I normally don’t even want to get involved in posting a drumbeat of “here’s something about Biden staying in the race” stories because, (1) I’m not sure he should, and (2) it doesn’t “cancel out” the waste of time that is the incessant drumbeat of articles about how he should drop out. It’s like taking uppers to counteract downers; it just doesn’t work that way, it makes everything worse. And the amount of press this whole thing is getting and the way it’s being presented is absolutely fuckin absurd.
But that being said, I want to post this one because I like Elizabeth Warren quite a lot and I think what she says gets to the core of the issue.
Also, if you are a Democratic politician or donor and you want to replace Biden with someone else, surely talking to the press about how he should drop out without anyone in particular in mind that you’re talking to them about as a replacement, and a strategy to get that person into place, should be an absolute last, last, last resort for a way to get that done. And probably not even then.
Biden’s thing of “If you want to replace me then mount a challenge at the convention, that’s what it’s for, and whoever wins, let’s fuckin fight the real enemy” makes quite a bit of sense to me, and the longer this goes on, the less sense the people who are talking to the press about him dropping out make.
So here you go, here’s a story about someone who thinks he should stay in and what she has to say.
If replacing Biden was the answer to all the Democrats’ problems, all the papers like the NYT that are openly hostile to the Democrats winning the election wouldn’t be pushing it so hard.
It’s not quite that simple, of course. They are not “pushing” it in the sense of sincerely advocating a particular course of action that is realistic, and interviewing the people who are trying to implement that plan of action, as they would if they were sympathetic to the Democrats’ efforts to stop a real fascist dictatorship to come to life in the US, and trying to report on that genuine strategic effort maybe with a little bit of partisan hope that it would work.
They’re just very convincingly imitating this whole panicked concern trolling freak out, to hurt Biden, for reasons of their own. That doesn’t mean he isn’t old as fuck or that that’s not a problem. It could be that going through the total clusterfuck of replacing him as a candidate 4 months before the election might be worth the risk and we’d come into smoother waters successfully before November.
But they’re recommending it with such a shouting in everyone’s face level of forcefulness and repetition and without any particular plan to substitute for him, because they know it will hurt his chances if he stays in, and that replacing him at this point will be a clusterfuck. Not because they sincerely believe it will help. And the Democrats who are buying into and amplifying the strategy free panicked shouting version of it should be ashamed of themselves.