I agree about the abysmal job of the "preppers" who failed to see the effect of the onslaught of lies and how to deal with them.
As I have posted elsewhere:
I've read some chunks of the transcript. With a few exceptions, without the stutter and pauses Biden's points are cogent and well made, though probably too involved with straight facts and not a narrative surrounding them. To call him "feeble" here is to judge by how anyone reacts when the door of a blast furnace is suddenly opened, except that he DID not melt in substance.
It’s incredible to me that the army of debate prep staff couldn’t get the essential truth you stated up front. It’s like nobody led the prep; just a bunch of parts. I also appreciate you framing this as an opportunity for the Biden team to learn. There’s still time to course correct. Keep teaching, Dave.
As bad as Biden's performance was, his entire campaign team should be fired.
Biden was poorly prepared, the debate format was a horrific choice, and the failure to pre-spin Biden's cold was political malpractice.
People will turn out if they understand the stakes, but I doubt that 25% of voters have even heard about Project 2025.
People will turn out if they understand the vision for a 2nd Biden term, but I've yet to hear a coherent summary (and "finish the job" is meaningless).
There should be thousands of surrogates flooding the country, the airwaves, TikTok. Where are they?
There should have been an add up within an hour, with Trump saying that ending Roe was his "gift to America"...juxtaposed against emergency room scenes of women bleeding and life flights taking off.
Well put, David -- especially the part about CNN enabling Trumpian disinformation. Here's part of what I wrote on that subject in a comment on a Washington Post review of the debate by Lili Loofbourow with the headline "At this Presidential Debate, we all Lost:"
Shame, shame, SHAME on CNN's management (mangle-ment would be a better description) for the format and rules for this debate! Jake Tapper and Dana Bash could easily have fact-checked Trump's most heinous lies on the spot, and I can only surmise that they were threatened with loss of employment if they did so.
The timing, the lighting, the funereal stage, and above all the rules preventing these two skillful investigative reporters from fact-checking, loaded the dice in Trump's favor in this ugly parody of a real debate. Add to that the fact that Biden was suffering either from a cold, extreme fatigue or a long and stressful day of hard work, while Trump looked rested and refreshed. Being 88 years old myself, I can sympathize with Biden. We all have "senior moments" after 65, but Biden is clearly an "elder" -- having some wisdom. Trump does not.
Biden is not now and has not really ever been a strong communicator. But as President he has been more effective than any since LBJ, and that needs to be communicated to the public. It’s just that he is not the one to do it. If Ted Sorenson was able to “walk through that door”, Joe would still be unable to get the message across. It needs to be surrogates with national recognition and broad appeal. DiNiro was nice. How about Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney doing a tag team ad? Dolly Parton and Bruce The Boss? C’mon people!
5 minutes in last night, I was “oh shit”. Joe had no voice, he was struggling to sift through the TONS of info they’d given him. Very poor job of prep team. Hillary lost to Trump with a horribly run campaign. Cannot afford a repeat.
If all the voters that do support pro choice vote based on DJT’s lie about Row v Wade, that alone might win Biden the election. But of course they can vote on ALL the other lies we heard last night. If voters LISTEN to what the felonator says, instead of what the NYT says, Biden wins!
No. 1 - He won't resign - he's President until the election and he's doing a historically good job. He's proven over and over that he can do the job and has built a world class administration.
No 2 he would have to decline the nomination...and then it would go to Kamala. There is no white male unicorn waiting in the wings to become a Dem savior. MAGA pushes the "drop Joe" narrative so that they can run against a woman of color.
No. 3 Republicans printed "I'm voting for the Convicted Felon" T-Shirts and wore diapers to support Trump. There is nothing weaker than cutting and running....and the public hates weakness almost more than anything.
Trump said America is the "worst country in the world"...the public hates that too.
Trump said ending Roe was his "gift to America" ...Play that on repeat and remember that SCOTUS punted on EMTALA and 2 of the men said that women do not deserve life-saving, health preserving treatment if they are pregnant.
This is about my daughters and granddaughters. It's personal.
Biden should be prepped for future debates to say, first, after every T response, " There you go again, Donald...not answering the question you were asked." Then he could address what the Biden administration HAS accomplished in the area mentioned.
It’s the Ronald Reagan playbook against Carter - the hostages, talking illegally in a back channel to a foreign head of state, pumping up the tax incentives for big business even more, form over substance, being crowned by compromised media opinion columnist before the election has occurred.
The party establishment still has PTSD from '68 when Johnson bowed out and we lost to Nixon. I still have PTSD from 2016, when Hillary's unfavorable ratings were slightly better than Joe's are at this point in the race.
Of course informed substack subscribers, and most everyone in our respective circles, would vote for Joe Biden's corpse preserved in formaldehyde before we would sit it out or vote for the alternative. But tragically we learned in 2016 that there are a whole lot of otherwise reasonable people who don't think the way we do, who don't understand the threat, who don't understand how government actually works. There are those who claim to be progressive insisting upon a level of purity and perfection which does not exist.
I've remained far more appalled by "liberals" who stayed home or voted for Jill Stein in 2016, and in doing so, sent our country down the road to hell. Every miserable decision handed down by the Supreme Court since, only renews my anger and fear that so many progressives seem to be determined once again to cut off their nose to spite their face. I struggle to figure out how to reach them, as a Boomer living in a liberal bubble, not having any known connections to people I only read about and see in interviews.
I appreciate the optimistic belief that progressives are more aware of the risks now, and I will do everything in my power to affect awareness where I have influence, but clearly our optimism isn't reflected in the polls. That keeps me up at night.
David, Well stated. I won’t say as some have that Biden was unprepared, he was over-prepared and unrelaxed and suffering from a cold didn’t help. Trump made use of a rhetorical style of rapid fire lies that, knowing there’d be no real time fact checking, left Biden (in fact it would leave anyone) unable to reply or correct and still time to answer the moderator’s question. A big part of that is CNN’s fault for the format and rules.
Four years ago around this time, Joe Biden was wanting to be a transitional president; an experienced elder statesman president that could get things done and fixed and then ready to pass the torch to a new younger generation of leadership in four years. What Biden and/or his team and the DNC leadership either failed to see or wanted to acknowledge was the fact, win or lose in 2020, Trump and MAGA wasn’t going away. And here we are.
I don’t know who’s coaching Joe and running strategy for him and the DNC, but they need a swift hard kick in the head.
I donated as soon as debate ended. We need to have Joe’s and America’s back. It was a bad night. Trump lied all night long.
I agree about the abysmal job of the "preppers" who failed to see the effect of the onslaught of lies and how to deal with them.
As I have posted elsewhere:
I've read some chunks of the transcript. With a few exceptions, without the stutter and pauses Biden's points are cogent and well made, though probably too involved with straight facts and not a narrative surrounding them. To call him "feeble" here is to judge by how anyone reacts when the door of a blast furnace is suddenly opened, except that he DID not melt in substance.
It’s incredible to me that the army of debate prep staff couldn’t get the essential truth you stated up front. It’s like nobody led the prep; just a bunch of parts. I also appreciate you framing this as an opportunity for the Biden team to learn. There’s still time to course correct. Keep teaching, Dave.
As bad as Biden's performance was, his entire campaign team should be fired.
Biden was poorly prepared, the debate format was a horrific choice, and the failure to pre-spin Biden's cold was political malpractice.
People will turn out if they understand the stakes, but I doubt that 25% of voters have even heard about Project 2025.
People will turn out if they understand the vision for a 2nd Biden term, but I've yet to hear a coherent summary (and "finish the job" is meaningless).
There should be thousands of surrogates flooding the country, the airwaves, TikTok. Where are they?
This unfortunately seems true.
There should have been an add up within an hour, with Trump saying that ending Roe was his "gift to America"...juxtaposed against emergency room scenes of women bleeding and life flights taking off.
His team has yet to release an ad that ends the GOP lie of abortion post-birth.
Literally the world's easiest ad...
I knew I could rely on you, David, to make me feel better.
Well put, David -- especially the part about CNN enabling Trumpian disinformation. Here's part of what I wrote on that subject in a comment on a Washington Post review of the debate by Lili Loofbourow with the headline "At this Presidential Debate, we all Lost:"
Shame, shame, SHAME on CNN's management (mangle-ment would be a better description) for the format and rules for this debate! Jake Tapper and Dana Bash could easily have fact-checked Trump's most heinous lies on the spot, and I can only surmise that they were threatened with loss of employment if they did so.
The timing, the lighting, the funereal stage, and above all the rules preventing these two skillful investigative reporters from fact-checking, loaded the dice in Trump's favor in this ugly parody of a real debate. Add to that the fact that Biden was suffering either from a cold, extreme fatigue or a long and stressful day of hard work, while Trump looked rested and refreshed. Being 88 years old myself, I can sympathize with Biden. We all have "senior moments" after 65, but Biden is clearly an "elder" -- having some wisdom. Trump does not.
Biden is not now and has not really ever been a strong communicator. But as President he has been more effective than any since LBJ, and that needs to be communicated to the public. It’s just that he is not the one to do it. If Ted Sorenson was able to “walk through that door”, Joe would still be unable to get the message across. It needs to be surrogates with national recognition and broad appeal. DiNiro was nice. How about Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Clooney doing a tag team ad? Dolly Parton and Bruce The Boss? C’mon people!
5 minutes in last night, I was “oh shit”. Joe had no voice, he was struggling to sift through the TONS of info they’d given him. Very poor job of prep team. Hillary lost to Trump with a horribly run campaign. Cannot afford a repeat.
BIDENS RALLY IN NC WAS FANTASTIC!!!!! Watch it and please comment! Thanks David
If all the voters that do support pro choice vote based on DJT’s lie about Row v Wade, that alone might win Biden the election. But of course they can vote on ALL the other lies we heard last night. If voters LISTEN to what the felonator says, instead of what the NYT says, Biden wins!
Unfortunately he gave the impression that if he had a tight two prepped for everything Trump could throw at him, he still would have whiffed. Sad.
Hi David… lotsa people saying Biden should resign and help select his replacement candidate(s)! What do you think about that ?xxG
That is a fantasy.
No. 1 - He won't resign - he's President until the election and he's doing a historically good job. He's proven over and over that he can do the job and has built a world class administration.
No 2 he would have to decline the nomination...and then it would go to Kamala. There is no white male unicorn waiting in the wings to become a Dem savior. MAGA pushes the "drop Joe" narrative so that they can run against a woman of color.
No. 3 Republicans printed "I'm voting for the Convicted Felon" T-Shirts and wore diapers to support Trump. There is nothing weaker than cutting and running....and the public hates weakness almost more than anything.
Trump said America is the "worst country in the world"...the public hates that too.
Trump said ending Roe was his "gift to America" ...Play that on repeat and remember that SCOTUS punted on EMTALA and 2 of the men said that women do not deserve life-saving, health preserving treatment if they are pregnant.
This is about my daughters and granddaughters. It's personal.
Volunteer More, Donate More and Fight Harder.
We'll be standing with you.
Amen!
Biden should be prepped for future debates to say, first, after every T response, " There you go again, Donald...not answering the question you were asked." Then he could address what the Biden administration HAS accomplished in the area mentioned.
It’s the Ronald Reagan playbook against Carter - the hostages, talking illegally in a back channel to a foreign head of state, pumping up the tax incentives for big business even more, form over substance, being crowned by compromised media opinion columnist before the election has occurred.
The party establishment still has PTSD from '68 when Johnson bowed out and we lost to Nixon. I still have PTSD from 2016, when Hillary's unfavorable ratings were slightly better than Joe's are at this point in the race.
Of course informed substack subscribers, and most everyone in our respective circles, would vote for Joe Biden's corpse preserved in formaldehyde before we would sit it out or vote for the alternative. But tragically we learned in 2016 that there are a whole lot of otherwise reasonable people who don't think the way we do, who don't understand the threat, who don't understand how government actually works. There are those who claim to be progressive insisting upon a level of purity and perfection which does not exist.
I've remained far more appalled by "liberals" who stayed home or voted for Jill Stein in 2016, and in doing so, sent our country down the road to hell. Every miserable decision handed down by the Supreme Court since, only renews my anger and fear that so many progressives seem to be determined once again to cut off their nose to spite their face. I struggle to figure out how to reach them, as a Boomer living in a liberal bubble, not having any known connections to people I only read about and see in interviews.
I appreciate the optimistic belief that progressives are more aware of the risks now, and I will do everything in my power to affect awareness where I have influence, but clearly our optimism isn't reflected in the polls. That keeps me up at night.
David, Well stated. I won’t say as some have that Biden was unprepared, he was over-prepared and unrelaxed and suffering from a cold didn’t help. Trump made use of a rhetorical style of rapid fire lies that, knowing there’d be no real time fact checking, left Biden (in fact it would leave anyone) unable to reply or correct and still time to answer the moderator’s question. A big part of that is CNN’s fault for the format and rules.
Four years ago around this time, Joe Biden was wanting to be a transitional president; an experienced elder statesman president that could get things done and fixed and then ready to pass the torch to a new younger generation of leadership in four years. What Biden and/or his team and the DNC leadership either failed to see or wanted to acknowledge was the fact, win or lose in 2020, Trump and MAGA wasn’t going away. And here we are.
I don’t know who’s coaching Joe and running strategy for him and the DNC, but they need a swift hard kick in the head.