Biden resists allies’ calls to exit race after debate performance: ‘I know I’m not a young man’
Biden resists allies’ calls to exit race after debate performance: ‘I know I’m not a young man’
After his weak debate performance, Biden responds to suggestions that he bow out of the presidential race with a firmly voiced promise to beat Trump.
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The discourse around Biden exiting the race is moot because the only one who decides if he continues is Biden. Biden is still running so nothing changes. Biden is who we need to vote for to keep our democracy.
Biden had a bad debate performance. It was a missed opportunity to pick up new voters. Biden demoralized his base. But we're still stuck with him, because there is no external mechanism to stop him from running.
The most effective tool we have to prevent the christo-fascist takeover this November is voting. The debate did not change that.
the only one who decides if he continues is Biden.
Got it.
Biden is who we need to vote for to keep our democracy.
Um, what? Vote Biden to save Democracy, and fuck you if you want a different candidate.
I'll vote for Biden's corpse in 2028 if it's still the only way to keep Trump out of the Whitehouse, but give up the "save Democracy" schtick. That ship has sailed. Democracy is dead, and it's not just the Republican's fault.
Democracy is still alive for now. That's why voting matters. Our flawed democracy is still our best chance at adverting fascism. Which is why the fascists want to take it away. Giving up early gets us nothing. So keep fighting.
I think his point is that, if our only alternative to fascism is to vote for a senile old man who was forced upon voters without a primary, then this system can't credibly be called democracy.
It is still democracy. It doesn't matter how old the candidate is.
If your choices are vote for A and democracy ends or vote for B, it isn't really a choice. If it isn't a choice, it's not a democracy. It's political theater. Not unlike mock elections in dictatorships.
You're fucked either way, both choices are pathways to the same destination. Just at different speeds/ different routes.
By electing Biden democracy continues and we will have the opportunity for better choices. There are ways to fix our problems, but we have to be willing to fight for them. If we choose to keep fighting we can avert self-destruction. In this case it means voting for a neo-liberal. That's a small price to pay for a shot at a better society and averting death camps.
Its not about how old the candidate is, its about not having other valid alternatives when you dont like the candidate chosen for you.
Edit: just to make sure the point gets across. Imagine going to a restaurant, the waiter asks if you want to drink moldy water or toxic industrial waste. You see behind him lies an array of normal, refreshing beverages but sorry, you weren’t given those choices so you can’t have any of that. Thats basically this election.
We live in a first-past-the-post voting system. These choices, Biden and Trump, are in part the result of that system. We need to change to a different system like rank choice voting or approval voting. But despite being flawed, our system is still a democracy.
You can only continue to call this system a democracy by setting the bar very very low. Pointless to argue semantics though, better to argue substance. We won't get to a better - more representative - democracy by working within the current system; we need to apply external pressure. People don't feel that voting in this election will save democracy because they don't feel there's enough of it left to be saved. Voting in this election can at best stave off a total collapse to fascism, but that's it.
Our democracy is a democracy. That is a fact. The most effective method to improving our democracy is using our democracy. US history has demonstrated this repeatedly. Our democracy is our most effective tool to prevent fascism, so we should fight to keep it as long as possible. The fascist movement will continue to grow until we defeat their ideas and abandon neo-liberalism. This means we need to elect Biden in 2024 and then elect a socialist in 2028. edit: typo
The most effective method to improving our democracy is using our democracy. US history has demonstrated this repeatedly.
Meaningful progress has only ever been made in the US after mass movements engaged in direct action and protests (often met with violent state repression), and even then the legislation that's made is usually much less than the people wanted. This is not a sign of a democracy that functions for the people.
It is the sign of democracy for the people. All of the social, economic, and political progress in the US is thanks to movements that translated into legislation, amendments, and court rulings via our democracy. Without a democracy those movements would have hit a wall. Of course we need to continue to improve our democracy. We need unfettered majority rule in this country. It is functionally possible to achieve this, but people have to vote. The movements won't translate into positive change if people skip voting.
Why on earth do you think you'll be given the option to elect a socialist in 2028?
If Biden wins this election in 2024 we will have a Democratic primary without a Democratic incumbent in 2028. The last two times that happened we were given a socialist to vote for in the Democratic primary. In 2028 we need to make sure whoever that is wins the primary. We can do that by spreading socialist and progressive ideas in the fours years between now and the 2028 election.
We can still get back to democracy. This isn't democracy. Did you even read my comment btw? This knee jerk canned response isn't even human.
We are living in a democracy right now. The fascists are attempting to takeover our democracy. If we didn't have democracy there wouldn't be an election.
Then let's hold a primary.
The Democratic Party's primary already happened. As is typical for American politics the incumbent won their party's primary.
Well, at least in the states where they didn't succeed in keeping everyone else off the ballot.
There was no real primary. Even 2020 wasn't a real primary. The fix is in with mainstream media and the major outlets taking their queues from the establishment.
The idea that we have an actual democracy is laughable, and the Democratic party does everything in their power to keep it that way. Biden won in 2020 because the establishment picked him and the media did as they were told. There is no democracy without an independent press.
Biden is a better choice than Trump for a multitude of reasons, but not saving democracy.
We have a democracy. There is a real Democratic Party primary every four years. Incumbent presidents usually win their primary when they are up for reelection.
The press is independent, but for profit in most cases. There are of course non-profit exceptions. The fact capitalism exists doesn't mean democracy doesn't exist. It means the owner class has a profit motive to overthrow our democracy.
Electing Biden preserves our flawed democracy for four more years. This gives us time to build grassroots movements to put people with better ideas into political positions in the next two elections. It delays the christo-fascist movement for four more years, who have to win a presidential election to succeed.
Getting Biden in office is how we save our democracy, but not because of something he will do. In order to save our democracy, we first have to keep it. Then we have to fix it.
This year they literally canceled the presidential primary in several states so, no, we don't have a primary every four years.
Radical consolidation of the media industry has largely killed independent journalism. There is a long list of media personalities who were taken off the air for daring to speak the truth. Anchors are selected to represent the establishment perspective on everything. Media ownership and the establishment work together to dominate the narrative. For profit or non-profit is irrelevant. PBS is now as captured as the private networks.
New media caught the establishment by surprise and did manage to make inroads, but that has largely been brought under control. Democrats and Republicans cooperated long enough to pressure social media companies to tweak the algorithm to direct viewers to "trustworthy" news sources, a group that laughably includes FOX News and MS-NBC and excludes independent news providers.
Electing Biden can't preserve democracy where none exists. There was that study out of Stanford that showed zero statistical correlation between the policy desires of voters and what legislation gets passed. We have the facade of democracy, but no actual democracy.
What we do have is the fight for Democracy, and that fight has a much better chance under Biden than Trump. That's not a minor distinction. I will not get behind allowing the Democratic establishment to portray itself as the defender of Democracy. They are democracy's enemies, and they are my enemies. The entire fight for democracy in an age of media manipulation is a fight to pull back that curtain. That fight doesn't stop because of Trump.
Biden was a write in candidate in New Hampshire and won. Delware was cancelled because only Biden got enough signatures. Florida's cancellation is still being challenged in court. These exceptions are exceptions, they don't mean we didn't have a primary. The incumbent won the primary, like incumbents usually do.
The media isn't perfect. Fox News is a propaganda machine for the Republican Party. CNN was artificially shifted to the right by a rich donor. But the situation isn't as bad as your argument claims. We just had most of mainstream media attacking Biden over his debate performance. For profit media follows the profit motive to everyone's detriment. There isn't some kind of organized conspiracy to control the news.
We have a democracy. The policy people want and the policy that gets implemented has diverged since Regan. Neo-liberalism is the cause of this. Neo-liberalism suppresses socialist ideas, while allowing fascist ideas to take root. Neo-liberals cling to the status quo and believe that our institutions are fundamentally good. That we just need good people in charge of them. So they resist systemic change and fail to get to the root cause of our problems.
Our intuitions are fundamentally flawed and need to be fixed. We need majority rule in our democracy and wealth redistribution in our economy. We need to abolish the Electoral College, proportion Senate seats by population, have Supreme Court justices run for election to name a few. We need to remove the owner class by taking away their wealth and the source of their wealth. Workers need to own the corporations they work for. Every worker needs to be given an equal percentage of the company in stocks or bonds and be paid out regularly in dividends or interest. Billionaires need to be taxed until they are millionaires.
In addition to being difficult to implement neo-liberals are going to intuitively resit these changes. The fixes all involve systemic change to systems they believe are inherently good. There are people who would rather elect Trump than fix these problems. Not because they are fascists, but because neo-liberalism has led them to believe that a 'good man' needs to be allowed to do 'what needs to be done'. There are of course people who want their prejudices to be validated and overt fascists. But neo-liberalism leaves people susceptible the idea that systems don't need to be fixed and that only the people need be to changed.
Thanks to neo-liberalism it easier for a fascist to convince people to blame their problems on immigrants and minorities than for a socialist to convince people to solve their problems with systemic change and wealth redistribution. This is not to say that it is impossible to convince people socialism is the answer to their problems. Just that we actively have to educate people about the flaws of neo-liberalism and fascism in addition to convincing them about progressive and socialist ideas.
I will not get behind allowing the Democratic establishment to portray itself as the defender of Democracy.
I am not arguing for this.
Biden is who we need to vote for to keep our democracy.
I am arguing for this.
I am not arguing Biden will save democracy. Biden is a neo-liberal. His political ideology prevents him from saving our democracy. The same goes for the Democratic Party who are predominately neo-liberals. I am arguing that we, as in the American people, need to save our democracy. The first step in the strategy I am arguing for is to elect Joe Biden. Out of the two viable candidates, he is the candidate who is not a fascist. Electing Biden will preserve our democracy, flawed as it is, for four more years.
Then we need to use the 2026 and 2028 elections to elect socialists and progressives. We ideally want a socialist president to win in 2028. We need to co-opt the Democratic party the way the christo-fascists co-opted the Republican Party.
That fight doesn’t stop because of Trump.
The fascists will not be defeated until we defeat their ideas. Once Trump is out of the picture MAGA and the Republican Party will find a new guy. Fascists movements are springing up in Europe. Modi is the head of a hindu-fascist movement in India. Getting Biden elected is not the solution, just a way to delay the fascists in the US long enough to start implementing actual solutions. edit: typos
There are a lot of non-democracies with elections.
Not a lot of them vote out the would be dictator so that he incites an insurrection.
I don't understand this chain of logic why we need to keep Biden:
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Biden isn't the best candidate.
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Only Biden can drop (false)
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Biden will never make the adult decision to retire.
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We have to plow forward with Biden because he'll never change his mind on anything.
Like, the argument for why Biden has to stay, is just reasons he shouldn't stay...
And it's not just up to him. It's up to the DNC.
We are not stuck with Biden.
Biden and the DNC just know that's the only way people will vote for him, so they've been reporting it for like 5 years now.
Only Biden can drop
This is a true statement. Biden won the primary. The delegates are pledged to him. Biden is the one who has to decide if he drops out.
Mostly true. The DNC is the organization that makes the rules and can change them at any time. That would be a pretty bad move though unless the party really felt united in needing to do a hostile expulsion. Realistically Biden needs to be on board for a change to work, so being able to play Calvinball with primary voting rules isn't really an out.
Yes, as I understand it they would have to change the rules to expel him. People seem to be assuming that there is already a mechanism to expel him without doing that.
Ah yes, the DNC, known for making good decisions for our democracy. How they trusted Hillary on us leading to the election of Trump.
We just need ranked choice voting at a national scale. Until that happens we're going to keep dealing with this bullshit. A lot of Republicans don't want to elect a fascist anymore than a lot of democrats don't want to elect a geriatric. But just like democrats a lot of those Republicans think they have no choice. These could all have been avoided with a different voting system and the more moderate members of each party could have voted together.
I agree with you, but the system is just fucking broken.
Until that happens we’re going to keep dealing with this bullshit.
Bruh...
The current DNC is not going to support RCV. Some state parties might, but the DNC is run by moderates who know most of their votes are because literally the only other option is a Republican.
To get rcv, we need to get a progressive president who will actually try to fix the DNC.
Obama wasn't perfect, and he made a lot of mistakes.
But the one that keeps fucking us over is instead of fixing the DNC when he had a shot, he just ignored them because they just ignored him in 08.
If Obama had tried to fix the DNC, Bernie would have won in 2016, would be exiting his second term, and likely handing the torch to president AOC.
trump would still be known as a shitty reality TV host, and we'd all be better off.
At this point tho, the DNC may be beyond saving.
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The guy didn't ace a debate with a sore throat and jet-lag so the media loses its shit. The orange liar has rape and 34 felony convictions- crickets. Nothing new here.
There are two standards. Everyone expects Republicans to be lying shitheads so when they are, no one is surprised.
We somehow just accept this.
I searched for an editorial board opinion in the New York Times which said Trump should withdraw from the Republican ticket because he lied throughout the debate, but I couldn't find one. Why didn't they write one?
Because the media is complicit and owned by the same oligarchs that have taken control of our country.
Can the party not compel him to step down and elect a more healthy replacement.
There is no mechanism at this stage that can force him to do so that I am aware of. They can of course try to convince him, but no one from Biden's inner circle, like Jill Biden, or any of the hypothetical candidates people like to float, like Gavin Newsom, has expressed interest in doing that.
the only one who decides if he continues is Biden … vote for to keep our democracy.
I … I don’t think that’s a democracy.
Biden won the Democratic Party's primary election so he is going to be the Democratic Party's candidate. That is democracy.
Ah yes. Demos is greek for the democratic party.
In a democracy, the person who wins an election gets the position they ran for.
If there is only one predetermined person running does it still count as “winning”?
How is it different with two predetermined people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries
Other people ran in the Democratic Party's primary. As is typical of US politics, the incumbent president won their primary.
Biden and Trump both won their primaries, because people in their respective parties voted for Biden and Trump. Trump had even more challengers than Biden did. This outcome wasn't predetermined, just predictable.
Hillary Clinton vs Jeb Bush in 2016 was predictable. But as we saw with Trump's win, not predetermined.
Biden was tired from too many engagements, jet lag and a sore throat. You could see he was tried. On the other hand, the orange felon/rapist/liar had one job - to not be an asshole - he failed spectacularly.
He spent an entire week focusing on just this debate at Camp David.
Why would he be tired? What other engagements did he have?
Yeah, at least Trump didn't gain any ground. Biden lost the battle, but we're still fighting the war.
sounds like the party is dysfunctional if we can't replace a candidate with 120 days of leadup. that's longer than any other country's election season. the inability of the democratic party to do good things on purpose makes a strong argument against their leadership if what they think they offer is competence
I thought the 2016 Bernie debacle was enough of a learning moment for the Democrats, yet 8 years go so long for memory lane. Biden is barely functional, anyone with old grandparents know how fast things accelerate, how is he even going to last 5 more years with that mental capacity? Isn't this at the end blind party loyalty, the same thing the republicans are criticized for? I guess rules for thee but not for me.
Yep - if you are for Biden after that debate you're just Blue MAGA, he is unfit for office at this point. That's not a "bad night" , that's an old man. I cant even believe these news articles, its outrageous. I basically support the guy and after that debate I don't know how I cam cast a vote of confidence that he can do the job. We're fucked.
If he gets elected I'm not worried. He can die or be puppeted by his staff and things will be roughly as ok as they are now. I'm worried he won't get elected.
One does not need to vote for biden, one only needs to vote against trump. It is unfortunate that those are the same.
But more people want to vote against trump than want to vote Biden.
And everyone voting Biden wants to vote against Trump.
Logically, to get the most votes, wed run a better candidate than Biden to maximize odds of stopping trump...
Like, you get that right?
Biden and the DNC is asking tens of millions of voters to vote for someone they don't want because stopping trump is so important. But refuse to step aside to help stop trump.
That's not us working together to stop trump.
It's Biden and the DNC holding the entire country hostage with the threat of trump if we don't elect someone we don't want.
Which just hurts Biden's chances of stopping trump even more, and shows that even if he wins, he's just going to do whatever the fuck he wants like continue to violate US and international law. Which is why:
But more people want to vote against trump than want to vote Biden.
If Biden really cared most about stopping Trump, he'd fucking retire.
The Democratic Party is still the best option when the only viable alternative is a christo-fascist party.
We're past "preventing" the Christo-fascist takeover. We're in damage control now.
VOTE.
The christo-fascists are not in complete control of all three branches of government yet. That is why this election and voting is so important. Calling it early is both inaccurate and unhelpful.
I'm running on an independent ticket. My platform: Unlike the other two candidates no one wonders if I can physically handle the journey from back stage to the podium.
You're the hero we needed and the hero we deserved.
I'm fucking serious, one of the talking heads on the news said Biden needed to "remain upright" to come off well in this debate. That was said of the currently serving commander-in-chief!
Unlike the actual President Of These United States of America, the 24 hour news cycle probably expects more out of me than "can stand up straight for 30 minutes without incident."
Remember when Trump made a point to demonstrate his ability to lift and drink from a glass of water?
Seriously next time these two appear on stage I want them to step through a hoop to prove there are no wires.