My appetite is returning today after the nausea I experienced watching President Biden, or at least what’s left of him, suffer through 90 minutes of what felt at times like elderly abuse in the Thursday night debate.
Trump was his usual self, a power-hungry cynic gushing lies on every topic, doing his best to stir anger and hatred. Several times, he refused to promise that he’ll respect the results of the November election, even after exhausting his legal challenges. If the devil walked the Earth, he could take lessons from this man.
But after this disastrous debate, there is one consolation: the calendar. This TV debate, for the first time in history, took place before the party convention in August. There is still time to replace Biden as the nominee, should he be convinced to hand the baton to one of several younger and more popular Democrats.
Team Biden proposed the early date, which makes you wonder: Did they choose June so they’d have a safety net? Was this the only way to convince the boss that his time has come?
That time has surely come. Biden is a good man, and he’ll go down in history as a successful president. He’s gotten big stuff done, a miracle in this crazy political time.
But he’s a very old man, and his verbal skills are gone. He was only a few minutes in when he ended an incoherent ramble about the national debt by saying, “We finally beat Medicare” and staring into the camera blankly. It didn’t make a scrap of sense.
On the border, he fell apart again. Instead of skewering Trump for derailing a tough bipartisan bill to secure the border, he slurred a word salad without meaning, citing his “total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.” Got that?
It went on like this. He even lost the exchange on abortion, a miracle of incompetence. “First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.” Ouch.
Most painful of all, though, was the failure to smack down Trump’s lies. Trump is way ahead of Biden among disengaged voters who don’t follow politics, and may not have seen the lies, plentiful as they were. Listening to the CNN fact check after the debate sounded like a skit from Saturday Night Live.
Trump said that some Democratic states allow doctors to kill newborn babies. He said “everyone” agreed Roe v. Wade should be overturned. He said Biden had the biggest budget deficit ever, and the biggest trade deficit with China – in both cases, that honor goes to Trump. He said Biden wants to “quadruple” taxes, a flat-out fabrication. CNN found 30 statements like this.
How could Biden let him get away with that? A split screen showed Trump, who seemed vigorous, building a mountain of lies while Biden looked downward, often with his mouth slightly open, as if waiting for a spoon of oatmeal. This was painful, start to finish.
Sure, even a diminished Biden would make a better president than Trump. As the comedian Bill Maher put it, “I’d vote for Biden’s head in a jar of blue liquid versus Trump.”
But Democrats have stronger options, and I’m not talking about Kamala Harris, who was an awful candidate in 2020, an ineffective senator before then, and a cowardly attorney general before that. We can do better.
Start with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a swing state where she won reelection in a landslide two years ago. How about teaming her up with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Black Rhodes Scholar and former Army Captain who won in an even bigger landslide last year. Other possibles include Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock.
But will Biden quit? He’s down in the latest polls, especially among disengaged voters who don’t follow politics closely and seem to buy the nonsense that Trump is selling. This debate will inflame the acute concerns about Biden’s age. Robert Kennedy Jr. and the other flakes with no hope will probably get a boost, based mostly on refugees from Camp Biden. This debate was a political disaster on every front.
Will Biden ever give up? That may depend on the people around him, starting with First Lady Jill Biden, and perhaps including former President Obama, and Biden’s closest circle of top advisors, people like Ron Klain, his former chief of staff. If they love Biden, now’s the time to be honest with him. If they believe Trump presents a threat to our democracy, then it’s a patriotic obligation.
My nausea returns when I think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the esteemed Supreme Court Justice who refused to step down while Obama was in the White House, despite her advanced age and declining health. That allowed Trump to replace her with Amy Coney Barrett, one of the justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Bader Ginsburg didn’t take the risk seriously. Let’s hope that Biden does.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or (973) 986-6951. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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