Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
President Joe Biden isn't going anywhere, he insists. He remains committed to his candidacy and is confident that he will indeed beat Donald Trump in November. And his strategy of toughing it out against all the critics calling for him to step away from the race appears to be paying off -- at least so far.
Will President Joe Biden's re-election candidacy survive the week? That is the question on every Democrat's mind right now, as the forces line up both pro and con. Whatever happens, it pretty much has to happen soon. If Biden does somehow survive this week, then his chances of riding out the entire "Pass the torch, Joe" storm will have increased, that much seems somewhat certain. But with Congress back in session, all the elected national Democrats will be in one place again, and in both the House and Senate they are planning on holding very tense caucus meetings tomorrow.
This week, the nation celebrated its 248th birthday. (Feel free to insert a "Biden's so old" joke here, if you wish....)
It's been a rather excruciating week, aside from enjoying the fireworks last night. The entire political media universe has been completely consumed with the question of whether President Joe Biden is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump, or whether he should instead gracefully step aside and allow the Democrats to nominate someone younger who might have a better chance at victory in November. We have to admit, we've never really seen anything like this (but then we are too young to remember Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968). The pressure on Biden seems to only be growing, day by day, as more and more people come to the conclusion that Democrats would be better served with a new nominee.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
-- Preamble to the Declaration of Independence
That line will be widely quoted across this land today, in parks and bandstands, on radio and in newsprint, from California to the New York islands, in countless big-city parades and from a myriad of small-town gazebos.
The Democratic Party is now in a full-blown crisis of confidence. Part of this is media-fed, since writing "Democrats In Disarray" columns comes so naturally to most pundits, but it really goes a lot deeper than that. There are real worries out there that President Joe Biden is not going to be up to the task of defeating Donald Trump. There were worries about that before the debate, actually, since his poll numbers have been so anemic for so long. But after America saw Biden stumble through a 90-minute debate with Trump, these worries have gotten a whole lot more acute and immediate.
Back in the early 1980s (before he was in his early 80s), the punk band The Clash put out a song asking what has now become Joe Biden's new existential question:
President Joe Biden now has absolutely nothing to fear from picking up the phone and ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate Donald Trump. Or perhaps (and more to the point) ordering them to take out two or three Supreme Court justices. These would all be "official acts" of a sitting United States president (the commander in chief giving an order to the military), and therefore Biden would be completely immune from any fear of prosecution afterwards. That is what the Supreme Court just ruled, today.
I cleared the decks for this column, preferring to spend today reviewing the first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle instead of writing a standard "Friday Talking Points" column. But if I had gone with my weekly format, President Joe Biden would easily have won my Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award, hands down. His debate performance last night was not just disappointing, it was downright abysmal.
The first 2024 presidential debate is now mere hours away. I am going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction for tonight: Donald Trump will announce his vice-presidential pick at some point during the debate. He could do so very early on, in an effort to rattle President Joe Biden and/or to distract from whatever question Trump had been asked (but didn't want to answer), or he could wait until his closing statement and go out with a bang. But my guess is that Trump's big reveal will happen at some point tonight.
Maybe it's just us, but this week seemed like a waiting game. Perhaps the midweek holiday had something to do with it, but everything in the political world right now seems to be on hold in anticipation of next Thursday's first presidential debate. The debate is going to be incredibly early in the campaign schedule, but nobody really knows what this will mean until after the dust settles. Who will benefit the most from the earliness of it all? Well, that all depends on how they do, of course.