You seem to, since you say:
If you missed or forgot the “we beat Medicare” bit, then watch that again.
That would be appropriate to say if I were an outlier in calling his debate performance an absolute catastrophe.
I don’t know how reliable this is – Raw Story is generally more interested in sensationalist scoops than in verified facts, but still …
Is it your belief that if only half his party, half his supporters were not asking for him to step aside as candidate that he’d currently be communicating and projecting strength and confidence? The level of strength and confidence necessary to stage a major comeback, pulling the unenthused, the unengaged, the disappointed, into voters for him by Election Day?
The problem Biden is having is that most of the time since the debate he’s doing the same things over and over. Maybe they’re to help his stutter, I don’t know. But he keeps using stock phrases and fillers, seems to get lost as to the thrust of his argument, and has weird things going on with his voice modulation.
As I’ve seen a few columnists compare him to Lear, I offer this for a speech in which he declines the nomination:
I am a very foolish, fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
Yeah, and those phrases and intonation keep emphasizing his oldmannes: “Look” and “the idea”.
During the debate he also kept saying, “We’re in a situation in which,” and similar phrases, which did seem to be a stalling technique, perhaps to address the stutter, but it was again and again, and never was the phrase useful in actually constructing a meaningful, effective sentence.
Just to preempt criticism of the above: Yes, this is minor compared to other issues in the debate and thereafter and is not the main thrust of my argument.
It isn’t my native language, but I’ve been speaking it long enough to know that this is nonsense. Accepting loss because you know you gave it your best shot is just about the most generic answer you could give to that question, no matter your age.
Oh! No! He misspoke? Dear God! No president has ever done that before!
Yep. What matters here is perception, and in my view, things like “Leaked converstion shows Obama wants Biden to step down!” or “Here are five lawmakers who think Biden should resign!” have been much more damaging to the perception of how “strong and confident” Biden is than anything Biden himself has done or said.
And that’s not hyperbole. No, I mean it.
This has been litigated several times in this thread, but it’s a long thread.
Biden, due to his stuttering, has never been a particularly graceful public speaker, and particularly not during his presidency. He hesitates, and he stumbles over words from time to time.
The issue is that, in the last couple of months, it appears to a lot of us that things have changed for him, and not in a good way – and it’s not just the debate. He’s stumbling over words more, he’s mis-naming people, and he’s getting lost mid-sentence.
Is it a fatigue issue? Is it a neurological issue? Is it something else? We don’t know.
Accepting loss because you gave it your best shot is okay when you lose the Super Bowl. It’s not acceptable when you and your party and media aligned to your party have been saying for most of a decade that your opponent is a fascist and that his reelection will end democracy in America and usher in a thousand years of darkness.
Per NYT:
“Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, another vulnerable Democrat who faces a well-funded Republican challenger in this year’s election, has become the fourth senator to call on President Biden to drop out of the race. In a statement, he says that he agrees with voters from his state who “think the president should end his campaign.””
Everyone asking for Biden to drop is vulnerable.
While I don’t know the polling, Pelosi sure does and it’s enough to scare her and others into publicly asking Biden to step down. It must be awful.
The polling hasn’t moved. The donor class who have been worked into a frenzy by the media and the corps that control it are getting louder and pressuring the congressmen they bought and paid for fair and square to Do Something About It.
The Money is flailing around in rough water and they’re going to take our country down with them.
I think that’s right. If it was merely “bad,” the party would be ramping up and supporting the campaign as best they could. If it’s “hopeless,” they need to change course. It seems to me they have concluded it’s “hopeless.”
Actually, it has, as noted upthread. Trump had a very narrow lead until the debate. He’s had a 3-4% lead since.
May as well paste in Silver’s comment on the latest polls as well:
Last update: 11:45 a.m, Friday, July 19 : We’re seeing a lot of bad polling numbers for Joe Biden over the past 24 hours — although to be more precise, what we’re really seeing is Trump’s numbers spiking while Biden’s remain depressed. Indeed, this looks like something of an inflection point, which may reflect the impact of the start of the GOP Convention and the assassination attempt against Trump. Biden is now down nearly 4 points in our national polling average.
Biden is also at a new low in our forecast, with a 26 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. However, the model is designed to be cautious around the party conventions: it’s shaving a little bit off Trump’s numbers and also hedging toward its pre-convention forecast. If Trump sustains these numbers, the forecast will continue to get worse for Biden.
And here we clearly inhabit different realities and no conversation will resolve that.
Biden misspeaks. Always has. No problem with him having a minor misspeak. That was not a misspeak. It was jaw dropping, across the country pretty sure the was a simultaneous “oh shit” from hundreds of thousands of Democrats. And it kept coming.
There is no sweeping that under the rug with a nothing to see here.
You are completely correct that many people who have had in person less public interactions with him (not in his administration) are sounding the alarm based on what they know of his function, contributes to the perception that this is his current condition: varying from a mediocre communicator with misspeaks but lucid, to completely befuddled and incoherent losing his train of thought mid sentence.
The fact that half the party is worried about his cognitive and communicative capabilities is not the problem that causes the perception. The demonstrated performances are.
As noted it has. And I discount those moves as assassination attempt and convention associated.
What you keep failing to acknowledge is how bad not moving when you are mired behind is.
His polling is stuck at its floor. It’s acting like the floor and the ceiling are basically the same number. That is very very bad.
And yet, since the day of the debate, the ONLY place I’ve seen anyone even mention that line is on the SDMB. I asked a few of my coworkers today, Republican and Democrat, if they remembered that embarrassing thing Biden said about Medicare at the debate, and not one of them knew what I was talking about.
A lot of people are making assumptions of what “low information voters” think based on information that they aren’t even aware of.
So you think Biden should tell Kamala not to certify the ballots if Trump wins?
Not everyone wants him to step down. According to ABC News:
More than a thousand Black women leaders and allies have signed a letter in support of the Biden-Harris ticket.
In the letter, dated July 17 and addressed to the “Democratic Party leadership,” the signatories say they’re “writing to share our deep concern and dismay at the lack of unity being displayed by some of our elected democrats and Democratic Party leadership, who are not standing firmly and resolutely for the reelection of President Joseph Biden and his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris.”
“The Biden-Harris administration is running on a solid record of historic legislative accomplishments and a commitment to finish their agenda to improve the lives of all Americans, protect our rights, freedoms and democracy,” they continue, in part. “Further, we believe it is unfair and disruptive to judge President Biden for having a bad 90-minute debate performance against a serial liar who wants to destroy our democracy and be a dictator-in-chief.”
That’s a total fantasy. It really wasn’t nearly that big of a deal.