The disgraceful thing from last night was the complete lack of discipline from Dem pundits. Trump could have shit his pants and the GOP would have gone on TV right after and said he was clearly better than Biden. Biden has a bad night and the Dems make it worse. It’s horseshit.
For people who love to complain about how the Dems are bad at politics, there sure are a lot of people nodding their head as the Dems doing the worst job of politics I can remember because they agree with what's being said.
A lot of Dems, notably pundits and people who obsessively watch pundits, are too fixated on playing strategist and trying to figure out how "the voters" will react to everything. It's like they don't understand that they are also voters and their opinions on who is actually better matter too.
And it's actually contra to a lot of reactions I heard from normal non-broke-brained people I talked to about the debate whose major takeaway was "oh god i forgot how bad trump is"
They're devoted to squashing that narrative because they need a news cycle
Yes, I think a specific thing going on is that in the hyperactive armchair pundit scene most of us swim in Trump is already a known quantity, whereas for a lot of people that's the first time they've actually seen him talk at length in...years, probably
Biden made it bad. Blaming others is childish.
He did not deliver the performance he needed to deliver. He didn't even effectively combat Trump's childish bullshit. He looked feeble and incapable of thinking on his feet.
That's not a pundits fault. That's being an 81 year old with a stutter.
Okay, then if you're a Dem pundit your job is to use that to pivot to how fuckin' bonkers Trump was. Stay something like "I would have struggled to respond to what Trump was saying too when that guy was lying every three seconds". That's your job as a pundit.
And it was completely unpersuasive and only makes you look bad.
Pundits want to maintain cred and it's hard to do that while screaming that the sun is rising in the west.
Yep. A party of born losers unfit for the last 9 years of American politics. Spending untold energy trying to paper over the doddering husk leading the party only to have a collective public freakout at the exact moment they can't hide it anymore.
I said the same thing to my viewing partner, but I added if trump frothed at the mouth and spoke gibberish, R surrogates would’ve claimed it was the best performance ever.
I wonder if some D surrogates were already on other bandwagons, specifically Hillary or Bloomberg, and hoping for an excuse 🤷🏻♂️
I dont know. he had a bad night, and everyone recognized it. lying about it won't have made it any better.
I will enthusiastically vote for any candidate the Dems put up, though, because the alternative is terminal.
I’m glad you would enthusiastically vote for Harris, but Biden’s not stepping down.
I do think the Dems need a new Comms director asap and a good talking to about staying on message.
Dems have relied on pure negative polarization for a long time now--nobody agrees on what the Dems' vision is, but everyone from Josh Gottheimer to AOC hates Trump. So nobody feels any loyalty to the actual party.
The Dem party loves to pick a figurehead and then spend years following them around with dirt-filled shovels, just waiting for the moment they can bury them where they stand.
I’m a nobody in the suburbs. Every friend I called last night noticed how off Biden was. He has cognitive decline and we all saw it and we’re all terrified. It’s going affect to turn out for him. My friends and I will vote for him, but the low information voters…
Are you terrified because this is a new weakness in the eyes of voters it might matter with, or are you terrified because you were already terrified? Do you count as a normal voter because you called people immediately to talk about it? Did you talk about Trump?
Yes, I viewed it as a new weakness. I’m concerned low info voters won’t vote for an old man with dementia. I’m not a dem elite. Nothing new to say about Trump. He was the same as always…liar, rapist, fraudster, traitor, and felon.
This is a new question actually. I have watched like everyone how much Biden has aged in the last four years. But I haven’t truly been worried about it until last night.
Sorry to interject but from outside US looking in, Biden doesn’t look fit to be President right now let alone for next 4 years. It’s irresponsible for the most powerful nation on earth to be governed by someone in that state. Crazy. I really hope you can sort it out. Or we’re all fucked, frankly
Biden has had senior moments for over a decade and every indication is that it doesn’t make good memes because it makes it look like you’re just punching down at someone old.
That is the point of ideological cults isn't it? Ends justifying the means without a care about facts or integrity? Gotta really hammer home how the Dems are no better than the Republicans to those on the fence
Further, had that happened, we would have derided the Republicans non-stop for doing that.
Trump showed up to sell, Biden didn't. That's all there is here. And old mans ego could well cost us the country and a lot of people their lives and you're focused party discipline?
