Political Observer engages in some Political Archaeology.

Headline: It’s risky, but Joe Biden needs to give way to someone who can beat Donald Trump

Sub-headline: The president had one job: to prove he was strong enough to take on his predecessor. Now Democrats must act, for America’s sake – and the world’s

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/28/joe-biden-democrats-donald-trump

Mr. Freedland almost makes political noises reminiscent of ‘Morning Joe’ on the burning ‘Biden Question’ : beginning with 3:50 is the maudlin chatter about Joe’s ‘love of Biden, Jill and his family’: Norman Rockwell was better at producing American Kitsch! But this is also about the utter failure of American Broadcast News, as America abandons ‘Morning Joe’ for ‘Joe Rogan’ !

Freeland’s approach is the bloated ‘World Historical’ , as expressed the ‘The Fate of West’ in the sub-headline. But nothing quite matches Freedland’ s particular brand of panic steeped in hysterics:

What was the worst moment? Perhaps when one especially rambling sentence of Joe Biden’s ended in a mumbled, confused declaration that “We finally beat Medicare”, as if he were the enemy of the very public service Democrats cherish and defend. Maybe it was when the president was not talking, but the camera showed him staring vacantly into space, his mouth slack and open? Or was it when he was talking, and out came a thin, reedy whisper of a voice, one that could not command the viewer’s attention, even when the words themselves made good sense?

For anyone who cares about the future of the United States and therefore, thanks to that country’s unmatched power, the future of the world, it was agonising to watch. You found yourself glancing ever more frequently at the clock, desperate for it to end, if only on humanitarian grounds: it seemed cruel to put a man of visible frailty through such an ordeal.

In that sense, the first – and, given what happened, probably last – TV debate between the current and former president confirmed the worst fears many Biden supporters have long harboured over his capacity to take on and defeat Donald Trump. For more than 90 excruciating minutes, every late-night gag about Biden’s age, every unkindly cut TikTok video depicting him as doddery and semi-senile, became real. There was no spinning it, despite White House efforts to blame a cold. Joe Biden delivered the worst presidential debate performance ever.

Is this Freedland’s Gethsemane moment?

Editor: The Reader is left with 963 words of ‘analysis’ I’ll engage in ‘sampling’ from this bloated text:

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Expectations were rock bottom:

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For one thing, Trump’s entire framing of this race is strong v weak: he offers himself as a strongman, against an opponent too feeble to lead and protect the US in an increasingly dangerous world.

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But, no less important, Biden’s inability to deliver clear, intelligible statements meant Donald Trump’s lies went unchallenged.

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There were dozens more in that vein, an unceasing firehose of lies.

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As the former Obama administration official Van Jones put it after the debate, this is a contest of “an old man against a conman” – but the weakness of the former is allowing the latter to prevail.

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Editor: on Trump:

He is a failed coup leader, nationalist-populist menace and racist who would suck up to the world’s autocrats and throw Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s wolves: he should be allowed nowhere near power.

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Editor: on ‘expectations’:

Indeed, that is why the White House opted to have the debate so unusually early: to allay fears about the president’s age and to reframe the race not as a referendum on Biden, but as a choice.

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Editor: On Biden as a ‘proud and stubborn man’:

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Some imagine the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having a quiet word, but Biden is a proud and stubborn man who feels he was passed over too long, including by those two.

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Editor: Jill Biden provides a kind of solace as antidote to the glaring reality:

Some say the only person who could ever persuade him to do that is his wife, Jill. But after the debate, she loudly congratulated her husband, albeit in a manner that reinforced the sense of a man well past his prime. “Joe, you did such a great job!” she said. “You answered every question! You knew all the facts!”

Editor: on the possibility of a Biden replacement:

The party could throw it open to a contest fought out at its convention in August among the deep bench of next-generation Democratic talent – the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, her California counterpart, Gavin Newsom, and others – but that could be messy, bitter and rushed.

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Editor: Freedland in his final paragraph repeats the current political wisdom of the Biden as ‘a good and decent man’ : ‘Morning Joe’s maudlin chatter seems to have infected , emboldened other apologists? Yet this reader recalls the Joe Biden of another political time:

CNN — 

Joe Biden in a 1993 speech warned of “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” and said they must be cordoned off from the rest of society because the justice system did not know how to rehabilitate them.

Biden, then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the comments on the Senate floor a day before a vote was scheduled on the Senate’s version of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

His central role in shaping and shepherding the tough-on-crime bill will likely face scrutiny in a Democratic primary should he run for president in 2020. His 1993 comments, which were in line with the broad political consensus to tackling crime at the time, are at odds with a new bipartisan coalition of activists and lawmakers who are trying to undo what they say is a legacy of mass incarceration fostered by that era.

Biden’s word choice could also pose a problem with a new generation of Democrats who view the rhetoric at the time as perpetuating harmful myths about the black community.

CNN’s KFile came across the 1993 speech during a review of the former vice president’s record.

President Bill Clinton in 1994 signed the crime bill into law with broad bipartisan support as violent crime rates peaked in the US in the early 1990s. Included in the law was the federal “three strikes” provision, mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.

“We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created,” said Biden, then a fourth-term senator from Delaware so committed to the bill that he has referred to it over the years as “the Biden bill.”

“They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale,” Biden continued. “And it’s a sad commentary on society. We have no choice but to take them out of society.”

In the speech, Biden described a “cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally … because they literally have not been socialized, they literally have not had an opportunity.” He said, “we should focus on them now” because “if we don’t, they will, or a portion of them, will become the predators 15 years from now.”

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/biden-1993-speech-predators/index.html

Political Observer