Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.
It’s not just the debate performance, it’s the months of Biden being sheltered from any unscripted speaking, his relatively sparse interview schedule, the Hurr report, his refusal to do interviews following the debate, his refusal to take any kind of cognitive test, and reports that when he does do supposedly unscripted interviews his team has been feeding the interviewer questions.
I don’t have any way to know what goes on in biden’s head, but if the debate was a fluke then both Biden and his team have been acting very irrationally before and since.
On the other hand, if we assume his handlers are acting rationally then we can only assume that they believe his speaking ability has gotten so bad that even at this point putting him in front of reporters will only make his image worse.
Also the debate was pretty fucking bad. Don’t forget his team basically got everything they wanted in terms of no audience, cut microphones etc. and they had weeks to prepare. Biden should have been at his best for the debate and his best didn’t seem very good.
I don’t totally disagree with you, but the logical conclusion is that if we get trump again and he goes batshit crazy the dems aren’t going to have a leg to stand on regarding the 25th amendment.
I’m worried that the democrats are playing the short game again and we’re all going to suffer.
And normally absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, but the total lack of transparency is a bad look for an administration that supposedly has nothing to hide.
1 if he can’t get up and speak coherently for an hour at a time I’d argue he actually isn’t doing the job. Communicating clearly and responding to crises at all hours is crucial to the job.
2 there’s little proof that Biden is actually the one calling the shots even ignoring his lack of public appearances
Bad take. Biden clearly isn’t up for the job anymore. If it really was “just a cold” he would be out doing unscripted interviews and reassuring the public that he isn’t too confused to work after 5pm. The fact that he isn’t means his team thinks it’s more likely than not that he can’t actually convince the public that he’s still with it.
Putting someone else in is a risk but keeping him in is a bigger risk. Models are predicting a 60-70% chance of trump winning if the election was run today. This ignores that now the trump team and conservative media will now be pushing the age issue constantly. Who is going to be confident in Biden after he hides away from the public for the next few months and then drops out of the second debate?
Last, I’m deeply uncomfortable with the Democratic Party giving cover to a president that isn’t mentally fit for the job. There was so much talk about following norms and respecting the office of president while it was trump in the white house, but now some dems are openly saying they’re ok with Biden being controlled by his cabinet and family. Even if it all works out and Bidens cabinet runs the country for 4 more years it’s going to cast a long shadow on future elections where republicans can point to Biden as proof that democrats don’t respect the office and don’t even care if the nominee is competent.
Offering to run instead of Biden at this point would basically be political suicide, so it’s no wonder nobody has stepped up. If Biden backs out though the math changes significantly. This is t a very convincing argument.
I agree with you there, but I think the upper class is going to increasingly push their agenda through the democrats rather than the republicans, and I think the republicans though perfectly willing to sell out will regardless lose power if they can’t seriously cement their hold somehow.
At this point the downside is that if that debate is the best he can do then he’s absolutely going to lose.
If he does make it to Election Day without dropping out or dropping dead then yeah we may as well vote for him, but that seems like a terrible position to be in.
I disagree with this, I think the Republican Party is waning and they’re now in the sweet spot where they have a large enough base to enact a fascist takeover but not enough to win by appealing to the electorate. If they aren’t able to change the rules in their favor in the next couple cycles I think they become further marginalized and lose their chance.
That’s not to say we won’t face a similar problem again after we have a party realignment, but I do think the GOP specifically has a limited window in which to seize power.
I genuinely feel like the climate is just a no win situation from a political perspective. Any real solution has pretty serious tradeoffs so either you take small low impact steps which are panned as being too little too late, or you take bold steps that hurt some significant group economically.
Not even close. Despite the hype being pushed by tech companies the latest wave of AI has extremely niche use cases and it’s already beginning to plateau.
My first thought was that a couple cops are going to get hurt in traffic accidents and then their union is going to point to the increased injury rate as a reason for further militarization
The problem isn’t that the energy is too cheap, it’s that there’s too much of it, which is why it’s so cheap. An electrical grid can only support so much power and there is no cost effective way to store enough energy to run the grid for any appreciable amount of time, so it all must be used or else the system becomes unstable.
And he’s been saying for weeks that Biden is unlikely to win and should drop out