Joe has my back, and I've got his.

Let's talk about the debate, and the media's weird and unhelpful reaction

One of my favorite comedians and actors Eddie Izzard famously said “70% is how you look, 20% is how you sound, and 10% is what you say.” Then - hand on her heart - she launched into a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, singing the wrong lyrics loudly and with wild expression: “And fish in the sky! And a big monkey pie!” 

Joe Biden only had that last 10% going for him during Thursday’s debate, and even then it wasn’t the best. He looked sick. He sounded quiet. He was unable to fact check the two-minute chunks of lie avalanches spewed by his racist felon opponent. He was and ill-prepared. Those who watched it can’t deny that. And I’m not going to. 

My first thought was “Oh, Christ. The Media is going to do what they did with the Mueller congressional testimony. They’ll say he didn’t have PIZAZZ and they’ll keep harping on their “he’s too old” narrative and ignore substance along with the dystopian xenophobic nazi shit that Trump said.” But what the media actually did was bizarre to me. They started calling for Biden to drop out of the race altogether. Four months before the election. Beyond ballot access deadlines. And a lot of them were calling for Biden to be replaced with folks OTHER than our amazing and capable Vice President Kamala Harris. 

What. The. Fuck.

Whether you think Biden should step aside or not, we can all agree trump must be defeated in November. It seems that we each have our own ideas about the best way to do that. Ousting the incumbent four months ahead of the election with ballot access deadlines on top of us seems like a really bad idea to me. Maybe if it happened all the time, we’d have some successful historical precedent to point to. But history shows us the incumbent is by far the best candidate.

Obama flubbed his debate with Romney. John Kerry knocked all three of his debates out of the park. 20 million fewer people watched this debate than the 2020 Biden/Trump debate, and three of four post-debate polls show no movement. Debates are meaningless and history shows that. Newsweek even reported undecideds had flipped to Biden after the debate mostly because of the firehose of lies that came from Donald Trump. Biden raised over $40M in the 48 hours following the debate, and the hour after the debate ended was the single biggest grassroots fundraising haul of the entire campaign. Trump’s post-debate fundraising paled in comparison.

Again, I’m not insinuating that Biden didn’t do well. But one of the most fervent and angry replies I get from people - mostly men - responding to the fact that I still back Joe is that I’m “gaslighting” them because they saw his performance “with their own eyes.” That totally misses the point. I saw the debate, too. I’ve never said Joe knocked it out of the park, or even did well for that matter. My problem is when they call ME crazy for not wanting Biden to step aside based on one bad debate performance. Talk about gaslighting! 

Look. Had Biden gone on to the campaign headquarters later Thursday night and sounded the same as he did during the debate, or had he sounded similar later on when he went to the Waffle House, or if he sounded terrible the next day in North Carolina - then SURE we can have a discussion about persistent underperformance and capability. But the debate was clearly an anomaly. One that Bob Woodward says should be investigated. I’m not going to make excuses without facts. We know he had a cold. We know he got better as the debate progressed. We know he rocked it later that night and the following two days. But we don’t know what we don’t know so I won’t speculate on why he did poorly Thursday. I’ll let investigative journalists uncover that.

I won’t speculate because at this point, it doesn’t matter. What matters is pundits with megaphones calling for Biden to step aside with no real plan to beat trump in that scenario. If these folks truly believe that replacing Biden now is our best chance to beat Trump in November, they’re basing that opinion on feelings, not facts. Experts I trust tell us that entertaining changing course at this late stage is a ridiculous exercise in futility. And I wish it were only that. But the repeated calls rooted in fear and panic will do more damage - in my estimation - than a bad debate performance ever could.

I don’t see how dividing us with fear and panic will help defeat Trump in November. And if defeating Trump is really their goal, then they should realize the damage they’re doing and knock it the fuck off.

I also have a darker take on why they’re doing this: so that if somehow Trump wins, they can blame us for running Joe Biden. They are desperate to be right so they can score editorial points and shift the blame off of them for dividing dems and onto some mythical scenario that wouldn’t have ever worked. It happened with some Bernie supporters in 2016 - as if dems would have defeated Trump if Bernie were the nominee even though Bernie couldn’t get the votes in primaries. They did it with Merrick Garland - using debunked talking points to somehow blame him for the fact that Trump’s picks on the Supreme Court have successfully delayed Trump’s coup trial for over six months. It feels like a set up so they can say “I told you so” later with no real evidence that they would have been right. 

After I watched the debate, I was sad and anxious, but it never crossed my mind to call for Joe to step aside. That was never an option because in my mind it would be electoral suicide. Any other scenario besides Biden and Harris would fracture the party in a race that’s already too close for comfort (if the polls are to be believed - which I’m not convinced of, but why risk it?) I thought “Well, time to circle the wagons. We can’t spin this performance so we need a strong message going forward.” The very next day, we saw the “Get Back Up Again” speech. PERFECT!

I assume the polls will take a hit (mainly because the media and pundits are out here scaring the shit out of everyone and telling them how they should feel), but that we’d bounce back. That was it. It wasn’t a big deal. Until - just as they did with Hillary’s emails in 2016 - the media made it a big deal.

I was also certain that level-headed electeds wouldn’t call for Joe to step aside over one debate, and they haven’t. Hillary, Obama, Jeffries - everyone’s still with Joe despite the media. I also hope and believe that all the folks who are calling for him to step aside will still back him and vote for him and roll up their sleeves for Joe if he doesn’t step aside. New York Times excluded - who has had it in for Joe for a long time now. But I don’t care much about the opinion of an editorial board that opposed women’s suffrage and put Hitler on a pedestal. I’ve canceled my Times subscription, along with my Atlanta Journal Constitution and New Yorker subscriptions. I’ve cancelled all advertising with those publications across my podcast network. I’ve subscribed to the Philly Inquirer who countered with an editorial board piece calling for TRUMP to step aside as the republican candidate. 

I think it’s a mistake to call for Joe to stand down because facts and history tell me he’s the best chance we have to defeat Donald Trump, AND because he’s the best person for the job based on the past 3.5 years of incredible leadership. If things somehow change, I’ll always back the Dems, just as I have in every election, all the way down the ballot since my first election in 1992. But I never entertained for a second the possibility of calling for Joe to step aside sending our party into upheaval four months ahead of the most important election of our lifetime.

My support for the Biden/Harris ticket is unwavering, and I’m proud that I’ll never have to walk back comments on any of my podcasts.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.

~AG