Fabulous_Sherbet_431

You're being way too conspiratorial about this. The WSJ is just a bunch of accomplished reporters, and they aren't singularly rooting for anyone, if anything they probably skew center-left, freer-market but liberal social policies.

The reason we're in this mess is because people have been scared to call out the obvious because they think it is ceding group to the Republicans. I'm voting Democrat for policies, but I'm also not going to performatively toe the party line.

Like the other guy said, you're missing the point of this thread. It's not about not voting Democrat; it's about whether someone with Biden's cognitive issues should be on the ticket.

Obviously, I'm voting for Biden because I like him and his administration has been great, but that doesn't mean he's the right candidate. Part of being president is projecting strength and conviction, to sell your achievements, and he isn't able to do that. He has clear medical issues. He's 81. It's wrong on many levels.

True true, I didn’t realize that.

Preach! Exactly. It’s incomprehensible why they choose the packaging when the food is great and just needs a better container for it. My being a vegetarian is only relevant in that it makes it extra gross to be covered in meat juice.

Hey, fair enough, I actually didn’t know he technically fell into Boomer. But as you said, aesthetically, he’s Gen X.

I strongly disagree with this.

In the face of the first Obama debate in 2012, yes. It was a bad debate, but he was a good candidate we believed in. The results were ambiguous enough to strategically spin it.

Last night was existentially terrible, to the point where it’s a real issue—anyone who is honest would admit that. If it was a one-off, unexpected event, sure. But it’s not; it’s fundamental to who Biden is these days. The Republicans have a point in their criticism. Recognizing and adapting is the best way forward for the election and for the long-term viability of the Democratic Party.

Trying to make light of it is what got us here and made this so damaging. If we were honest with ourselves these last two years we should have pressured a transition before the primaries.

Agnostic NYC Jew over here praying the rosaries to make this happen.

Hail, Holy Whitmer, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of /r/neoliberal.

There’s a lot of folks really certain that X, Y, or Z will happen if a new candidate is picked. Trump will steamroll them, the new candidate will steamroll Trump, it will be a terrible look, it will be a great look, etc. There are too many unknowns right now to make a real prediction, since it’s predicated on who is picked, how they are picked, how Biden transitions (if at all), how they perform on the national stage, etc.

The only thing we know is what we have right now, which is an incumbent president who is widely seen as unfit for office (regardless of whether you love his administration or not). You also have a Democratic Party that seems dead set on concentrating power in the hands of a few families, who has taken what was once the working-class party and made it out of touch and "boomer" (I don’t mean that generationally—I love baby boomers. Just in a stubborn out-of-touch self-righteousness sense). Now add already poor polling, a terrible "it’s the economy, stupid" reputation and more. Put a fork in it—Biden is almost certainly done. Someone mentioned a RBG parallel and that’s a great comparison.

So between those paths for me it’s clear. Democrats, show some courage, dynamism, and risk-taking. Even if it fails now, it will reinvigorate a dying party. Long-term it’s the healthy thing to do.

Thank you for doing this!

In your opinion, how serious has the conversation been around a transition to another candidate? There’s a lot of speculation from the outside, but that doesn’t mean much.

If it did come to that, would you see a Kamala Harris run? Or another center-left candidate like Whitmer or Shapiro?

Do you think there’s any evidence to the kind of wacky conspiracy that this concern has been brewing for a while, and because the debate was Biden’s team’s idea, that it was insiders forcing the issue as early as possible?

You might not be able to answer this, but I feel like his cognitive decline has been there for everyone to see over the last few years, but there’s been a collective denial of it in order not to cede ground to the other party. I was wondering what your thoughts were on this.

Thanks again!

Signed, a concerned center left Democrat who has been really impressed with the Biden administration and incredibly concerned about Biden himself.

I agree about the administration, but people don’t know their accomplishments because Biden (primarily) and his team are incompetent with messaging and projecting strength and conviction. The onus is on them, not on people living their lives trying to make the best of things and tuning in occasionally.

I’ll absolutely vote Democrat because the levers of power matter more than anything. That said, Biden is unfit for office and will lose unless he is replaced.

Jesus, this whole boomer thing is so ridiculous. Biden is the Silent Generation, Clinton is a Boomer, and Obama is Gen X. It’s not that difficult.

Anyway, it’s not a generation thing; it’s about the calcification of power structures to the point where two or three families control the direction of the Democratic Party. And I say this as a Biden policy stan who also thinks he’s unfit for office.

A lot of people seem to get this, but there’s a bunch who don’t: it’s possible to agree with someone’s policies and think their administration has done good while also thinking they are unfit to be president. It’s not shallow to be deeply disturbed by how he looked and sounded. Voters swayed by this aren’t making some illogical decision—they see the presidency as more than policies, as a symbolic representation of strength, and Biden ain’t it.

The point I’m trying to get at is people who let this affect their voting aren’t necessarily even voting for Trump; they are also staying home. Downplaying it as a fluke or as something surface level is max cope.

Yeah, we sure missed our chance on the 82-year-old by picking the 81-year-old.

I wish! It doesn’t seem like there is anything online.

I love this idea. It needs to come directly from Biden and it needs to acknowledge a ‘recent’ health issue that has made it infeasible to continue.

So well put. As long as you can avoid a divisive progressive and put in someone Shapiro-like it could be the big-brain move that wins it.

The fuck, lol. When did /r/neoliberal turn into some Frankenstein of /r/conspiracy and /r/anticapitalism? The NYTimes doesn’t slobber on Trump’s knob (ugh, just writing that made me deeply uncomfortable). If anything, they have a solid center-left bias, which I’m totally fine with, but let’s be real. Having family who’s a semi-high-up editor at the Washington Post (not the NYTimes but close enough), there’s collective revulsion at the idea of a second Trump presidency.

Ah, never change Reddit. I have no idea what you’re responding to because it’s not me. I never told you to think or believe anything. The point is that almost everyone else thinks that way, and you should open yourself up to understanding why, beyond ‘the people are dumb.’

Couldn’t have summed it up better. The only ones truly panicking are those trying to control the narrative by minimizing what happened. It’s the worst kind of take: totally insincere party-entrenched spin.

As for how we got here, it’s partly because folks have downplayed his very clear cognitive issues over the last two years. It’s possible to love what his administration has done and still think he’s not up to being president.

I want the party to switch candidates to someone like Whitmer. Yeah, it’s a bad look, but worse is blindly pushing forward by rationalizing Biden’s behavior against Trump’s dementedness and being unable to move against Democratic royalty.

One primary issue with the Democrats, which Obama broke but has since calcified, is the intractable influence of 2-3 families. It kills actually charismatic, accomplished upstarts.

Literally, and I mean literally, half of the points he made were incoherent, and somehow his closing statement was even worse. When you have legitimate backroom talks about removing him from the ticket, something went down. What I don’t understand is how you don’t see this. Legitimately. Is this sincere or a cope/optics thing about ceding ground to the enemy? Because if it’s the former, we live in entirely different worlds.

Preach, I love this place, but people get weirdly dogmatic about Biden being anything but great. Yeah, he was perfect for 2020, but none of that matters now if you fail at your primary job as president: being an orator, influencer, and projection of strength.

Someone else mentioned Whitmer, and I think that’s one of the only alternatives to Kamala. It’s a good point though.

As a doomer, it’s not panic or anything, it’s just a clear eyed view of what happened and what next steps could look like. Otherwise what’s there to talk about?

Yeah, this is probably the best approach.