It wasn’t just one bad debate. Questions were swirling around his competency well before the debate. For instance, this 2/24 Daily Show episode filmed three months before the debate:
He has segments with Biden looking confused while giving speeches and his aides going on talk shows saying how sharp he is. After showing clips of Biden looking confused at press conferences, he has a segment with his aides saying Biden is fine. The transcript of one segment goes:
This was three months before the debate. It’s not going to be a good strategy to frame the debate performance as a one-off when there are numerous videos of Biden’s confused behavior months before the debate.
After the debate he went on to do several interviews, including with Lester Hold and George Stephanopolous, where he stumbled over his words and made nonsensical statements, got defensive and belligerent, and did absolutely nothing to disabuse anyone of the notion that he’d had mental decline. It was far more than just “one bad debate.”
Because who gives a shit? I’m not here to defend Biden. Biden’s not going to be on a ballot ever again, and the quicker the party can move on the better. I want to win in 2028. Having to talk about Joe Biden isn’t going to give us a winner.
Yeah ok, that’s not a “platform.” But what a noble declaration.
Probably not. Many people like Pete, so I suspect there will additional posts positing him as a viable candidate.
Are you suggesting that you feel obligated to repeat your opinion that Pete can’t win because he’s gay every time someone posts about him?
I know this might be hard to imagine, but bear with me here for a moment. Have you considered, just maybe, just possibly that if someone mentions Mayor Pete, that you could… deep breath now..
. not respond? Crazy, I know! But it just. might. work.
Why do you feel obsessed over my opinion? My opinion isnt odd , many people have it. Maybe, just maybe you could drop this weird thing you got going and get back to to the real subject?
Personally I like Newsom- not a great choice, but he isnt doing great in the polls-
Polling aggregation site Race to the WH currently shows Harris, who lost to Trump in 2024, leading the pack with a polling average of 27.2 percent. She is followed by Ocasio-Cortez in second at 15.9 percent, Buttigieg in third at 12.8 percent, Booker is fourth at 8.6 percent and Newsom is fifth at 7.1 percent.
It is very unlikely ANY Democrat would be able to reverse the damage done by DJT. It isn’t just a Harris problem. Even with majorities in both chambers of Congress this will take years to undo.
I know Harris is tainted by losing to the Orange Peril, but in retrospect I think the Dems were kneecapped by the seemingly incessant drumbeat of “The sky is falling!!!” (from the so-called MSM as well as Faux et.al.). So there’s a part of me that would like to see her try again. Whether the supposed corruption of the Biden administration is still an issue in 2027 or thereabouts will probably play into her decision.
Just MHO, which is worth (at best) what you paid for it.
Nixon lost and came back, Biden lost and came back, Churchill, and even trump lost and came back. So, yes- a mark against her, but hardly disqualification.
Re coming back, I certainly think that Harris remains a theoretically possible candidate for 2028. Things that work against her at the current moment:
The questions of whether there was a “coverup” of Biden’s infirmity and whether she was culpable in that (also, if she was culpable, was it really that bad of a thing). My guess is that it was more of Biden’s immediate handlers that propped him up and people a bit more distant were not willfully complicit. Still, it doesn’t look great.
Probably her worst flub of the campaign trail: being unable or unwilling to say what she would have done differently than Biden did. Of course, this was a bit of a lose-lose situation, but at least throwing out a few token disagreements, etc., would have sufficed. This is sure to come up again in 2028.
One criticism since the election that may be apt is that Harris hasn’t been a leader since losing. Again, this is a bit of a lose-lose situation, since, had she tried to say or do something, the reaction from many (including perhaps a few on our side) would have been, “You just lost–shut up!”
I think she can recover from all of these things, and I don’t think they are all that terrible. The biggest thing to overcome, however, is having lost in the first place.
Kamala Harris is on the FBI director’s enemies list. Biden’s diagnosis suggests to me that they may skip over Joe and arrest her. I’m not predicting that. But it’s a serious risk that they’ll arrest her if she climbs too high in the polls, or is nominated. MAGA plays for keeps.
You can run for office from jail. But if swing voters want normalcy after Trump, nominating someone with jail risk is high risk.
Depending on the state of the country, Kamala losing might be a positive. If we’re in a deep recession w/ stagflation, travel restrictions, etc I think “I wouldn’t have done this shit” could be a powerful message.
She’s not my top pick, but I wouldn’t necessarily think it’s a disaster if she runs/win the nom.
I was glad to vote for Harris, and far preferred her to Twitler, but she spent more than a billion dollars in a campaign which made starkly clear the risk which Trump posed to the nation… and still lost, including all seven swing states. I would be very surprised if she could get any traction in the 2028 primaries.
There’s a whole book coming out about how Biden wasn’t fine, which features mostly the observations and opinions of Democrats:
I’m not taking a side as to whether Biden was fine as president but am merely pointing out that Harris could get some flak over the issue. (Biden wasn’t “fine” as a candidate, however, as was obvious from the debate, and no one his age at the time should run for president. Period.)
Okay, but, “Why be absent during those months?” will be the criticism.
