Old Man Woes

So you want to pile on an elderly president…

Can you go down from here: The Challenge (Photo Credit: The Economist)

This has been the worst week for President Joe Biden’s campaign… yet. It also might be the last week of President Biden’s campaign, because the week-long rehab tour did not work. Instead of getting Biden out all the time to do press conferences, attend rallies, or face tough impromptu interviews, the president’s campaign has insisted on claiming everything’s fine and Biden is capable enough. Not to mention the polls either have shown Trump gaining his lead nationally and in battleground states, or barely any change. The best polls only show a maximum of 1-2% growth in his support.

Perception is reality: The less the campaign is sending Biden out in public and making the case that the first debate was just a bad moment, the more people will believe the White House and the president are hiding something from the public, entrenching their beliefs that will inevitably end with the conclusion of Biden needing to step down and change candidates.

As you remember, I published a piece calling for everyone to calm down and wanted Biden to stay in the race days after the debate. After this week, I am not sure.

Despite the Biden campaign’s failures to reassure concerns, I still don’t see the Biden-should-step-down side providing more concrete and valid arguments against my points listed in the article below except just “He’s bad in the polls” or “Do you trust him to manage the country until January 20, 2029?”

Those are arguments with merit, but continued rhetorical questioning shouldn’t be the way to win this debate. Judging on pure media coverage and perceptions alone, it feels like Joe Biden will have to inevitably land to the conclusion that he should step down. In the end, I will be at most, an extremely reluctant supporter who would want Biden to step down.

Given we have to prepare for all situations due to the shambolic times we live in, the best case scenario for changing the Democratic ticket is letting Biden resign as both a reelection candidate and the presidency, endorse and hand over the White House keys to Kamala Harris which would automatically make her the 47th (first female and incumbent) President of the United States, and let the entire party coalesce and rally in support behind President Harris for the last weeks until the November election.

Of course, some problems still linger. Yes, Harris is doing just as well in the polls against Trump when compared with Biden. However, does that necessarily translate into actual support if she becomes the nominee? Not to mention, who becomes the VP if Harris gets her title bump? It is likely to be a Democratic Governor, but in this case, who? (Don’t get me started again in the giddy pundit talk on choosing who should be VP to Harris because wait a moment before I begin ranting.)

---

Out of the fiasco that has happened in the past several days, if you think Biden’s performance was painfully embarrassing, and the campaign aftermath was humiliatingly disappointing, you will find yourself in utter dismay at how the media has not only not risen to the moment, but devolved itself into a gossiping hysterical mess.

We are not even going to delve into the right-wing media response, which was filled with delightful vindication and zero mentions of “jacked-up Joe,” or how social media is just bombarded with inexcusable insulting and personal attacks on people who were supposed to be on the same side supporting Biden (Just to be clear, even if you disagree with the media coverage of Biden’s post-debate performance, attacking pundits and journalists does not do your position or the anti-Trump movement that I am assuming the attackers were supporting any favors or justice).

Pretty much just moments after the debate ended, major media outlets in the US (Not even mentioning international media) began to circle Biden like vultures circling a lone survivor in the desert. Nearly every reputable news outlet (Except some like the Philadelphia Inquirer) has written editorial pieces calling for Biden to immediately drop out of the race, pundits have been writing or talking non-stop in speculation of all the possibilities of debate aftermath for Biden's campaign, and journalists are cranking out story-after-story of “anonymous insiders” creating a flimsy sense of how Joe Biden and his campaign are involved in a conspiracy to hide the truth of the president’s health away from the public.

Look, there is nothing wrong with covering the president’s age, or discussing whether Joe Biden should or should not drop out and what comes after that. As I have argued before, it is a necessary topic and has inherent journalistic value. However, the tone and volume of coverage surrounding the topic from American mainstream media is more resemblant to Mean Girls than PBS NewsHour.

One of the biggest media outlets engaged in non-stop Joe Biden coverage is undoubtedly the New York Times. If you have read the Times webpage since June 27, the first section and the opinion pages were plastered with post-debate reporting and analysis. Journalist Jennifer Schulze put that excessive coverage into a mathematical perspective. Between the end of the debate and 8 am on July 5, there were 142 news stories, 50 opinion pieces, and 13 non-debate news all about Joe Biden. In contrast at the same time frame, with SCOTUS declaring presidents can be kings with absolute immunity for official acts, there were 67 news stories and 25 opinion pieces on Donald Trump. Nearly half of the stories are related to the SCOTUS case and only one story on Trump calling for military tribunals against his political enemies like Liz Cheney.

As a side note, what perplexes me about the Trump and the media reaction is just how little his side gets covered. Set aside the tsunami of lies and talking about “black jobs” like it’s a normal thing to say, the fact that Donald Trump did not receive editorials calling for his resignation from the election campaign as a candidate for the GOP is dumbfounding. He is a convicted felon (34 counts and waiting for more) who has been proven in court in civil trials to be a fraudster and a sexual abuser. If Joe Biden’s old age and poor performance are enough to demand that he leave the campaign trail as a candidate seeking reelection, why shouldn’t a man who has threatened retribution and had incited a coup be held up to the same standards?

As Philly Inquirer (The same and lone outlet demanding Trump to drop out from the race after the debate) columnist Will Bunch wrote on July 2, there is seriously something wrong with the media coverage.

One of the first things they teach doctors in medical school is the imperfect but necessary art of triage, the technique used on a battlefield or during some other mass-casualty event to determine who is most gravely wounded and who needs immediate attention during a crisis when the system is overwhelmed, and clear-headed thinking will save lives.

Clearly, this is not something that is taught in journalism school.

Over the course of a remarkable weekend, I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down.

The soft clacking of these keyboard commandos turned into a stampede as the nation’s pundits, its editorial-page poobahs, mega-rich but anonymous donors, and Democratic horse whisperers competed to outdo each other on The Daily Rip or in “the paper of record,” or wherever they thought the actual frail president, Joe Biden, might be paying attention.

Dropping names — Whitmer! Shapiro! Warnock! — like a groupie backstage at a heavy-metal concert, floating wildly implausible scenarios, stretching so hard for historical analogies that several probably blew out a hamstring, America’s pundit class managed to achieve a level of groupthink that surpassed the brainwashers of The Manchurian Candidate. All argued that for the good of the country he loves, Biden — hoarse, barely audible, and visibly confused a few times during Thursday’s Atlanta presidential debate — must immediately end his candidacy.

Meanwhile, in the actual America that less resembles The West Wing than the disaster flick Don’t Look Up, two comets simultaneously bore down on America in the hours leading up to its 248th — and possibly last — birthday as a democratic republic.

In covering the latest Biden age story, the media has way surpassed their already obsessive coverage of the president’s age into hyper-mode. In Washington insider-type media outlets (Politico and Axios are the more prominent examples), there is an incessant use of anonymous Democratic operatives and politicians who all are complaining behind their backs about Joe Biden’s campaign, and there is no disguise from the tone of coverage that ranges from gleefully cheeky to unbridled frustration that the latest story they have written about isn’t the one getting Biden off the ticket. Amid all of the frenzy and hype surrounding whether media folks can take down a president for old age and slurring, important journalistic cornerstones like facts and context get blown out of the water. Here is Schulze's writing for the Heartland Signal.

Journalists are posting false and misleading information. CNN’s lead news anchor Jake Tapper shared a breathless “breaking news,” four-part social media post claiming that Democratic governors were turning against the president. Within two hours, Tapper deleted the bulk of his post, but not before it had been viewed by over 5 million people and shared nearly 2,000 times. So far, Tapper has yet to adequately acknowledge the mistake.

NBC News seemed to go out of its way to distort an interview with key Biden ally, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, to make it seem more anti-Biden. This post reads: “I will support” Vice President Kamala Harris if President Joe Biden “were to step aside.”

But Clyburn’s actual quote is this: “I will support her if he were to step aside, but I want to support her going forward sometime in the future. I want this ticket to continue to be Biden-Harris, and then we’ll see what happens after the next election.”

In the subject of Biden’s age, reporters are now unofficial pundits. Do these reporters have resentments towards the administration? The answer is yes, but that is problematic when it comes to doing actual journalism. Independent journalist Aaron Rupar tweeted this regarding the matter:

It’s been jarring in recent days to open this app and see employees of major mainstream media outlets with “reporter” in their bios offer hot takes like this. They’re totally committed to the anti-Biden bit. This is not reporting, it’s punditry.

Former POTUS speechwriter Dan Cluchey had this to say on Twitter (X):

What has stunned me the most (not the ferocity of the press pile-on as Trump’s obvious, express intent to destroy the country continues to go wildly underreported — I expected that) has been the group of reporters who have giddily and obsessively used this moment to slander White House staffers as “liars,” “gaslighters,” & more, as if the debate was proof of some nefarious scheme to hoodwink the nation for years, and not, you know, a very surprising, unusually bad night.

These reporters are cherry-picking shreds of gossip at best and making shit up at worst. Some have openly loathed Biden for years, & are salivating at the chance to torch his team. It’s ugly and wrong — but more gravely, it’s a massive failure of journalism at a moment when America desperately needs them to act like grown-ups rather than petty, gossipy vengeance-seekers.

There are legitimate questions here that POTUS must address head-on. But we are doomed either way if our political press can’t demonstrate the clarity and capacity to do *their* job, too.

Speaking of pundits, do some (Especially those who call themselves Never-Trumper Republicans) dislike Biden for some of his policies and feel this moment is the right time to dump him in the pretense of having the moral high ground? I can’t speak for them, but the underlying message of how they justify their reasoning to throw Biden under the bus at this particular moment doesn’t do their “excuses” any justice. Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch Network and former Republican, said this on the Uncovered Podcast about how he interprets how fellow Trump-hating Republicans are the ones yelling the loudest for Biden to go.

And one of the most disheartening things for me is that the chorus of people leading the charge to toss Biden, you know, are those people. And me and like Stuart Stevens and Mike Madrid are probably like the three exceptions, or maybe there's one or two more. But pretty much everybody else was get rid of Joe Biden, and a lot of them have taken heat from lifelong Democrats saying, man, we trusted you guys. We welcomed you into our party in 2020 and 2016, and we liked you guys. And what are you what are you doing right now?

I have a theory about that. My theory is this: Look, there are most of these former Republicans and you know them well, they're all over the media. They're probably overrepresented on MSNBC. It is they have no investment in the Democratic Party there. They have no investment in the ideas in the policies. They don't care about them. They don't even agree with a lot of them. They don't particularly like the people. They don't particularly like or love Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Cory Booker or any of these guys.

All they care about is defeating Donald Trump. That's it. That's all they care about. So if that's really your main thing here, then, you know, you can just easily just go, OK, this is not the guy who gives us the best chance to beat Trump. Get rid of them because they have no investment in the party. The idea is anything.

So I think that that's, to me, the reason why we've seen a lot of former Republicans leading the charge on this. And the fights that have broken out between the traditional lifelong Democrats and former Republicans is very disheartening to me.

That sentiment of Biden being “disposable political material” because of his poor performance easily transcends into downright cruelty for many pundits and journalists. During a White House press conference, James Rosen of Newsmax interrupted a conversation between NBC reporter Kelly O'Donnell and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre by joking “If he’s awake” when O'Donnell asked “We would invite the President to come here and tell us” about his condition. Longtime media critic and former CNN host Brian Stelter tweeted in response to a post by Joe Biden’s Twitter page marking the moment a landmark Parkinson's bill gets signed with “Today, of all days…” That post has then been deleted by Stelter.

If that isn’t enough, The Economist magazine, an outlet I usually trust and respect, decided to add the presidential seal to a walker mobility aid as the cover of their latest issue (See photo on top) with the headline “No Way To Run A Country.” Setting aside the boisterous statement: “The president and his party portray themselves as the saviors of democracy. Their actions say otherwise,” it is something to see a reputable magazine use ageist and ableist dog-whistling to portray a presidential candidate’s age. I hate Donald Trump for so many reasons, but even I would be appalled if the Economist or any magazine used that exact cover to discuss his age. If you want to go full-on with the age metaphor, I dare any news outlet to put Joe Biden’s name on a tombstone or coffin and call that a new issue cover, that’s going to drive up sales!

In the magazine’s Cover Story newsletter, they justified their choice of using a Zimmer frame after considering other forms of cover art that are considerably more tasteless than the final version. You can be the final judge, but I’m not convinced that because it’s okay to be harsh, you can stride right in and become a jerk.

That left the question of taste. Some may feel that this cover pokes fun at the physically infirm. Yet the Zimmer frame is a universal symbol of failing powers even if, obviously, you can struggle to walk without struggling to think. You only have to be aware of the context to know that we are not saying that physically disabled people should be barred from serving as president. 

Others may feel that criticising Mr Biden is simply too harsh. But harshness is justified here. The Biden team are campaigning on the claim that a Trump presidency would be a disaster for America. Yet their attempts to shore up their candidate contradict what tens of millions of Americans saw with their own eyes. That will only make a Trump presidency more probable.

---

As Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice earlier this week:

Pundits like stuff to happen. Biden stepping down would feel like action; it would be good copy. The media wants dramatic choices and dramatic events. Choosing to stay the course feels boring and insufficiently proactive, especially when the stakes are so high.

But that commentary shouldn’t lose sense of humanity. Journalists keep wondering why Joe Biden doesn’t take interviews with the press after the debate, or why is Biden’s family still calling for Biden to run and not calling for his resignation as they wanted. Imagine if the person who was facing all the blasting coverage and criticism wasn’t Joe Biden, but your grandparents. Yours truly doesn’t have the answer to how you will react if facing that situation, but I wouldn’t blame you for doubling down in support of your own family amid this intense level of hysterical scrutiny.

What comes next? There are two ways to go. One would be Biden stubbornly stays on the ticket, which might lead to a gradual dying down of hysteria but the resentment of Biden by the media and pundit class will keep on simmering until the next Biden age issue (God forbid it is Biden dying or him losing the election). Another outcome will be if Biden does step down and let Kamala be the new candidate and president. What then? I highly doubt the media is going to shut down their hysterical Dem talk right then. If the polls under Harris don’t improve, there might be a buyers-remorse type of situation flooding the political commentary space, but by then it would be too late.