Angus Johnston: If Biden steps down, it won't be because of the Times or his critics in the party or left Twitter or even the polls. It will be because he has lost the confidence of the top echelons of the Democratic Party. Everything else is decoration.

If Biden steps down, it won't be because of the Times or his critics in the party or left Twitter or even the polls. It will be because he has lost the confidence of the top echelons of the Democratic Party. Everything else is decoration.

If the half-dozen most powerful people in the party were out there twisting arms telling senators and governors that they were confident that Biden is up to the job and sure that he's not dropping out, we'd see that. It'd be visible. We wouldn't be able to NOT see it.

I don't know for sure what's happening behind the curtain, but I know what it looks like when the Democratic Party's top leadership closes ranks in unity, and it doesn't look like this.

If the party's top officials were all wholeheartedly supporting Biden, nothing else would matter. Everything else would be noise. The ongoing slow-motion collapse of public support for his candidacy is a symptom of his lack of closed-doors support, not the cause of it.

Because here's the thing: All the evidence we have suggests that top Dems were as rattled watching the debate as everybody else was. We saw it on the cable news shows that night—everyone on screen, everyone sending the panels texts, was freaked out.

Last Thursday wasn't a "bad debate." It was a cognitive decompensation. And in the week since, Biden's people appear to have been unable to convince the folks who matter in the party that it was, in Pelosi's words, an "episode" rather than a "condition."

Has a single powerful Democrat given an on-camera interview forcefully making the case that Biden is cognitively healthy—or better yet, mocking the idea that he isn't—in the last week? Honest question. If it's happened, I haven't seen it.

I don't know - I think it DOES look like this. Schumer, Pelosi, Jeffries, Clyburn, and Obama haven't wavered at all. They can't tell their donors to shut up and get them to do it, but they're not giving any hints this is open.

Clyburn and Pelosi have entertained the possibility that he might step down. Obama sent out a tweet saying we should stick with him. Similar from Schumer. They're not deserting him, but they're not out making the case for him—they're just saying he's the nominee and they support him as such.

I don’t trust that the top leaders of the party aren’t relying on vibes created by Times’ editorials - they don’t seem to have good instincts and no one seems in charge of anything

If they weren’t so deferential/scared of the Times and its readers I think the campaign would be a lot more antagonizing with them - this is only one of their daily journalistic failures

All the evidence we have suggests that they were powerfully rattled on debate night, and that nothing has calmed them down since.

I find it odd that I keep seeing people calling it one bad debate. If it was that, no one would be freaking out. People are freaking out because he was frail, confused, and had garbled responses. The fear is that the SOTU was the exception, not the debate.

It’s odd because Trump makes no sense either so much of the time (not even talking about the substance)

That's because MAGA is a cult. Everyone not in MAGA already knows that about Trump. If you're asking why the media doesn't call it out? Because they're bad at their jobs.

Yes that’s my main issue actually - the media is failing and part of that failure is losing its mind about Biden

Weren’t we all? They had no strategy for Roe, they did nothing when Hochul pulled the rug out on the most visible climate change policy in the country completely reinforcing the idea that Dems have no principles and don’t want to govern when they have power. Deferring to the Times seems on par.

This would imply that the president has been walled off from the top leaders in his party enough that they weren’t able to quickly dismiss it. “Meh, bad night. I spoke with him yesterday and he was fine” would have been easy to say if it were true.

And if there’s truly been no reason to wall Biden off from the politicians in his party, then this is a failure of his campaign and senior White House staff. Because creating the vibe of secrecy is bad.

The apparent lack of advance knowledge or subsequent response to Hochul killing congestion pricing already convinced me that there’s absolutely no communication among any of those people but I attribute it to incompetence not bc they think Biden can’t make decisions

Meh, I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think any White House would get involved in day-to-day policy disputes at the state level. Unless you just mean if it’s an example of how an executive can be distanced from their party and fuck up.

My pet theory here — if Biden truly hasn’t declined much in the past few months — is that he’s been walled off to shield him from criticism over Israel/Gaza, and party leaders are interpreting this as being shielded because of his age.

I'm not sure those things can be separated!

The freakout at the top began before the Times wrote a single word on the debate. The freakout at the top is upstream from everything else.

Totally, but at this point it's a complex system with different parts feeding into each other. I mean, it's broadly accepted that Tom Friedman and Morning Joe have an influence on Biden himself.

Intolerance

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Who do you think that is? Who are you talking about?

I name a bunch of names in the thread.

It's a great day to read the Declaration Of Independence. SCOTUS is rogue. www.archives.gov/founding-doc...

Declaration of Independence: A Transcriptionwww.archives.gov Note: The following text is a transcription of the Stone Engraving of the parchment Declaration of Independence (the document on display in the Rotunda at the National Archives Museum.) The spelling

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