(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Biden Has Had It (With the Naysayers, That is) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-07-16 The president — finally — is fighting mad. Determined to push forward, Biden tightens his circle and grows combative: President Joe Biden spent more than a week in meetings and on phone calls addressing Democrats’ concerns about his candidacy with a positive, conciliatory message about his path forward. At times, he even sounded contrite about his uneven debate performance, which prompted calls for him to suspend his re-election campaign. He took blunt questions about his mental acuity in stride. He smiled through suggestions from allies that he take a cognitive test or consider allowing someone younger to take his place on the Democratic ticket. He agreed that his supporters have legitimate concerns and promised to show them he’s up for the rigor of a presidential campaign and another four years in the White House. Then he’d had enough. OK, I was one of the people who, after the debate debacle, was calling for Biden to hand the nomination over to Harris. His demeanor in the debate seriously frightened me. I’m still not totally convinced he is making the best choice to beat Trump, but I feel a lot better about it now than I did a week ago — because Biden has gotten up off the mat and is slugging it out. We’ve been seeing signs of this in the past few days, with his impressive post-NATO news conference in which he displayed his usual impressive command of the issues in all their complexity. We saw it also in his remarks and in his Oval Office address after the Trump assassination attempt. We saw it in the campaign’s immediate response to the J. D. Vance pick for VP — a response which hasn’t let up. Biden, addressing NAACP, bashes Trump in bid to move beyond age questions “Just because we must lower the temperature in our politics … doesn’t mean we should stop telling the truth,” Biden told hundreds of Black supporters in an animated speech that regularly bashed Trump on race issues. “Who you are, what you’ve done, what you’ll do — that’s fair game. As Harry Truman said, I’ve never given anyone hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.” He blasted Trump on violence: Biden began by saying he was praying for Trump, who was injured during Saturday’s shooting, but quickly shifted into a forceful case against the former president. He criticized Trump for ignoring or downplaying political violence in cases with Black victims and inciting it in other cases, including the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “If you’re going to be outspoken on one, don’t be silent on others,” Biden said, referring to acts of racial violence in Charleston, S.C., and Buffalo and suggesting that Trump had said little about them. (This is an area where all Democrats have to do more: Hammer and hammer on just how much and how many Republicans from Trump on up [sic] have been stoking political violence. Blame Trump’s attempted assassination on Trump.) Biden also picked up on Trump’s “black jobs” gaffe in the debate: Biden sought to return to making that contrast on Tuesday before a friendly crowd, touting his record of delivering economic growth and appointing Black people to top positions while ridiculing Trump’s recent claim that immigrants were taking “Black jobs.” “I know what a Black job is — it’s the vice president of the United States,” Biden said to applause. “I know what a Black job is — it’s the first Black president in American history, Barack Obama.” Dark Brandon rides again. This is a Biden who may yet win. And oh yes, the media is still sniping at him about his age. (As witness the WaPo headline above.) The way to fix that is to make the focus about Trump. We have to break the spell of "Trump amnesia." Trump’s gish gallop of lies and nonsense caught Biden off guard at the debate, and let’s face it, a gish gallop is really hard to stand up against. (One of the many mistakes the Biden team made in setting up that debate was in giving Trump space to spew. Another was in not having an audience — Biden does best when he has one. A third mistake was in cutting off the microphones — because Trump continued to rant, but all we saw was Biden’s disbelieving facial reactions to the rant, which made no sense if you couldn’t hear Trump. And while I’m at it, a fourth mistake was in letting CNN do Biden’s makeup. And I could go on.) Biden has said that he will step aside if he is convinced he cannot win. There’s no convincing evidence of that; the polls are all over the lot, as polls have a habit of doing. And Trump may, as he often does, have made a mistake in picking Vance. (Is JD Vance a 'Massive Gift to Democrats'?) Oh, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m back up off the mat, too. 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