Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/03/harris-newsom-2024-biden-meets-vp-for-lunch-today-followed-by-face-to-face-with-gov-newsom.html
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Or, and hear me out, cause this is gonna sound BUG-NUTS CRAZY!!!.. He’s meeting with people who are surrogates for his campaign to discuss strategy… 
I’m not generally “disappointed” with BB, but this is just feeding this bullshit media narrative about what’s happening with the election. We’re literally staring down the face of fascism here, and we really should not be pushing this fucked up narrative about how Biden is about to step down.
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Doesn’t this little detail pretty much nullify the whole premise of this article?
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I agree that the media is having a field day with all this.
That said - I wonder if Biden has sat down and actually watched his recent debate? If so - he must be thinking ‘hmm this is actually really catastrophic on many levels. What can I do that can change the narrative?’.
My fear is he is now in an unwinnable predicament. Perhaps his pending (damage control) ABC interview will be more coherent and energetic - but I fear Biden may not have it in him at this point.
So - a long-winded way to say he really should be looking at Plan B here.
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Yeah, it’s a scandal that the president is meeting the vice president. And interesting use of quotation marks.
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I hate the narrative that has erupted that CNN was all to thrilled to create and drag into two week’s worth of bullshit speculation, but… if there isn’t a serious discussion about plan B, the DNC is delusional. Which, for the DNC is entirely probable; after all, one of the most complicating scenarios right now is that they scheduled the nominating convention after a few states’ ballot deadlines. In other words, they painted themselves into a corner where any new candidate would likely have to be a write-in. Like, WTF are you thinking?
One thing that was brought up in a recent Pod Save America feat. Medhi Hassan is the difficulty of getting a consensus candidate in time to run an effective campaign. One way is for Biden to declare Harris as his endorsement, which obligates(I think?) his delegates to vote for her and essentially guarantees the nomination. Short of that is an open convention, which would almost certainly be a disaster and cutting it way too close time-wise. I could see this meeting being about Biden feeling out the most likely candidates’ willingness to get behind a party ticket that would avoid any convention shenanigans. Harris-Newsom, indeed.
And please don’t at me about being a doom-sayer. Biden has been one of, if not the most effective president in my lifetime and I constantly sing his praises, but if anyone thinks this isn’t a real and immediate crisis, well I hope you’re right but seriously doubt it. I’ve spoken to far too many swing voters this week to believe that this and Gaza haven’t massively depleted his already meager standing.
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The New York Times, CNN, and even MSNBC are pushing the narrative hard that Biden has declined to the point where he can’t win and needs to step aside. They all want him to fail. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this narrative has ramped up into overdrive in the two days following the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Voters were pissed about that, and that should have helped Biden. So suddenly the media goes hard with Biden needing to step aside, including a bullshit story from an “anonymous” source that Biden himself has acknowledged that he might have to step aside. This is all bullshit. When huge corporations are acting so scared of a second Biden term, I think he’s doing something right.
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Sorry, I have more to say. Can you see the media having the same meltdown if Trump had a similar performance? Fuck, Trump has spewed nonsensical word salad at his own rallies for 8 years now! Where are the fucking calls for him to step aside? No, he just says, “I spoke perfectly! People are saying I’m the smartest candidate they’ve ever seen,” the media shrugs, and runs another story about Biden’s mental fitness. Fuck fuck fuck this is enraging!
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That’s certainly true, and should be extremely alarming. But one thing that it definitely isn’t is a new phenomenon. It’s not some new reason to be concerned about him as president that didn’t already exist for all to see.
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It is clearly a media crisis, but it’s not a real crisis at all. There’s nothing to do for it. The reporting is going to report whatever they want to drive clicks. The truth is just to boring.
The plan will clearly be to have the social media team instead of the policy team prep him for any future debate. He showed up prepared for a policy debate, that was the crisis, thinking the debate would have anything to do with policy. It is possible that thinking any press interaction will be about policy information is wrong too.
If someone isn’t voting for Biden because of his Gaza response, they’re not really concerned with Gaza. The primary votes for this were great for messaging. They’ve clearly pushed Biden in a direction. Just as much, they showed the Biden can be pushed and influenced. Not voting for Biden in the general because of Gaza will just make things worse for Gaza. That’s choice, vote for the guy that can be influenced, the guy who cares and is dealing the intricacies of international relations, or vote for the guy that doesn’t care if Gaza exists anymore. Or don’t vote, which is the same as voting for the guy who doesn’t care.
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I can’t vote in the primaries (neat fact about having dual citizenship and living outside the US) but if I had, I’d be pretty pissed off if someone were planning to just cancel my vote without asking me and substitute a different candidate without my approval. That seems like a fascist play.
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I’m not here to disagree, and I’m not going to suggest any specific path forward other than the fact that we should all vote blue this November. But I am legitimately curious to know, based on that statement, if you actually watched the debate in full.
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Harris can’t have Newsom on the ticket. Article I, Section 3 provides “The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves.”
Any D ticket is going to carry California, of course, but the Electors from California could not vote for both Harris for POTUS and Newsom for VP, so California wouldn’t send any EVs for VP at all. The election is very likely to be within a margin of 53 EVs. Since there would be 538 EVs available for President but only 485 EVs for VP, so you’d very likely end up with a Harris-Vance administration or something which would weird indeed.
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They’ve spent years normalizing and lowering the bar for Trump. The debate reporting and focus on Biden is just an easy example.
The debate expectation was something like:
Biden will speak eloquent policy, respond to questions, be civil and polite to the moderators, and show us that he’s as vigorous as a twenty five year old track star.
Trump will belittle the moderators, lie, have horrible policy if any, lack any policy details, and if he manages to not fall over doing a stupid dance that’s a win.
Biden fell short of the elevated expectation expected of him. Trump was exactly on expectation. The media doesn’t give a crap that the expectation was set so low and that they’ve just accepted all of those things as normal and fine. Any two minutes of Trumps debate performance would have completely sunk a candidate back in 2004, just 20 years ago.
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I watched it all, and then enough of the CNN roundtable to hear them waive away Trumps lies in 10 seconds practically declaring that facts don’t matter.
What I saw was a person with a speaking problem trying to jam 5 minutes of information into a 2 minute window while politely respecting the moderators control of time.
That was a clear policy and nuances discussion. His thoughts were clearly ahead of his speaking ability. This approach was clearly a mistake. It looked worse than it really was.
He was at his strongest when not trying to jam that much information into the communication and just calling out that Trump was full of shit. Of course, he was mostly more polite about the calling out. You could literally see when he was trying to rebut the BS at a detail and nuance level along with fit in the time box. It didn’t work.
That entire strategy was clearly wrong. It assumed Trump was there to debate policy and plans for the country in a good faith effort.
On direct question, he should have prepared with more general information. It wasn’t the time to dive into every detail.
On response to Trump, he could have just responded to almost every Trump statement with “That’s false, ABC doesn’t do XYZ that you just said, tell us how it will accomplish XYZ.”. Perhaps “That’s malarkey” if he wanted to color it up some.
The Biden social media team is much better at showing that Trumps statements are full of shit. The policy team is much better at the nuances and steps to get things done. The wrong team showed up for the wrong event at the debate.
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Trump is not currently president, but when he was there were frequent calls from the media for the 25th amendment to be used to remove him from office (since he would never step aside volunarily).
That’s Article II, Section 1, Clause 3, not Article I. Anyway, that’s not really a problem. In 2000, both Bush and Cheney were residents of Texas. Cheney got a Wyoming driver’s license shortly before the election, and that was good enough to satisfy the Constitution. Note that it says “inhabitant” not “resident”. Harris is probably an inhabitant of the District of Columbia already. No one is going to hold the election up over that. If need be, she can get a DC driver’s license.
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I would hope that’s not the case. The debate was a disaster and Biden looked like he had one foot in the grave, but anyone with a brain should realize that an energetic Trump is not a better alternative. It takes a very special kind of stupid for people to say “I want the guy who’s loud and full of energy!” while completely ignoring that all that energy is being used to destroy everything they hold dear, especially after they’ve SEEN him doing it for four years. There is no valid reason, NONE, for anyone who isn’t already a Trump cultist to fail to vote Democrat in November. I don’t care if the candidate is Biden, or Harris, or a fucking broom wearing a wig and googly eyes, there’s no excuse to sit this one out and I’m sick of people acting like any reasonable person might be forgiven for doing so.
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