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Dear Friends,
It would have been better if the whole world hadn’t been watching. It would have been better to protect and nurture any possible lingering doubts among our many adversaries. Maybe America’s leader has some resolve? Competence? Determination? Alas, now there is no one left in the world who thinks that America even has a chief executive. Joe Biden isn’t in charge of anything.
I didn’t watch the debate last night because I had way better things to do. My daughter and I had to watch our nightly nine give a thrashing to the D-Backs down in Phoenix (nicely done, boys). And, besides, usually more important than the actual debate is the spin after the debate. I always find it easy to figure out what happened in a debate by checking Twitter and seeing how the various partisans are spinning things. The real upside benefit of that is that, well, I don’t have to watch the debate. So, after the final out, I pulled out my phone and my eyes bulged out of my head.
First up, a video of Claire McCaskell saying to a national audience something along the lines of “My job is to be a surrogate for President Biden, but tonight he just didn’t reassure anyone that he is up to the job.” Ooookay. That’s a pretty weird thing for a campaign surrogate to say. And then I start scrolling. Leftie after leftie, from progressive partisan hacks to standard-issue Washington Post types (but I repeat myself), completely trashing Joe Biden. They were calling for him to bow out of the race. The dismay was palpable. Apparently, Biden was an unmitigated disaster and we haven’t seen Democrats panic like this in—well, ever.
It all seemed a bit suspicious to me. Almost like all of these surrogates got the same memo telling them that once the debate was over the game plan was to go on TV and openly ratchet up the pressure for Biden to get out of the race. Even the New York Times got in on the act. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theory, but it might as well be. My theory is this: it was completely preplanned and coordinated. Campaign insiders and Democrat operatives (and journalists!) knew that Joe Biden was going to completely humiliate himself on that debate stage and they let him do it. This is why we had a debate in June. Everyone was wondering why we are having a Presidential debate so early in the year. Having the debate now, getting it over with, still gives the Democrat Party a sliver of an opportunity to change horses.
My theory is that “they,” the powers-that-be in the party (that would include the Clintons and the Obamas), have been trying to convince Joe Biden to step out of the race for the good of the party and the country. Joe Biden, being Joe Biden, which is to say a man of unlimited self-regard, flatly refuses. He thinks he deserves to be President. It has been his life’s ambition for five decades. It is the whole point of his lifetime of pandering, lying, and grifting. He’s finally grasped the ring at the twilight of his life, and he isn’t going to give it up. So “they” said, “Fine.” And they let him walk out on that debate stage knowing exactly what was going to happen. The moment it was over they set in motion Plan B: conduct the entire party and media ecosystem into a deafening drumbeat for his departure. Make it so loud and insistent that Biden has to concede. It isn’t a foolproof plan, but I certainly don’t have any better ideas. Plan C is the 25th Amendment.
Okay, that’s my theory. Others disagree, and I think their disagreements have a lot of merit. Noah Rothman at National Review thinks that what we saw from the pundit class was something of a spontaneous reaction, an instinctive overflow or outpouring of frustration stemming from the fact that every one of these people had been forced by their guild to lie about what they always knew for months and months on end. And then, when it appeared on TV in all its full glory (Joe Biden’s decline) they thought they were liberated to express their dismay. In other words, there was no plan at all; it was just the natural result of lying about something forever and then once the lie is exposed, you do the next best thing. Okay, cat is out of the bag; time to get rid of Biden!
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