadre at the New York Times, you've lost the left, the radical left, and the crazy-stupid left all in one, fell, swoop.
The New York Times op-ed page was an unbroken mass of calls for Biden to step down. “President Biden, I’ve Seen Enough,” declared Nicholas Kristof. “Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He Must Bow Out of the Race,” agreed Thomas Friedman. “Biden Cannot Go on Like This,” was Frank Bruni’s offering. The Times “Matter of Opinion” podcast saw Ross Douthat, Michelle Cottle, and Ezra Klein unite under an “I Don’t Think Joe Biden should be running” headline. Calling Biden “ancient,” Michelle Goldberg added, “There will now be a new chorus of cries for him to drop out, and I’ll be joining it.”
It should be noted that Kristof, Friedman, and Bruni are three of the top political analysts in the country. They are not hysterical and are not given to hysteria. They see the same things that most of the rest of us are seeing.
Joe Biden has been mortally wounded and can never recover, so stick a fork in him and find someone else.
Hold the phone. There are still four months to go before election day. That's plenty of time for the American people to forget the debate and for Biden to recover, right?
Maybe not.
Biden has time to recover. This debate was the earliest in history, and the election is more than four months away, normally an eternity in politics. Turnarounds can happen. Time is not the issue. But this is not a matter of simply changing campaign tactics or producing clever new ads. His advisers can help; they can offer ideas. But this mostly falls on Biden’s shoulders.
Is he up to the task? Can he persuade enough voters to forget what they witnessed Thursday night and look at him in a new light and reassess whether he has the physical and mental stamina to serve another four years? Does he have the capacity to overcome the damage he did to his candidacy — and the impact it had on Democrats who are alarmed at the prospect of former president Donald Trump returning to the White House? Can he make Trump as much the issue as himself?
Dan Balz, the author of this piece, has been at the Post for almost 50 years. He's seen major gaffes by candidates in his time covering politics, and perhaps he's basing his analysis on that.
But this is a different world than even 15 years ago. The visual impact of a faltering, hesitant, incoherent Biden is going to be with the voters when they walk into that voting booth. There's no way around that. Biden can scream his lungs out about "felon" Trump. He can go before the cameras and weep about Trump "ending democracy." He can pull out every single dirty, shameless lie and half-truth to fling at Trump, and it won't matter.
Voters know what they saw on Thursday night. They will still be feeling the unease at watching the most powerful man in the world unable to speak coherently and babble on about irrelevancies.
More than anything else, that's why Democrats are going to have to come to grips with the fact that Biden must be replaced or the Democrats will suffer the most catastrophic losses in the history of American politics on election day.
