Dem
51
GOP
49
The sharks are still circling. Now a second House Democrat, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), has called for Joe Biden to step aside. Democrats don't know what to do. Maybe in retrospect they should have paid a wee bit more attention to the voters, who have been telling them for years that Biden was too old.
Biden is not a quitter and is now starting to fight back. It took a while, but he is now going all out to save his candidacy. First, he is blaming his poor performance at the debate on being sleepy from the jetlag of international travel. He says it was so bad he almost fell asleep on stage. (V), who watched the debate in Boston and was back in Amsterdam about 36 hours later, can testify that you can eat a pint of melatonin if you want but it doesn't help a whit. If you are not sure which continent you are on, it is hard to string two coherent sentences together in a row. Maybe today's blog will demonstrate that. However, Biden's travel was on official business, so he is, per Supreme Court order, immune to all criticism.
Second, many people have said that if the debate performance was just a fluke, Biden can counter that by submitting to a live interview with a senior, respected journalist. Tomorrow he will do just that. He will be interviewed by ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Excerpts will air tomorrow, but the whole thing will be shown Sunday. If he can jump over that hurdle, maybe the storm will quiet and people will accept that he just had a bad night.
Third, the Biden campaign is trying to change the subject to the Supreme Court ruling and what King Donald I might do. Here's the ad. It is only 30 sec., so unless you are really, really busy, it is worth watching.
If you didn't watch the ad, it says that America was founded in defiance of a king but now the same Trump Supreme Court that overruled Roe v. Wade says that a president can commit a crime, because Donald Trump asked them to. It concludes that he led an insurrection and must never be allowed to be president again.
It is possible that the Court's ruling could help Biden more than Trump in the short run. The long run, too. It gives him something to talk about, like what damage an unaccountable president could do to women, Black people, minorities in general, and the country as a whole. Ad writers could go wild making up ads depicting troops forcing innocent people into "concentration camps" with a smiling Trump watching approvingly. Imagine a string of video clips showing Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jung-Un, and Trump each ranting about something. Unfortunately, no footage of King George III ranting about the upstart colonists has survived. Cue ads showing newspaper headlines reading: "Supreme Court Approves Trump's Ascension to Third Term after Melania Resigns the Presidency." The ruling could provide good material to scare people about Trump becoming a dictator for life.
Trump is definitely doing his part to help Biden. He has repeatedly called for a televised military tribunal in which Liz Cheney would be tried for treason. Her crime? Being a member of the congressional committee that investigated his attempted coup. His base will lap it up but we can easily imagine suburban voters thinking that a weakened, but kindly, old man is better than a powerful, but monstrous, old man. (V)