Before I gave up cable a few years back, I watched a lot of MSNBC at the beginning of the Trump era, which is dismissed by conservatives as partisan TV news for liberal left Democrats, but was rarely liberal left enough for me and way too much of a kind of outrage porn. Every week for months, even years, we were kept on the edge of our seats anticipating some course correction by Republicans, finally the moral pivot we'd been waiting for. Repubs, we desperately hoped, would finally figure out Dump was bad news and a national security threat, obviously more interested in enriching himself than building a better future for America. A pivot that would never come to pass, sadly, barely a peep of country-over-party from the fake news MAGA Repugs in congress, then as today.
Anyway, I finally had to give cable news up; probably not long after Biden won, like everyone else hoping the fascist crisis was over and I could return to my life. Too much doom hysteria. I'm not saying I'm above the TV news, or the 24/7 media environment, but actually as susceptible to it as anybody else.
So I'm not insensitive to the power of the image and TV performance. I'm just too squeamish to take it in unfiltered. But based on Biden's recent SOTU speech, recent snippets of Dump's dead-end Vegas act at his rallies, and the last debate in 2020, I was reasonably hopeful about the debate, even if I couldn't stand watching it live. Regardless, according to my sources-- i.e., people who did watch the debate-- the consensus is Trump appeared strong and vital and Biden weak and very weak. The live blog commentary I refreshed incessantly for the duration of the debate created a cringingly bad image: Biden standing-in-place, lost, mumbling hoarsely, stammering confusedly, while Grump ran circles around him with relentless energy; Trump's unchecked lies in full effect.
Of course the Repugs are now jubilant, Biden has at last been exposed as old and incompetent, as they've been trying to tar him with for months, but, additionally, and more concerning, I'm seeing all kinds of Dems that watched the debate, some of my most trusted sources, that in the aftermath of the debate were like, 'OMG, Biden's toast, he must resign immediately, and be replaced at the Democratic Convention,' like Ezra Klein was suggesting back in the spring. I can't say anything otherwise about the performances of the two candidates at the debate. But I can say I don't see how their relative performances, however bad they were, really changes anything about their contrasting positions on the political issues or the stakes those stark choices represent in the upcoming election.
I know, issues are not the way normies choose a POTUS. They have to identify with the candidate, like they were buying a box of cereal. They vote for the political charisma; the candidates' media packaged persona. I'm sure this is broadly true but in the spirit of hoping significant margins of voters actually can understand the issues, i.e., discern some qualitative differences about the cereals inside the boxes, let's review a few of the most salient political issues at stake in the election:
Women's rights. There is no grey area between the two candidates here. If you'd rather women, the individual woman, and pregnant women have the right to decide privately with their family and doctor what to do with their pregnancy, and would rather it not be left to some anti-abortion edict from the state, one that we can already see from documented evidence endangers the health of pregnant women, then you will vote for Biden, no matter how old he appears on TV. The Repugs on SCOTUS, that Dump put there, ended a women's right to choose with the Dobb's decision. And wherever they are in power they are trying to extend those restrictions to IVF, contraception, and by criminalizing reproductive health care as we speak. Any Repug vote at this point is a vote against basic women's rights and endangers women's reproductive health care.
Immigration. Biden recently implemented some executive order that reduced asylum seeking border crossings by 40%. The Democrats and a small handful of Republicans crafted a bipartisan bill to address the border and immigration "crisis" more comprehensively this past spring, reportedly, including numerous conservative priorities, but it was shot down by Trump because he was afraid the bill's effectiveness might reduce the border's value as a campaign issue. The southern border with Mexico really isn't about the Dems wanting "open borders" and only the Repubs wanting "secure borders," as Republicans like to frame it. It's really about one party, Dems, trying to reduce illegal immigration, and the other, Grump's MAGA Repugs, bragging about how they're going to throw a bunch of immigrants into concentration camps on day one of a second Dump term; by the millions, and then flying them back in army planes to where they came from, all paid for by Mexico, of course. The Republicans don't want to solve a border crisis. They want to abuse and do violence against immigrants. Takeaways: First, Trump is a sick humanitarian crime; fascist Nazi stuff. Second, any non-white or non-English speaking or non-Christian person should recognize this as preliminary to a bigot attack on them and should, of course, vote accordingly for Biden. And, third, any shocking, Big Bang, removal of labor on the scale trumpeted at Trump's rallies would be inflationary and likely catastrophic economically.
Climate Change is obviously a thing, a very serious thing. We see the increase in extreme weather events around us, the devastation wrought by these events. We know we have to curb carbon emissions and transition our economy to sustainable energy sources. Biden, and the Dems, even if belatedly, have done more to address climate change than any admin before. Ever. By contrast, Grump talks about eliminating all environmental regulations and "drill baby drill," again, from day one. He is so extreme he warns of the dangers of EVs, electric motors, and windmills, like he used to bad mouth masks and vaccines. A vote for Biden continues to pressure the gov to support progressive reforms that effectively address climate change. A vote for Trump isolates the US and further endangers the planet.
Economy. Dem admins have done considerably better than Repub ones on the economy for going on half a Century now but a conviction persists that the latter are better on the economy. As a friend frames it, the Repubs in power always find some way to screw up the economy and run up deficits and the Dems in power are left to invest in economic development and clean up the mess. More generally, business people prefer the way Republicans stick to Big Biz's free-market dogma. They still insist their tax cutting and deregulating policies are economically expansionary, even though the evidence piles up over the last four decades that they are not. But if you want the gov to protect worker's rights, to promote living wages and shared prosperity, to tax the rich fairly and promote sustainable economic growth, to curb corporate monopoly and reduce the cost of living for everyday Americans, or at least try to do these things, then again, however old and frail, you will vote for Biden, because that's what he's already been doing for going on four years now. Trump's economic model, by contrast, is crony capitalism and the rich-get-richer-while-the-poor-get-poorer, and only really benefits billionaires and conmen hustlers like him. That's it. In fact, if Dump's extreme plan for trade war tariffs and labor deportation were really enacted, as he promises and already alluded to, the economic impacts would be at best counter-productive and at worst catastrophic for the economy.
Crime. Most absurd of all, at this point, is the claim the Republicans are the party of law and order. Their candidate is a convicted felon. He has been indicted for trying to overthrow the 2020 election by violent force. Hundreds of his followers, his disheveled Brown shirts, have already been found guilty of attacking the police and trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. January 6, 2021 was obviously a failed attempt at "insurrection or rebellion," we all saw it on TV. If Trump were found guilty of instigating Jan 6 he would be in violation of the 14th Amd, Article 3, of the Constitution and disqualified from holding any office in the federal government. The effort of SCOTUS to delay this prosecution, rather than expedite it, or make the completion of his legal prosecution and due process verdict, a necessary prerequisite to his candidacy, is a colossal dereliction of duty and betrayal of the US Constitution. Conservatives hope instead, presumably, by delaying the legal process that he can be re-elected and thereby stop his prosecutions altogether (like Netanyahu in Israel). And more or less the same applies to Trump stealing boxes of top secret documents. Delaying his prosecution is a threat to US national security. Or his election interference in Georgia, or his fake elector scheme, or his cheating with Russia and Wikileaks in 2016. All these assaults on our free and fair elections and the failure to prosecute them constitute a Constitutional crisis. And if all this were not bad enough, the highest of high crimes, abetted by SCOTUS and corrupt elements in our legal system, MAGA Repugs promote and spread criminal violence, like nothing we've ever seen before. Trump inspires mass murderers and violent lunatics. And his MAGA minions spread domestic terrorism and death threats against public officials, public health professionals, public school officials, judges, election workers, you name it, like nothing before in American history. A vote for Trump is a vote for more criminal violence and conflict.
And this list is leaving out or not giving due attention to foreign policy and other issues. Maybe Biden isn't doing enough to stop the violence in Gaza but Trump cheers on calls for more violence against civilian Palestinians. Of course, we want, like Biden, to ally with Europe and other democracies around the world, the United Nations, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and various peace treaties and international humanitarian law protecting human rights. Not the murderous dictators and dirty oligarchs and violent imperialists Trump pals with. And we want to protect the meager social safety net we have in this country, Social Security, Medicaid, and Obamacare, or affordable health care, that the Republicans wish to destroy. Again, I can't remember in my lifetime a starker choice between two candidates and their leadership.
So maybe Trump looked like an activated Superhero and Biden a doddering Zombie at the debate. It doesn't really matter how strong Trump or how weak Biden appeared. A vote for Biden and the Democrats this fall is the vote for progress and a better future. A vote for Trump and the Republicans is a vote for more crime and more violence, more inequality and environmental destruction, more financial fraud, more sadistic bigotry and crony capitalist corruption. Whether Biden presides over his second term from a hospital bed or Kamala Harris has to finish his job this remains the case, the stakes, and the choices before us.
Addendum: Well, surveying the morning-after postmortems I saw some clips of Biden on the Jon Stewart show. I can better appreciate now some of the panic responses. Biden has some frightening looking senior moments. HCR points out Biden was scoring points, evident in the transcripts, but what I heard was muffled and indecipherable. Word is Biden got stronger and Trump's lies more ragged, less poised. Some sources called the debate for Biden. Here's CNN's Daniel Dale's fact check on the debate and Heather Cox Richardson's take, making the case for Biden better than he can.
CNN's Daniel Dale fact check's debate claims
Letters from an American, HCR
Oops, Biden's prep team, apparently, didn't get to this story from 2023 about Gish Gallop:
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