CHRIS CRUCIAL: It's not 'The Media vs Joe Biden' 😠
PLUS: The GOP party platform, revealed
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1. A false narrative
As he seeks to dig out from his debate debacle, Joe Biden — and his enablers on the (social media) left — have picked a familiar scapegoat: The media.
“You've been wrong about everything so far,” Biden told reporters on Friday. “You were wrong about 2020. You were wrong about 2022 — we were going to get wiped out, you remember the red wave.”
That framing — the media vs Biden — was immediately picked up by online accounts built to champion the president. Here’s just one example:
The problem? This is a totally and completely false narrative. The reality of the situation is that Biden is facing an internal revolt from his party and its majors donors. The media is simply covering that revolt.
Let me give you a few examples to prove the point (bolding is mine):
One senior White House official, however, who has worked with Mr. Biden during his presidency, vice presidency and 2020 campaign, said in an interview on Saturday morning that Mr. Biden should not seek re-election.
After watching Mr. Biden in private, in public and while traveling with him, the official said they no longer believed the president had what it took to campaign in a vigorous way and defeat Donald J. Trump. The official, who insisted on anonymity in order to continue serving, said Mr. Biden had steadily showed more signs of his age in recent months, including speaking more slowly, haltingly and quietly, as well as appearing more fatigued in private.
In fact, the consensus among Democratic senators is that Biden needs to step down, according to two Democratic senators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly share a sensitive opinion. And more and more House Democrats, too, privately became convinced in the week after the debate that Biden would need to bow out for the sake of ensuring the party has a chance to defeat Trump.
A House Democrat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said: “Denial of the problem is not a solution or a path forward to convincing our constituents that he has the capacity or the vision for four more years.”
And another Democratic operative who has advised the White House called the interview a “stay of execution” but added that the president’s “acceptance of losing to Trump as long as he tried his best will make his hand significantly worse with every Democratic office holder who does not want to lose their seat.”
In the hours after Biden sat for a 22-minute interview with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, more than half a dozen Democrats in Congress described Biden’s political situation in stark terms including “heartbroken,” “doomed” and a “f-----g disaster.”
And then there’s this list of Democratic Members of Congress who have called on Biden to step aside:
And this from Montana Sen. Jon Tester, one of the biggest GOP targets in the fall: “President Biden has got to prove to the American people—including me—that he's up to the job for another four years.”
And THIS from Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who faces a very tough race in November too: “I've talked to people across Ohio. They have legitimate questions about whether the president should continue his campaign, and I'll keep listening to people.”
So…..
Given the level of worry, anxiety and outright panic coursing through the Democratic party right now, the media has two choices:
Cover the worry, anxiety and panic — as well as what Biden, his campaign and other party leaders are doing about it
Ignore it — and focus solely on Donald Trump.
Only one of these two options is journalism. The other is activism. If you don’t know which is which, you’re an activist.
If Biden really wants the media to stop covering the questions within the party about whether or not he should stay in the race, the best thing to do is to get the members of his party to stop telling reporters how worried they are about Biden as the nominee!
Or hope like hell that the polling that comes out over the next week doesn’t show what the (majority of) polling that has come out over the last week shows: That Biden suffered real slippage — nationally and in swing states — in his head-to-head matchup with Trump after the debate.
The last time Biden led in a national poll against Trump was June 28, according to 538. There have been a whole lot polls conducted since then. And Trump is now ahead by more than 2 points in the polling average.
NONE of this is the fault of the media.
The criticism of the media I take a bit more seriously is that there is now a feeding frenzy when it comes to Biden and his age — and that reporters aren’t covering any other stories, especially those about Trump and his criminality.
My pushback would be that the first three letters of “news” are “new.” And the new thing in the presidential race is Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate and how his party is reacting to it.
You can not like that. But I am telling you that the media is always biased toward new news. It has zero to do with any ideological agenda or wanting one candidate or one party to win or lose.
That reality is why Trump is going to hold off on announcing his vice presidential pick for as long as possible. (My guess is he does it during the Republican National Convention next week.) Because he and his team know that as soon as they throw new news to the media, it will immediately take a bunch of reporters off of the Biden-age story. And they, smartly, don’t want to do that.
Look. I totally understand why Biden and his team are trying to make this a fight between “regular” people and the elites (of which they very much include the media). Everyone — or almost everyone — hates the media. It’s an easy fight to pick.
But, don’t be fooled. The media isn’t the opponent here. This is Joe Biden vs his own party. Or Joe Biden vs Joe Biden. Or Joe Biden vs Father Time.
2. Trumping the platform
The Republican party platform — long a statement of policy and principles agreed to by the faithful — is headed to read more like a loyalty pledge to Donald Trump this year. (You can read the platform here.)
Gone are detailed policy proposals. In their place are broader pronouncements that will be familiar to anyone who follows Trump on Truth Social: Lots of talk about making America great and not all that much on divisive social issues — particular abortion.
Here’s the New York Times on the platform:
The abortion section has been softened. There is no longer a reference to “traditional marriage” as between “one man and one woman.” And there is no longer an emphasis on reducing the national debt, only a brief line about “slashing wasteful government spending.”
The rest of the document reflects Mr. Trump’s priorities as outlined on his campaign website: a hard-line immigration policy, including mass deportations; a protectionist trade policy with new tariffs on most imports; and sections on using federal power to remove policies in academia, the military and throughout the U.S. government put in place by what it describes as radical Democrats.
The platform committee, which is stacked with Trump loyalists, overwhelmingly approved it on Monday. When the party convenes next week at the national convention, there will be a vote among all the delegates to approve it. It will pass easily.
The truth of the matter is that most voters don’t even know there is an official party platform. But, the platform does function broadly as a sort of beliefs manifesto: This is what it means to be a Republican.
And, in truth, what it means to be a Republican these days is to follow — unquestioningly — what Donald Trump says.
The softening of the abortion language is worth slightly closer inspection. It’s reflective of where Trump is trying to position himself — as someone who returned the decision about abortion to the states by appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v Wade.
I am not sure that argument actually works — particularly with suburban women Trump will need in this election. But the very fact that the party has now written that more moderate abortion position into its platform speaks to the power and hold Trump has over the GOP.
3. Whitmer rules it out (for now)
Even as Joe Biden continues to insist he isn’t going anywhere, some of the people most often mentioned to replace him if he, well, does drop out of the race are sounding off about that prospect.
In an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer offered a definitive “no” when asked if she would seek the Democratic nomination if Biden left the race.
“It’s a distraction more than anything,” said Whitmer. “I don’t like seeing my name in articles like that because I’m totally focused on governing and campaigning for the ticket.”
Whitmer is the first of the most-mentioned Biden replacements to publicly rule herself out. Spokespeople for California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker have dismissed the possibility arguing that they won’t engage in hypotheticals.
Meanwhile, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick indicated that he would be interested in running if Biden was no longer the nominee.
“If he does withdraw … I do believe there needs to be, albeit a short, competitive process to arrive at who our nominee ought to be going for,” Patrick told CNN. “And I think that’s a real opportunity for us.”
He added that he would “seriously” look at running under that circumstance.
It’s not at all clear whether Patrick would have any real chance at the nomination. A former two-term governor of Massachusetts, he ran a long-shot presidential bid in 2020. He entered the race in November 2019 and dropped out by February 2020.
To be clear: I don’t take Whitmer’s statement today — or, really, anything any Democratic politician says as we all wait to see if Biden remains the nominee — as gospel. When circumstances change, politicians’ minds change. Especially when we are talking about the presidency.
4. Why Joe Biden should take a cognitive test
I don’t see a lot of ways that Joe Biden can convince skeptical Democrats — and the broader public — that he is, in fact, of sound mind and body.
The one option I see is for Biden to take a cognitive test and release the results publicly. I explain why that might work (and the risk in doing it) in a video for my YouTube channel. Subscribe!
NOTABLE QUOTABLE
“A panicky White House is going to be persnickety, acting as though journalists are unfairly picking on the president about every gaffe, berating them when they don’t properly interpret the president’s elisions and jumbles” — Maureen Dowd
ONE GOOD CHART
Joe Biden and his campaign team have set out, of late, to make sure everyone in the country knows what “Project 2025” is. That education effort is reflected by how much liberal influencers are talking about it, according to the Washington Post.
SONG OF THE DAY
Beck turns 54 today. I think he is actually under-rated as an artist. My favorite album of his is “Sea Change” from 2002. Here he is doing “Guess I’m Doing Fine” live.
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It feels like the press is driving the focus on President Biden, because there’s been nothing about the other candidates deflection of every question and his tsunami of lies. Just 6-weeks or so ago, physicians issued a report about the visible indicia of the other candidates cognitive decline—mixing up sounds, shifting topics mid sentence as though he’d lost his though, and many more. (Leave aside the sharks and batteries). The media generally poo-poohed arm chair diagnoses and that was that.
It’s not Biden vs. “the media” or Biden vs “the elites”. It’s Biden vs the people. If anything, most MSM or left-leaning media either ignored the story or minimized it as right wing propaganda. Yet, poll after poll showed that voters were concerned about his ability to do the job for another four years (and for the record, I think that he did a great job for the most part over the last four years), and yet we were told to ignore those polls, there they didn’t matter, etc. Meanwhile, the White House effectively cocooned Biden, probably because his advisors knew full well what would happen if the President was challenged or had to go off script. We saw no press conferences. Very few face to face interviews. And then the debate happened and it was even worse than even Fox News could have ever hoped would be the case. That’s not the media’s fault. That’s the fault of President Biden and his handlers.
Incidentally, if this is coming across as being angry, that’s because I am. I stand by my opinion that Donald Trump represents an existential threat to our country’s democracy, and President Biden very likely handed him the White House on a silver platter.