US Politics, July 2024 - "Will you just drop out, man?"

young biden looks like connor o’malley

which is why when, as generously as I can put this, some of the most dyed in the wool dem voters who follow brooklyndaddefiant on twitter or who paste blogs from the eric feigl-ding of popular historians or whatever wonder why the media isn’t spending more time fact-checking trump’s debate performance, or when they liken this to the clinton e-mails panic, it just scans as incredibly naive: this is a genuine crisis of confidence among the chattering class of the very institutions not only on which their careers depend but in which they seemed to have had true, unshakeable faith. it’s been a long time coming and it’s incredibly unfortunate that it’s happened four months before an important election, but here we are

― brony james (k3vin k.), Friday, July 5, 2024 2:03 PM (forty-eight minutes ago)

The chattering classes will continue to chatter -- profitably -- should Trump win reelection in November. I've no idea how to gauge their sincerity: I guess Van Jones is one of the party's true believes, though I've never forgotten even though his own chattering class colleagues have how he said Donald Trump became president in spring 2017 after a SOTU.

Like tipsy and a couple of us posted on Wednesday, I think what we're seeing the last couple days is the combination of appetite for a story that's the normal instinct of reporters, plus, I'd suggest, the genesis of a story from people who are at least on basic levels more three-dimensional human beings than MAGA types wanting to confide misgivings they'd suppressed. The combination has produced a conflagration far hotter than the HRC email scandal. I've never seen anything like it. It's personal for the sources -- anonymous and on-the-record -- because they still have souls. Adam Johnson posted the following yesterday:

NYT, Axios and CNN are not giving up, they are going all the way on this. They will keep this fever pitch at an 11 nonstop for weeks, regardless if there’s any new dissent. They will kidnap and force a damaging quote from a county commissioner in Duluth if they have to. It’s OVER

— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) July 3, 2024

Okay this is getting annoying. Some of these tweets are from the same people who’d been saying “Biden is too old, he can’t win” for along time and now that the Libs have caught up, I guess instead of just taking a victory lap saying “I told you so” instead we’ll lose because Libs are freaking out?

Speaking for myself, Biden should drop out: a damned-if-you-do-etc. position because the Beltway green room denizens are calling for it too.

Okay this is getting annoying. Some of these tweets are from the same people who’d been saying “Biden is too old, he can’t win” for along time and now that the Libs have caught up, I guess instead of just taking a victory lap saying “I told you so” instead we’ll lose because Libs are freaking out?

― Dick Cavett Poo Party (Boring, Maryland), Friday, July 5, 2024 3:10 PM

yeah Adam Johnson is not LOL a fan of the Dem establishment. I quoted him only because his thread expresses surprise at the degree to which The Political Press has attacked Biden with such virulence.

More big-time donors are through with Biden

https://deadline.com/2024/07/biden-donors-outrage-abigail-disney-barry-diller-1236001923/

I know about Adam Johnson, it's now that at least one or two "left" commentators have now pivoted to "actually it would have been okay if everyone had immediately rallied around Biden (ignore my previous skeets/tweets lambasting the Dem establishment for refusing to face facts) but now the libs are going to lose the election by freaking out".

That’s an… interesting way to read Johnson’s tweet.

I know, it’s like people are so accustomed to pissing all over establishment liberal voices — with good reason in a lot of cases — that even when those voices are belatedly saying things they agree with, they assume it’s a trap or it must be wrong because how can Thomas Friedman and David Brooks be right? (It’s a fair question, of course.)

MA governor Maura Healey knows this campaign is a wash

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/05/maura-healey-biden-debate-consider-dropping-out-00166654

purely in terms of the news media it's obvious that the blood is in the water and the piling on won't abate any time soon. too many angles left to play out.

the dynamic is familiar enough. unless a bigger story kicks this one to the curb very soon the initial wound will be relentlessly probed, picked at, and enlarged until the story shifts to how fatally wounded the candidate has become, if only because they let the original story run away from them and get so big.

all this this will eventually move public opinion based on 'so much smoke means there must be a fire'. that's how it generally works.

I was just driving through South Carolina and got the opportunity to flip off a bunch of trump supporters organizing a trump boat rally. Not as satisfying as I hoped.

Be careful with flipping off those assholes. You don’t want be tailed by idiots with guns

I genuinely think this is a winning message lol pic.twitter.com/ycKK8Nm3Xz

— John DiLillo (@JohnDiLillo) July 5, 2024

Me the instant someone simply calls the weirdest man on earth “weird” https://t.co/Z9zPa8AJUY pic.twitter.com/Sc9jJV3MMq

— Jason Kirk (buy my novel) (@JasonKirk_fyi) July 5, 2024

I wasn't thinking about Johnson specifically, I don't go to Twitter anymore.

MA governor Maura Healey knows this campaign is a wash

do people like Healey? I know scott does....I was impressed with her when she won the governorship and I read and saw some speeches by her, she seemed, like Whitmer, to be a good potential party leader. But I also seem to recall there being some backlash.

haha, i really just like the idea of her. i like the idea of following her into battle. and those dimples! but i haven't really been paying too much attention to what she's been doing. i don't read the Boston Globe. she reminds me of someone who might have played paddle tennis with my parents in the 70s. in the woods. someone they met at the UU church. in the woods. we did everything in the woods back then. what we did was secret.

Biden totally used the age thing as a speech tag line today. "Was I too old...to create blah blah jobs...was I too old to...blah blah Medicare?" and he yelled that he was staying in the race twice really loudly. and called Trump a liar and a one-man crimewave and blah blah. he's staying with the crowd long after his speech too. shaking hands. proof of life.

I met her once, she was very chill

and he mentioned "people trying to get me to drop out..."

maybe it was all an elaborate long con where he just gets stronger and younger as the weeks go by thanks to the experimental drugs they start giving him. then he can ride the underdog chumbawumba thing and be the ol' joltin' joe of yore.

“her” being Maura Healy, I no longer get xpost notifications

all this this will eventually move public opinion based on 'so much smoke means there must be a fire'.

This is exactly backwards. The public opinion has been there for months if not years. There have been many polls with many people saying they think Biden is too old. Any suggestion this is some kind of media-created hysteria is just bizarre. This is an actual problem, and it is one that is visible to most people in this country.

yeah the fire has been raging for a long time the industrial sized exhaust vents are just starting to fail

I haven’t really followed adam johnson’s work in a long time and don’t remember his MO really, but I guess pro-biden, but leftistly is a lane that needs to be filled. what’s glenn greenwald up to these days?

re: healy, my main beef with her as someone who lived in boston the past 5 years is the dire state of the MBTA. although I just moved to…los angeles, so maybe I’ll remember her a bit more fondly in comparison

i don't think any governor or mayor is ever beloved in Boston, are they? maybe marty walsh was beloved. i like marty walsh. he should run for president. he looks like a terrifying boston cop from the 50s but he's actually a really rad dude. but he's all NHL right now and making some real cash. not that city or cabinet cash.

marty walsh is also more joe biden then joe biden. child of irish immigrants! unions! alcoholism! hockey! and when he talks you think he's going to tell you about the time that he caught Whitey Bulger. he's fun.

This is exactly backwards. The public opinion has been there for months if not years.

I was thinking more of the collapse of his voter base. he has been polling very consistently since he announced his intention to run again. Many people have been able to surmount their reluctance to vote for such an elderly president up until now. That seems about to cave in on him.

Any suggestion this is some kind of media-created hysteria is just bizarre.

I didn't suggest this was not a real story, only that it is a media feeding frenzy and it won't abate (unless some bigger story supplants it -- which seems very unlikely). I don't expect Biden can pull this out of the fire by more frequent public showcasing. I expect it to play out with his withdrawal. The question in my mind today is how smoothly or messily it is managed.

ABC just played a couple of advance clips of the interview. In one, Stephanopoulos asks Biden if he watched the debate afterward; slight pause, "I don't think I did." Pointing this out may be nitpicking, but that's exactly the kind of answer that doesn't work at all post-debate.

(Which I'm sure is why that chose to play that--if that's the worst of the interview, that's not too bad. But again, I don't think it matters in the end.)

they made him all pumpkin for the interview. so much makeup. just a liiiiiitle corpse-like.

this whole campaign of biden’s is now an extended riff on the “they’re gonna know” meme

Basically what tipsy posted earlier: "I'm guessing it'll be kind of a wash, not a triumph or disaster." Not right in the middle, though--I'd say he made his situation worse. His stubbornness was a little alarming.

E.g. (if he's being honest): he doesn't believe his approval is at 36%, and he doesn't believe he's behind right now.

Welp. That sucked.

Was anyone stunned that this is a disaster?

He can’t even call Trump a felon. What kind of cowardly shit was that?

Hey beamish , you’re getting on my nerves

https://images.axios.com/xbebamEO1VtiK33PU01LORjk8dw=/1920x1080/smart/2024/07/05/1720193917660.png

I only turned on the last 2 minutes and it didn’t seem great, and then they cut straight to the pundit panel and the first guy was like “This interview is not going to reassure Democrats…”

Like, this ought to be it, right? What cards do they think they have left?

Also lol at Trump, sure bud.

And big credit to the Biden campaign or whoever it is that’s been pumping out the Project 2025 agitprop. Definitely successful viral campaign, and the right way to give “death of democracy” talk some traction. My social media feeds have been swamped by Project 2025, in a good way.

One of Biden's odder answers tonight--haven't heard it brought up yet--had to do with his being distracted because Trump kept yelling after his mic was turned off. (He quickly added that the debate was his fault, though, and he wasn't blaming others--which he was.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought the debate was mostly a split-screen all the way. Trump went into his Mussolini pose a lot as Biden spoke, but I don't remember him looking like he was talking. The mic-off thing seemed to backfire, if anything, because it saved Trump from himself.

One 👀 House Democrat on President Biden’s interview tonight:

“It made me sad. Completely out of touch with reality and insulated from truth.”

“I’ll be breaking my silence soon.”

— Julie Tsirkin (@JulieNBCNews) July 6, 2024

Google doc being circulated by some Dem insiders making the "Case for Kamala." Persuasive enough imo.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1xVQ5GXHhl58g2cE35g11llVAUuCQ8Tqa4suUlUEq0DA/mobilebasic?pli=1

The people currently advising the New York Times (because they're not advising Biden) have been wrong about everything for decades.

Heed their wise counsel if you want.

Apologies for being incredibly pissed off at this horrible situation. By all means, don’t look at what I post and don’t respond to me, Calstars

Those stupid Dark Brandon memes cannot save him?

Well time is on the Biden camp’s side. If he just stays in the race for another few weeks, they get the nomination done and then it will for sure be too late for anything but hopes n prayers and probably picking out a nice golf retirement community for Biden to move to in January.

Jimmy Carter hasn't died yet, has he? maybe he can run