(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Biden Should Resign. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-07-05 This is not going to be a popular post here. I figure it is best to get that out of the way now. However, I am a believer that on important issues, examining both sides is a necessary step to fully exploring a problem and arriving at the best choice. I have read many front page stories here on DailyKos over the last few days since the debate and all of them are arguing that Biden should stay in. It was one debate. The media is unfair. Donald Trump is also in decline but you never hear about that. Trump’s unfit for office but you don’t see a dozen different articles on the New York Times arguing that he should drop out. He got better as the night went on. A parade of excuse making. Well, I think that Biden should drop out of the race. I wasn’t always in this position. I felt that a lot of the things that Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo wrote about the obvious problems of trying to switch to a different candidate made a lot of sense. But we get new information in, and the healthy thing is to reassess based on that. For a year or longer now, I have been frustrated on why we almost never saw Biden actually out on the campaign trail. He passed on doing an interview during prime time during the Super Bowl. He’s so seldom giving interviews at all. I see him tweeting out things on the campaign trail, but not out in front of cameras very often. I used to think that this was political malpractice by his campaign team. They were so convinced that Donald Trump would implode on his own, that they felt the best course of action was to sit back and wait for it to happen. The “prevent defense” to allude to football once again. Watching the debate, I understood then that I had simply gotten it wrong. His campaign staff was protecting Biden because he is simply in decline. He doesn’t always have the energy. Axios reports that he’s “dependably engaged” between 10:00am and 4:00, which is...just awful to hear. It implies that he can’t be reliably counted on to be engaged outside of those hours. The presidency is not a 10-4 job. It isn’t a job that you can have “good days and bad days”. It is quite simply the hardest job in the entire world and you simply cannot have nights like Biden had during the debate where he was just visibly incoherent and out of it for stretches. It was not a stutter. It was not a cold. These things may have made the situation worse, but that was Joe Biden having a bad day mentally and physically. The issue is that this is a high stakes situation and our standard bearer at their very worst simply can’t be that unfocused. He talked about beating Medicare. He credited Donald Trump with the largest tax cut in history (WITHOUT making it clear that it was overwhelmingly slanted towards the rich). He started answering a god damned layup question about abortion and them somehow wandered into immigrant killings which allowed Donald Trump to demagogue about migrant crime without coming across as being quite as flagrantly racist as he is because he wasn’t the first person to bring up immigrant crime sprees. He talked about fifteen “thousand” new jobs created. We have seen this before ladies and gentlemen. A liberal lion hangs on well past when they should, and then disaster happens and you can’t unring that bell. Her name was Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her refusal to step aside when she had gotten too old is a mistake that is going to haunt this country and possibly the entire world for a damn generation. Her final mistake of not letting President Obama appoint her successor when we had the chance probably undid a lifetime of good work. And now, President Biden is about to commit the same mistake. x REPORTER: Are you dropping out of the race or are you completely ruling that out? BIDEN: Completely ruling it out. ...You've been wrong about everything so far. You were wrong about 2020, you were wrong about 2022...Remember the red wave? You were wrong about 2023. pic.twitter.com/j62fbFM5LI — JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) July 5, 2024 Another DailyKos diary is laughing and painting this as a good thing. I think it is walking right into disaster. The debate crystalized a narrative that simply isn’t going to go away. Once the entire country is talking about whether or not you should drop out or not, the ballgame is already lost. It isn’t a bell that can be unrung once it is rung. Before, we Democrats could push back about Republican gaslighting and flagrantly false, untrue narratives. We could point to Donald Trump ranting Herschel Walker style about shark killings and the late, great Hannibal Lector. It doesn’t matter if the media has an unfair standard where they are laser focused on whether Biden is fit or not when his opponent is so obviously not fit. You have to play through bad refereeing and adjust to it if you want to win anyway. The Democrats have a chance to reset with Kamala Harris and whichever future star she wants to add to her ticket along with a quarter billion dollar war chest to run against a fatally flawed and extremely weak candidate like Donald Trump. His weaknesses are incredibly obvious and easy to take advantage of. (Something that Biden was simply not able to do in real time when it most mattered.) Biden can do one last heroic act and make Kamala Harris the first black woman president. Give her all the powers and advantages of incumbency and the Democratic Party an vigorous, energetic, young standard bearer to sound the clarion call to lead us all into the most important battle of our lifetime. The Great War is upon us. And we can’t have a general who only sometimes has the energy and strength to lead us. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/5/2251793/-Biden-Should-Resign?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/