Dear Dems: The Gaslighting Isn’t Helping Matters
The debate spin isn’t working. And Joe Biden is losing.
FOR EIGHT YEARS progressive activists, democracy-dies-in-darkness media types, and self-important podcasters have righteously bombarded Americans with clarion calls about the danger of Trumpian gaslighting. We’ve certainly done our fair share of that here.
Which is why it has been so dismaying over the past few days to see an unending stream of gaslighting from the very same people in the days following President Biden’s disastrous debate performance.
The bedwetting about Joe Biden’s debate performance, they insist, is overwrought and unhelpful and everyone should simply move forward as if we are not in the midst of a crisis.
This strikes me as insane. It’s the kind of argument that will lead us down a path to the unimaginable horror that is a second Donald Trump administration.
So I want to respond one by one to the main “arguments” I’ve been hearing from the This Is Fine crowd, so we can at least be clear-eyed about the challenges and choices ahead. But before I do, let’s put two things on the record:
None of what follows is meant to suggest that Biden can’t win this election. He could, though the odds are increasingly unlikely.
More importantly, if a diminished Biden is the nominee, he will of course be a million times preferable to the man who wants to end our democracy. On that question, count me with this Pennsylvania swing voter.
But determining whether Biden is, at this juncture, the best bet for defeating the Trumpian menace requires honesty. Solving a problem requires first admitting there is one. And that requires dispensing with the current torrent of BS spin.
Spin #1: Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2012 also had bad debates and they came back to win handily!
I’m sorry, but this is a ridiculous comparison. For starters, Biden was losing to Trump before Thursday night’s debate began. Reagan and Obama went into debate season with actual polling leads over their respective opponents.
Next, their performances, while nowhere near the peak of their powers, were totally fine. And they were orders of magnitude better than Biden by comparison.
Let’s watch some clips together to get a sense for the difference.
Compare Obama 2012
Here’s an exchange about the tax rate for small businesses from 2012:
Obama sounds great! He makes complex and compelling arguments about the tax code. He makes a more potent attack on then-businessman Donald Trump than Biden made in ninety minutes with Trump standing next to him.
Now let’s watch Biden’s answer to a question about the economy:
Even if you get past the performative aspect of it, the substance is all over the place. Biden takes an incoherent swipe that references Trump’s “inject bleach” gaffe. Somehow he starts talking about people getting killed in Afghanistan. The question was about the economy. There are a few facts sprinkled in but there is no narrative for people to grasp—if they could grasp anything at all.
Compare Reagan 1984
This is more of an apt comparison. Reagan was the oldest candidate ever running at the time and there were concerns about his age. So let’s watch a bit from his first debate, with a question from a young-looking Fred Barnes!
You can see why there were some age concerns after this debate. Reagan is not reaching the rhetorical heights that he was known to soar to in his grand speeches. He is a bit halting at times. On the other hand, he is still clearly “with it.” He’s pulling quotes from Lincoln out of nowhere. He gets into a very nuanced point about the separation of church and state that I wish modern-day Republicans would enunciate. It’s more than passable.
Now let’s go back to Biden:
Whoops, I tricked you! That was the first Trump-Biden debate from September 2020. And if you clicked, I’m sure you noticed that Biden sounds like a totally different person and a much more effective candidate than he did on Thursday.
Long story short, there is no comparison between the Reagan and Obama performances and Biden’s. On top of that, they both had the skill set to clean up their mistakes in subsequent debates.
And neither had a moment as haunting as Joe Biden freezing up mid-sentence before muttering “we finally beat Medicare.” Trust me, we would remember it even now.
Spin #2: It Was Just One Bad Night!
This is absurd. Stop it.
It was not just one bad night! It was the worst presidential debate performance in history by a wide margin. It was one historically catastrophic night. But it wasn’t just June 27th that was the problem.
Joe Biden has had many, many bad days and many shaky performances before the debate and Americans have noticed. How could you not? Look at this viral TikTok from after the debate comparing 2012 Biden eviscerating Paul Ryan to Thursday’s shitshow.
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And here’s another with millions of views comparing clips from his debate performance last week to clips from June 2019 and September 2020.
This didn’t happen overnight. There has been a visible decline for a long time. We have been talking about concerns regarding Biden’s age and performance for so many years that the folks who run the Bulwark subreddit spoofed our podcast logos to read “Biden Is Old.”
But to demonstrate the scale of the problem, I want you to watch a video of Biden not from 2019 but from a few weeks ago. This is from the June 15 fundraiser with Jimmy Kimmel and Barack Obama where the MAGA media used misleadingly edited videos (what are now called “cheapfakes”) to claim that Obama had to lead Biden offstage.
It is true that many of those videos were misleading. It is true that Rupert Murdoch is a lying asshole. But the video of Biden actually talking? Here is a leaked copy taken from the cell phone of a donor in attendance.
This is the very same Biden we saw on the debate stage. He was speaking so slowly that I had to double check to make sure my YouTube wasn’t on .75 speed.
The only difference between that event and now is before the debate people wanted to give the president the benefit of the doubt—in part out of politeness, in part to allow him to demonstrate that he was up for the big stage in the debate that his team requested. He failed.
So, no. It wasn’t just one night.
Spin #3: Did you see how great Joe Biden was at the Raleigh event the next day?!
Yes. He was pretty good. And he’s had other impressive performances. The State of the Union, going to Ukraine under the dark of night, etc.
The tenor of the rally certainly helped assuage and invigorate the Biden superfans and Democratic partisans/political obsessives. But the problem is those are the only people who are going to see it.
As for the GOP partisans/political obsessives, here’s what they are going to see: a viral social media post of Jill speaking at the same event with President Biden standing behind her, mouth agape, looking off into the distance like a Phish fan who took too much acid:
Is that video fair? Is it nice to talk about? No. But it’s not a cheapfake either. It’s just how President Biden sometimes looks. And from here forward, videos like this—and there are many videos like this, and there will be many more—only reinforce everything people saw at the debate on Thursday.
As for the non-politics junkies, they aren’t going to see any footage from the campaign event in North Carolina. They were back to BBL Drizzy remixes or whatever the TikTok algorithm Gods had in store this weekend.
But the problem is much deeper than that.
If Biden is going to regain the ground he lost last Thursday, he’s going to need to do what he did in Raleigh every day for the rest of the campaign—and do so in settings that break through beyond the core audience. Which means he’s got to do it off of the teleprompter, in hostile and unexpected environments at all hours of the day.
Thus far, there are no signs that type of pivot is in the cards.
On Sunday, when any other candidate facing a national crisis of confidence would have been doing interviews to change the narrative, President Biden was doing an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot with his family.
Was he not doing interviews out of the same anti-media petulance that led the campaign to lash out at critics in a fundraising email Sunday? Or because his team isn’t sure he’s up for a tough interrogation? Or is it simply inertia and a lack of willingness to accept the dire circumstances their campaign is in? I don’t know. But it’s not a good sign.
Lastly, if we are truly going to take the “one bad night” argument literally, that means that Biden is never going to look and sound like he did in the debate again for the rest of the campaign.
Does anyone genuinely believe that will happen? The campaign is only going to get more rigorous. The stress will only increase.
It seems much more likely that there will be future appearances where Biden looks and sounds even worse than he did at the debate. And if that appearance happens after the convention, it’s curtains.
Spin #4: Only White Men Are Worried About Biden’s Age!
This doozy was all over the internet this weekend, including in this post by Jen Rubin.
If only it were true! We have dedicated hours of conversations on The Bulwark Podcast and in Sarah Longwell’s focus groups talking with black and Hispanic voter experts and actual voters about why Biden is underperforming his 2020 share with those demographics. The same research and conversations have been featured on Astead Herndon’s The Run Up and Jon Favreau’s The Wilderness.
Time and again in these conversations two themes come up: inflation and Biden’s age.
And that was before Thursday!
The latest polling data reinforces this long-held worry for Team Biden. In the CBS poll 47 percent of black voters said they were concerned about Biden’s cognitive health.
Does that mean Donald Trump is going to win black voters? Of course not. Does it mean Joe Biden is losing ground from 2020? Absolutely. It’s showing up in all the numbers. And the bigger threat, in the words of Bakari Sellers and Charlamagne tha God, might not be black voters going to Trump, but staying on the couch.
Spin #5: Joe Biden Was Gish Galloped By Trump!
I am going to gish gallop on the face of the next person that sends this argument to me.
For starters, none of you even knew what “gish gallop” meant until you read about it in Heather Cox Richardson’s substack two minutes ago.
I grant that, academically speaking, HCR is correct about the tactics Trump uses. But gish galloping is not some magical superpower with no antidote. Trump has tried to overwhelm his opponents with nonsense talking points and lies for as long as he’s been alive. And you know who managed to navigate that rhetorical tactic successfully four years ago? Joe Biden! In two debates! So clearly he is (or was) capable of circumventing this nefarious tactic.
You think Slayer Pete Buttigieg would’ve been rendered incoherent by a little gish gallop? Do you think JB Pritzker or Gavin Newsom or Elizabeth Warren would have been unable to gallop past the gish? I sure don’t.
Spin #6: Joe Biden had a cold.
So did Michael Jordan. And Frank Sinatra. And JVL on Friday’s podcast. I once dominated a Trump spokesperson in a CNN debate with a hoarse voice mere seconds after vomiting.
Biden might have had a cold. He might not have. He might have been on meds. Or not. He sounded fine the next day. And he had six days of rest and prep at Camp David before the debate.
But the problem wasn’t just his voice. It was the fact that his sentences weren’t making sense. That he talked about migrant crime during a question about abortion and Afghanistan during a question about the economy—raising unprompted his two worst issues. The problem was that he failed to deliver a single coherent attack on Donald Trump that anyone will remember on a topic other than golf handicaps.
Concerns about Biden’s performance were as much about substance as style. A cold wouldn’t have impacted his substantive arguments so dramatically.
HERE’S THE THING: There are many people we can be upset with for putting us in this situation. For starters, the entire Republican party (I wrote the book on it), the media for treating Trump like a normal candidate, Merrick Garland for slow-rolling the January 6th investigation, the MAGA judges stalling the cases. I could go on.
But we are where we are. Donald Trump is leading the polling averages in every swing state. He is leading the national polls. Seventy-two percent of registered voters think Joe Biden does not have the mental and cognitive health to be president.
If nothing changes, we are on a collision course for a second Trump term.
So for those of us who were Never Trump from the jump—who passionately, desperately want to see him denied a second chance at power—it is critical that the Biden campaign and Democratic elected officials hear this message.
Don’t tell us to shut up and get in line. Don’t tell us not to believe our lying eyes.
Something must change. And it must change fast.
I don’t understand why Biden thinks he’s the only person who can beat Trump. He’s been a great President, but it seems so selfish and out of character for him to insist on running. You listen to Sarah’s focus groups and it’s just right there front and center: people want competence. His age is the key factor stopping people voting for him. Even if he could potentially do the job, it’s now too much of a risk.
I say this as someone who pushed back so hard on the "Biden is too old" thing for years, and I never thought he was too old until Thursday night. But now I do. It wasn't "one bad night", it was the worst possible night at the worst possible moment. It wasn't "a bad debate", there has never been a worse debate performance by any other candidate since we've started showing them on TV. I've never voted Republican in my life, not even for a moderate. But if he was running against anyone but a coup plotter he would've lost my vote Thursday night. We all saw what we saw, and that was a person who CANNOT be doing this job in 4 years.
The Titanic had one bad night too but they don't sail on that anymore, do they?