Posted on 06/30/2024 1:09:52 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Seventy-two hours after the debate in Atlanta last week, President Biden and those closest to him have settled on the same strategy police officers use to shoo bystanders away from a car crash: “Nothing to see here.”
According to the talking points being repeated by the president’s aides and surrogates, the debate was a 90-minute blip in a long campaign. Mr. Biden didn’t have “a great night,” as he told donors Saturday, but fund-raising is going strong and he has already bounced back.
Aides have been pushing a similar message for more than a year, as polls have shown that voters are worried about the president’s age. They have brushed off such concerns, calling them little more than a creation of the media and the MAGA movement supporting the campaign of former President Donald J. Trump.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, the president’s top campaign strategist, said on Saturday that any drop in the polls would be the result of “overblown media narratives.” Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, dismissed anxiety about the president’s performance, saying on “Fox News Sunday” that “it’s like one debate.”
And yet, like the bystanders at the car crash, voters do not need to be told what happened during the face-off with Mr. Trump. They saw it with their own eyes.
“Telling people they didn’t see what they saw is not the way to respond to this,” Ben Rhodes, who was a top foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote on social media an hour after the debate ended on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Arguably it was a blip. The poll taken after the debate showed that he lost about 2% and Trump gained about 1%. People have decided who they will vote for and there isn’t much that can change their minds. That actually is a good thing. It makes it less likely Biden will be replaced.
Predictable tactic of damage control is first, to minimize the damage, interpret it as insignificant, and move on as if nothing has happened. Just a bad night, everyone has one; just had a cold, so wasn’t at his best; Pay no attention to the blank stare and half open mouth— just a sign he was a little tired after a week of vigorous over preparing. Y’all know the drill.
The Biden meltdown is something the public had not seen so clearly before. If a 2% drop in polls corresponds to the actual vote in November, only 2% of the voters care if the person entrusted with making decisions about a nuclear attack can communicate verbally.
There is a long time before the election. I suspect even that 2% drop will wither before the election.
Some voters already knew before the debate that the media was gaslighting about Biden’s dementia. I would like to believe that the debate showed “10 to 4” Biden to millions of voters who had not faced the fact that in the event of a nuclear attack, he might not be able to even communicate with others. Maybe I am naive.
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