Media establishment figures are going to continue to give Uncle “Victrola” Joe every break they can (whether they’re doing it consciously or not) out of a sense of knee-jerk deferral to authority and because their corporate masters really don’t want to see Sanders or Warren become the Dem front-runner.
For example, see this pathetic post-debate defense:
Sorry, Tim, but accusations of “ageism” won’t fly – Sanders and Warren are both in their 70s and I don’t see the MSM raising that cry on their behalf.
If you don’t want to watch the first 3 and a half minutes i’ll break it down really quick.
Biden campaign: ‘That was a low blow. A completely ageist attack.’
Julian: ‘All I did is point out a really big inconsistency in something he said about policy. Go back to the transcript from the debate and i’ll show you.’
The ABC commentators, to a person, all jumped on the Castro move immediately, like it mattered, and very gravely issued fact-checks. They were so. offended. for Biden. And one just lazily tossed off “people to the right and left., and of course what’s in the middle is most important, where things can get done.” referencing both Joe Biden’s physical position on stage and begging the question that the “middle” is what will get done. Despite the fact that if you combine Warren and Sanders’ leads in polls (the too-far-left according to him), they dwarf Biden. Their immediate, intense and singular fixing for Biden was fucking bizarre.
Nobody “analyzing” the debtate is even going to touch on the fact that Biden sounds like incoherent shit up there?
The MSM wants what it always wants from the Dem primaries: a neoliberal-lite establishment frontrunner easily swatting off cheap shots from younger, darker and/or leftier candidates (for a little dramatic tension) before emerging triumphant for a coronation at the convention. Any small but serious threat to that narrative has them crying foul like this. You see the same response from DNC establishment types and from the kind of Internet commenter who automatically defers to authority.
Well they have to deal with the in—the—look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started… dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where—look, you talk about education. I proposed that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year, give every single teacher a raise so they equal, raise so getting out of the, the 60 thousand dollar level.
Number two, make sure that we bring in to the help the, the stu—the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need—we have one school psychologist for every 15 hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are [unintelligible]—I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have make sure that every single child does in fact have… three, four, and five year olds go to school, school, not daycare, school.
We bring social workers in to homes of parents, to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not they don’t want to help, they don’t want—they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the—excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the, the phone, make sure kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there. There’s so much we—
ABC’s decision to use Rahm Emanuel as a commentator is practically journalistic malpractice. That said, Castro did seem like a bit of an asshole while pressing Biden. I don’t now how he could have made his point differently, but it was not a good look for him.
It was a really good night for Booker, I wonder if we’re going to see a rise in his standing.
Some bonus background on Biden’s “4 million fewer words” thing that is… not flattering.
Something else just occurred to me too. Biden jumping from TV to “record player” wasn’t just some weird out-of-touch goof (though the record player being the next example of sound-emitting technology that comes to his mind certainly is). Rather, he realized mid-sentence that in the middle of a rant about how poor kids (read: black kids, since the context of the question was about racism and segregation) need to hear more words and that poor (again, read: black) parents just don’t realize they need to talk to their kids (fuckin’ YIKES!), he’d just proposed sitting kids down in front of the Devil Machine that he and other politicians like him have been decrying as destroying children’s lives and replacing the role of the parent. The neoliberal “technology will solve everything!” attitude ran smack into the traditionalist “technology will ruin everything!” attitude and the quickest course-correction he could make was the Gramophone.
What if Joe’s gaffes are a feature, not a bug? What if electable, Obama-flavored Joe wins the convention with, say, Warren for veep, and they go on to win the election…and then the gaffes suddenly take a turn for the much worse…shame about the distinguished gentleman…and the VP invokes the 25th amendment and takes over. Joe as shoehorn?
If Trump’s behavior isn’t enough to trigger the 25th Amendment then nothing Biden says could hope to compete. I doubt it will ever be invoked except maybe in the event of a massive, debilitating stroke.
I doubt the result would be all that different; a Democratic Party that saw fit to nominate Biden gaffes-and-all would almost certainly stand by him gaffes-and-all. Just as Trump’s supporters aren’t about to abandon him just because he’s spouting the same vile nonsense that he was in 2016.
It would take a sudden and undeniably serious mental decline for either party to allow their own President to forced from office that way.
If he was in on it then there would be no need for the 25th because he could just resign voluntarily. Or better yet, drop out now and hand her the nomination.
This is interesting (from Ipsos, via 538). All of the candidates are rated higher post-debate on favorability than they were pre-debate, with all except Biden, Sanders, and Castro taking big jumps. I think voters like to see the candidates getting scrappy, it makes them feel better about the chances in the general election. Since Biden was getting most of the hits in the debate, the fact that he didn’t completely fall apart must be counted overall as a slight plus.
