President Joe Biden’s debate disaster has created a rare overlap between Trump and Biden voters.
If you’re a Trump voter, Biden’s dismal performance only reinforces your view that Biden is the bigger threat to America.
But if you’re a Biden voter and believe Trump poses the bigger threat, and that Biden has little chance to win after last week’s disaster, then Biden also becomes a threat.
Get it? Biden’s a threat for both sides. Democrats are now trapped in a nerve-wracking conundrum that explains the desperate calls among Biden’s followers for him to bow out.
“Though Joe Biden’s debate performance last week was among the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed,” Michelle Goldberg writes in The New York Times, “it at least seemed to offer clarity. Suddenly, even many people who love this president realized that his campaign has become untenable.”
Goldberg has been joined by Democratic royalty—from Thomas Friedman to David Remnick to Maureen Dowd to Nicholas Kristoff and countless others—pleading for Biden to be replaced with a candidate more likely to beat Trump.
As things stand, they are facing an excruciating double nightmare: supporting a candidate they fear will put their Orange nightmare back in the White House.
If the stakes weren’t so high, this would be a Greek tragedy for the ages.
Two factors are exacerbating the drama. One, the Biden camp is digging in and fighting back. They’re calling the debate a single “bad night” and bashing those calling on the president to bow out as the “bed-wetting brigade.” Given that millions saw the evidence of Biden’s decline with their own eyes, this continued denial lacks credibility.
Two, since it’s so late in the game, it’s extremely complicated to change nominees even if Biden agrees to do so.
“Finding a Biden alternative would be risky and messy, and there’s no guarantee that it would work better than trying to put on a brave face and drag the current president across the finish line,” Goldberg concedes. “But the Democratic Party’s leaders—the people, let’s remember, who got us into this mess—have no right to condescend to those trying to find a way out.”
Goldberg’s attempt to put all the blame on party leaders is disingenuous. For the past couple of years, as evidence of Biden’s declining mental state kept mounting, her colleagues in the legacy media have shamelessly joined the cover-up. They’re as responsible as anyone for the current mess.
As they kept their guns fixed solely on Trump and his lies, they covered up arguably the biggest lie of recent years—that a leader of the free world showing signs of dementia was “sharp as a tack.”
The staggering evidence displayed at the debate blew up the Big Lie and triggered an instant state of emergency among Democrats. With the majority of registered voters believing Biden is not fit for the presidency, the party is now torn between those who are sure Biden will lose and those who claim he can still pull it off.
“If you’re in a car careening toward a cliff and can open a door,” Goldberg writes, “you should jump out.”
But why did it take them so long to see the cliff? Maybe they were so busy fighting the danger of Trump they never saw, or didn’t want to see, the bigger danger lurking in their own camp.
Now that they’ve finally caught up to reality, the problem for Democrats, and for our country, is that they’re a little too close to the cliff.
Originally published by The Jewish Journal.
