Excuse me? Do you honestly pay me for the privilege of reading my Substack so you can achieve such heights of fury? First thing in the morning, I’m going to delete this heinous comment, refund your subscription, and remove you from my email list. I never want to hear from you again. Maybe, for your sake, you’ll get some help.
I think you've fallen into The Liberal Trap of thinking that facts make a difference. "The facts don't matter." You could test him now and find out his IQ is 150. Wouldn't matter. It's all about perception and emotion, *especially* among the voters who aren't going to investigate the gray nuances of "perception" vs. "actually 'in decline'".
Please, NO need to be snarky and irritated ("Try to read with more comprehension", "trite stereotype" etc.).
I'm sorry that I misunderstood what you were trying to say. My mistake, sorry. It sounds as though you think that if Mr. Linker would just read some about cognitive aging he might change his mind about whether Pres. Biden is impaired or not. But, as you agree, that won't change the *perception* in the wider world and, after all, it's that wider perception that's the issue and that's what he wrote about.
Maybe she could run circles around me. So, what? I'm in good shape for a 63-year-old, but I'm much worse physically - and even a little worse mentally - than I was at 43. It is not "ageism" to acknowledge the reality of aging.
You are a political scientist and yet you seem to live in a fantasy world when it comes to electoral politics. Many Democrats support Biden because they think he’s done an excellent job. And they listen to Biden, not the bored press interpreting Biden. He’s sharp, he’s funny, he’s perceptive. I get that you don’t like the squinty eyes, but come on! Encouraging a divisive primary and squandering the incumbency advantage would have been political malpractice.
Dems are furious with the Hur report because it conflicts with their view of Biden. You are afraid of it because it confirms yours.
You do an excellent job writing about the ideological moment we are in. But when it comes to electoral politics you start sounding like a kid with pictures of unicorns on everything she owns. Wishful thinking and improbable fantasies.
The Republicans and their international allies are going to rip the shit out of whoever the candidate is. Roll up your sleeves and start working to elect the Democrats you have, not the Democrats you want.
And in the field after the Hur report and during the media’s frantic, excited, and non-stop coverage of “her emails.” Let’s see how that settles out. I don’t say it’s not *an* issue but I don’t think it’s the only one and not enough to offset the politically divisive consequences of a Democratic primary.
The incumbency advantage is powerful. Trump’s already got a version of it. A non-incumbent Dem running against Trump, after a divisive primary and facing the full force of the Republican/Russian disinformation machine, would face her/his own challenges and you’d be bemoaning the Democrats’ myopic choice of Harris or Newsom or whoever the divided field produced.
Election polls are going to start to be meaningful as the choices settle in but we aren’t yet there. They are still a referendum on Biden. Once it’s a choice between two actual candidates they will look different (though I don’t know what they *will* look like.) But it's still officially early enough that panic is unwarranted.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the Hur Report inflicted some damage but it’s been the result of the coverage as much as anything. The report was a stinker. It wasn’t a legal analysis from which people could draw their own conclusions. It was conclusions drawn by a person of ostensible authority that said one of the two candidates for president is incompetent. To me it seemed to be deeply partisan but even if Hur were a concerned Democrat, I’d be suspicious of someone who felt the need to politicize his findings in a report that was supposed to yield a conclusion *only* about whether a crime had occurred.
This is in my book *at least* a questionable action and instead of raising any questions, you appear to be yielding to panic and thus contributing to the panic. ironically, it looks like you’ve got the Democratic “bed-wetting” down to an art.
I get the stakes. I absolutely do. But we are always going to have to defend democracy with the candidates we have and the candidates will always be the target of repeated hit jobs and attempts to define them by a powerful enemy. There is only one thing to do and that’s put our heads down and work our asses off to elect our flawed candidates. If we reel back in panic from one of the hit jobs, we do the enemy’s work for them. And that is precisely what they hope for.
I would first ask why Hur felt impelled to state that Biden shouldn't be prosecuted (because he's sympathetic as an "old, feeble man"? When's the last time you heard a prosecutor refusing to indict crimes based on that?) and neither should Trump. Trump wasn't the subject of the report but Hur felt compelled to add that, probably to make sure his donations to Republicans can still be accepted and he can get something in return.
The Right Wing media did the same hit job on Hillary - for 25 years prior to the 2016 race. Remember "her Brain Damage glasses"? That, Benghazi, and countless other empty stories on 24/7 repeat.
Give me a Dem candidate that's not as easy a Republican target as Biden and I'll happily vote for them.
That said, with a couple of exceptions Biden has done a great job. Trump is old and addled, too. He's also a malignant narcissistic sociopath, convicted sex offender and an indicted criminal.
Perception is key here, even if it's not anchored in firm objective ground (but yes, while his record is good, it has 0 to do with the increasing infirmities of age, and if you don't believe that his appearances and access to him are being heavily scripted and controlled then you are sadly naive and mistaken. ). Your argument could easily be from a T-Rump supporter aimed at OG Republicans who say Carrot Top is a psychopathic narcissist who does not give a fig for anything but himself...
I think I agree Damon. But man it's all so tricky at this point. Definitely agree he should have gotten out long ago.
The only thing I'll say about Dems trying to get the voters to not believe their eyes...why shouldn't they? Seems to work for the Republican base. We all lived through the Trump years together and still...he was the greatest president? (As JVL loves to point out, the asymmetry is real.)
The Republicans have chosen the worst possible candidate to be their presidential nominee. The Democrats have done the same thing. Neither candidate is the right person to lead our country. Yet here we are - a rematch of 2020. Both parties are to blame. The voting public is left with two terrible alternatives. And after the special counsel's report saying Biden has a memory problem, the media gladly participated in making the report at the top of every news cycle. So in my opinion, the media wants Biden to lose.
I pretty much I agree with all of this but I can also believe that Hur is a partisan little shit-weasel who had to slip the knife in somewhere.
Who I really reserve my ire for is Merrick Garland who allowed Hur's report out unredacted. I've had it with these appointees who are so terrified of appearing biased they end up doing more damage than any scheming, corrupt partisan.
I get it though. Joe did a good job but it's over. My doctor might say I'm "pre-70" - at a certain age you're pre-everything - and I'm missing a step or two. So I imagine Joe is probably a bit more diminished than he appears. Whoever passes for "wise-men"(chortle) in the Democratic Party should probably be picking straws for who gets to march up to the White House and tell the old man it's time for the home. If worse comes to worse tell him you're all going out for ice cream.
The caveat is who does the Democratic Party choose for a nominee if Biden is an indication of the party's Dunning-Kruger affliction.
As with any radical proposal such as this, my first question is: When has it EVER worked? Johnson withdrew, Humphrey the VP was nominated, and Nixon won.
Every situation is different, and that's certainly true about 1968, with George Wallace in the race, the Democrats' New Deal-era electoral coalition shattered by civil rights, Vietnam and urban violence weighing down the Dems, etc. As for 2024, what could the parallel be to Trump running while facing 91 felony counts, post-coup-attempt, etc.? I have no idea.
As probably the most "MAGA" subscriber, I don't think Biden has anything to worry about. I think Trump is so off putting that the Democrats are likely to win a 1964 style landslide. They most definitely would do so if Biden gave way to a younger Democrat. But I just cannot see the 82 million who voted against Trump in 2020 deciding to change horses. I also don't think Trump can troll the country and find many more than the 75 million he won.
The nation is going hard left. I really think the Abortion issue is what will swing a lot of Senate seats to the D's.
We’re going hard left? Perhaps part of the country will go further socially left, by their own choice. But that won’t change those who don’t want to be pluralistic or inclusive. Economically left is basically dead. Bernie is the exception not the rule. When dems choose Hillary and Biden as their nominees over Bernie it, we can infer that the moderate are still the preference politically.
There is no hard left turn. Dem voters know they’ll have a hard time convincing large segments of the population to vote for their candidate if they are considered hard left.
“Who Are You Gonna Believe? The Democratic Party or Your Lying Eyes and Ears?” — how about the Democratic Party because your lying eyes and ears are actually lying as they can tell you nothing about Biden’s actual cognitive ability. Educate yourself. Here’s a good place to start:
“Experts agree. Memory, no matter what your age, is fallible and malleable. Our brain processes incalculable amounts of information at a given time, and there’s simply not room for all of it to be stored. And surprisingly, the act of forgetting is an important aspect of memory.”
“The Washington Post interviewed several memory experts. They noted that the cognitive abilities of Biden and Trump can’t be evaluated based on anecdotal memory lapses. Formal evaluations are needed to truly assess someone’s brain health. But they noted that memory lapses at any age are surprisingly normal and, for most people, aren’t a signal of mental decline.”
No reputable immunologist would claim 100% vaccine effectiveness for any vaccine much less all variants of COVID. Every immunologist that I read/saw said it would reduce your chances of getting it and of surviving it if you did get it.
I don’t think you can name any candidate for President who has the same or better name recognition than Joe Biden. I don’t think you can name any candidate who has a record of accomplishments in any venue remotely similar to Joe Biden’s accomplishments in the past 4 years. Can you name any candidate who has as much campaign cash today — $46 million — as Joe Biden? Can you name any candidate like Joe Biden who has the power of the incumbency? I don’t think so, but educate me.
What you do have are polls which you spread on social media which try to predict what might happen 8 months into our future. Eight months is a lifetime.
Too bad President Truman isn’t alive to teach you something about polls, i.e. Dewey didn’t win.
What alarms me is the lack of education among your polled Americans about Tom Paine and tyranny:
“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered;”
It's true that if you go back 76 years to 1948, you'll find a sliver of hope for Biden in Truman's surprise win, despite his similarly low approval numbers. But aside from that, there's nothing encouraging in Biden sitting in the high 30s nine months out from the election. Incumbency is an advantage unless people don't like how you've used your term in office. I agree with you about Biden's record, which I think is pretty good overall. The problem is that lots of Americans don't agree. Here's a recent poll showing that Americans think Trump's presidency was "better than expected" and Biden's has been "worse than expected." https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/voters-are-rating-trumps-presidency-better-expected-hindsight-rcna137971
If the "adios" means you're ending your subscription, I wish you well -- and hope your dogged optimism gets validated, rather than my pessimism.
My “Adios” doesn’t mean that. It’s only goodbye. I can be educated.
This is what I’m learning from your blog. You used it to reply with and spread another corporate-funded poll. Your blog is an echo chamber.
What concerns me is that your blog seems to support ditching the only candidate which has a solid record, plus has the only victory under his belt of defeating a former President whom the public has now learned is a communist sympathizer.
If Gretchen "A Really Bad Thing Happened In An Area Of The World I Am Afraid To Name" Whitmer, JB "Lucky Sperm" Pritzker, Gavin "Slimeball" Newsome, and Raphael "Beat My Wife" Warnock are considered formidable candidates than the Democrats are in a world of trouble.
The one element that I would point to in your article that is to this reader weak is that I find your list of possible Dem Presidential nominees devoid of a candidate with the gravitas, charisma and leadership needed for the Presidency. I think that polling, although scant, has demonstrated that none of those you mentioned would fare any better than President Biden... Here's myUnicorn ticket Kristen Sinema and Will Hurd. As you I will also be voting for ABT come Nov. Woe betide the U S of A
Just a quick comment. What about the others mentioned in the report who also had lapses of memory but no one (not even the Press) mentions their age or even a possible reason for those lapses but "Biden, he's too old".
Excuse me? Do you honestly pay me for the privilege of reading my Substack so you can achieve such heights of fury? First thing in the morning, I’m going to delete this heinous comment, refund your subscription, and remove you from my email list. I never want to hear from you again. Maybe, for your sake, you’ll get some help.
I agree about actual vs perceived decline.
I think you've fallen into The Liberal Trap of thinking that facts make a difference. "The facts don't matter." You could test him now and find out his IQ is 150. Wouldn't matter. It's all about perception and emotion, *especially* among the voters who aren't going to investigate the gray nuances of "perception" vs. "actually 'in decline'".
Please, NO need to be snarky and irritated ("Try to read with more comprehension", "trite stereotype" etc.).
I'm sorry that I misunderstood what you were trying to say. My mistake, sorry. It sounds as though you think that if Mr. Linker would just read some about cognitive aging he might change his mind about whether Pres. Biden is impaired or not. But, as you agree, that won't change the *perception* in the wider world and, after all, it's that wider perception that's the issue and that's what he wrote about.
It is inconceivable that a man in his 80s is not in decline. Don't try telling me 80 is the new 40.
Maybe she could run circles around me. So, what? I'm in good shape for a 63-year-old, but I'm much worse physically - and even a little worse mentally - than I was at 43. It is not "ageism" to acknowledge the reality of aging.
No one is immune to the effect of aging.
No satirist or comedy sketch writer could’ve written something as funny as Biden’s press conference last week.
You are a political scientist and yet you seem to live in a fantasy world when it comes to electoral politics. Many Democrats support Biden because they think he’s done an excellent job. And they listen to Biden, not the bored press interpreting Biden. He’s sharp, he’s funny, he’s perceptive. I get that you don’t like the squinty eyes, but come on! Encouraging a divisive primary and squandering the incumbency advantage would have been political malpractice.
Dems are furious with the Hur report because it conflicts with their view of Biden. You are afraid of it because it confirms yours.
You do an excellent job writing about the ideological moment we are in. But when it comes to electoral politics you start sounding like a kid with pictures of unicorns on everything she owns. Wishful thinking and improbable fantasies.
The Republicans and their international allies are going to rip the shit out of whoever the candidate is. Roll up your sleeves and start working to elect the Democrats you have, not the Democrats you want.
Here's a more recent poll showing that it's actually/now *86 percent* of Americans who think Biden is too old for another term. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/poll-americans-on-biden-age/story?id=107126589
And in the field after the Hur report and during the media’s frantic, excited, and non-stop coverage of “her emails.” Let’s see how that settles out. I don’t say it’s not *an* issue but I don’t think it’s the only one and not enough to offset the politically divisive consequences of a Democratic primary.
The incumbency advantage is powerful. Trump’s already got a version of it. A non-incumbent Dem running against Trump, after a divisive primary and facing the full force of the Republican/Russian disinformation machine, would face her/his own challenges and you’d be bemoaning the Democrats’ myopic choice of Harris or Newsom or whoever the divided field produced.
Election polls are going to start to be meaningful as the choices settle in but we aren’t yet there. They are still a referendum on Biden. Once it’s a choice between two actual candidates they will look different (though I don’t know what they *will* look like.) But it's still officially early enough that panic is unwarranted.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the Hur Report inflicted some damage but it’s been the result of the coverage as much as anything. The report was a stinker. It wasn’t a legal analysis from which people could draw their own conclusions. It was conclusions drawn by a person of ostensible authority that said one of the two candidates for president is incompetent. To me it seemed to be deeply partisan but even if Hur were a concerned Democrat, I’d be suspicious of someone who felt the need to politicize his findings in a report that was supposed to yield a conclusion *only* about whether a crime had occurred.
This is in my book *at least* a questionable action and instead of raising any questions, you appear to be yielding to panic and thus contributing to the panic. ironically, it looks like you’ve got the Democratic “bed-wetting” down to an art.
I get the stakes. I absolutely do. But we are always going to have to defend democracy with the candidates we have and the candidates will always be the target of repeated hit jobs and attempts to define them by a powerful enemy. There is only one thing to do and that’s put our heads down and work our asses off to elect our flawed candidates. If we reel back in panic from one of the hit jobs, we do the enemy’s work for them. And that is precisely what they hope for.
[Edited for punctuation and typos.]
Hear, hear
And a view from yet another political scientist (we are everywhere.) https://open.substack.com/pub/smotus/p/the-two-evidence-free-assumptions?r=ziyo&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
This also makes a good point:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/biden-mexico-gaffe-real-lesson/677402/
It does. I assigned it to my class this week.
If it was a partisan report than release the transcript and let the voters make up their own minds.
I would first ask why Hur felt impelled to state that Biden shouldn't be prosecuted (because he's sympathetic as an "old, feeble man"? When's the last time you heard a prosecutor refusing to indict crimes based on that?) and neither should Trump. Trump wasn't the subject of the report but Hur felt compelled to add that, probably to make sure his donations to Republicans can still be accepted and he can get something in return.
The Right Wing media did the same hit job on Hillary - for 25 years prior to the 2016 race. Remember "her Brain Damage glasses"? That, Benghazi, and countless other empty stories on 24/7 repeat.
Give me a Dem candidate that's not as easy a Republican target as Biden and I'll happily vote for them.
That said, with a couple of exceptions Biden has done a great job. Trump is old and addled, too. He's also a malignant narcissistic sociopath, convicted sex offender and an indicted criminal.
Perception is key here, even if it's not anchored in firm objective ground (but yes, while his record is good, it has 0 to do with the increasing infirmities of age, and if you don't believe that his appearances and access to him are being heavily scripted and controlled then you are sadly naive and mistaken. ). Your argument could easily be from a T-Rump supporter aimed at OG Republicans who say Carrot Top is a psychopathic narcissist who does not give a fig for anything but himself...
I think I agree Damon. But man it's all so tricky at this point. Definitely agree he should have gotten out long ago.
The only thing I'll say about Dems trying to get the voters to not believe their eyes...why shouldn't they? Seems to work for the Republican base. We all lived through the Trump years together and still...he was the greatest president? (As JVL loves to point out, the asymmetry is real.)
None of us want to hear this
but all of us need to.
We need to listen hard,
think hard,
then act upon our conclusions.
Thank you Damon for your courage
in writing what you see
and what you think must be done.
The Republicans have chosen the worst possible candidate to be their presidential nominee. The Democrats have done the same thing. Neither candidate is the right person to lead our country. Yet here we are - a rematch of 2020. Both parties are to blame. The voting public is left with two terrible alternatives. And after the special counsel's report saying Biden has a memory problem, the media gladly participated in making the report at the top of every news cycle. So in my opinion, the media wants Biden to lose.
I pretty much I agree with all of this but I can also believe that Hur is a partisan little shit-weasel who had to slip the knife in somewhere.
Who I really reserve my ire for is Merrick Garland who allowed Hur's report out unredacted. I've had it with these appointees who are so terrified of appearing biased they end up doing more damage than any scheming, corrupt partisan.
I get it though. Joe did a good job but it's over. My doctor might say I'm "pre-70" - at a certain age you're pre-everything - and I'm missing a step or two. So I imagine Joe is probably a bit more diminished than he appears. Whoever passes for "wise-men"(chortle) in the Democratic Party should probably be picking straws for who gets to march up to the White House and tell the old man it's time for the home. If worse comes to worse tell him you're all going out for ice cream.
The caveat is who does the Democratic Party choose for a nominee if Biden is an indication of the party's Dunning-Kruger affliction.
As with any radical proposal such as this, my first question is: When has it EVER worked? Johnson withdrew, Humphrey the VP was nominated, and Nixon won.
Every situation is different, and that's certainly true about 1968, with George Wallace in the race, the Democrats' New Deal-era electoral coalition shattered by civil rights, Vietnam and urban violence weighing down the Dems, etc. As for 2024, what could the parallel be to Trump running while facing 91 felony counts, post-coup-attempt, etc.? I have no idea.
As probably the most "MAGA" subscriber, I don't think Biden has anything to worry about. I think Trump is so off putting that the Democrats are likely to win a 1964 style landslide. They most definitely would do so if Biden gave way to a younger Democrat. But I just cannot see the 82 million who voted against Trump in 2020 deciding to change horses. I also don't think Trump can troll the country and find many more than the 75 million he won.
The nation is going hard left. I really think the Abortion issue is what will swing a lot of Senate seats to the D's.
We’re going hard left? Perhaps part of the country will go further socially left, by their own choice. But that won’t change those who don’t want to be pluralistic or inclusive. Economically left is basically dead. Bernie is the exception not the rule. When dems choose Hillary and Biden as their nominees over Bernie it, we can infer that the moderate are still the preference politically.
There is no hard left turn. Dem voters know they’ll have a hard time convincing large segments of the population to vote for their candidate if they are considered hard left.
“Who Are You Gonna Believe? The Democratic Party or Your Lying Eyes and Ears?” — how about the Democratic Party because your lying eyes and ears are actually lying as they can tell you nothing about Biden’s actual cognitive ability. Educate yourself. Here’s a good place to start:
“Experts agree. Memory, no matter what your age, is fallible and malleable. Our brain processes incalculable amounts of information at a given time, and there’s simply not room for all of it to be stored. And surprisingly, the act of forgetting is an important aspect of memory.”
“The Washington Post interviewed several memory experts. They noted that the cognitive abilities of Biden and Trump can’t be evaluated based on anecdotal memory lapses. Formal evaluations are needed to truly assess someone’s brain health. But they noted that memory lapses at any age are surprisingly normal and, for most people, aren’t a signal of mental decline.”
Read the whole thing: https://wapo.st/3uuGW5g
Same "experts" that said the vaccine would stop you from getting Covid.
No reputable immunologist would claim 100% vaccine effectiveness for any vaccine much less all variants of COVID. Every immunologist that I read/saw said it would reduce your chances of getting it and of surviving it if you did get it.
There you go again, Damon.
I don’t think you can name any candidate for President who has the same or better name recognition than Joe Biden. I don’t think you can name any candidate who has a record of accomplishments in any venue remotely similar to Joe Biden’s accomplishments in the past 4 years. Can you name any candidate who has as much campaign cash today — $46 million — as Joe Biden? Can you name any candidate like Joe Biden who has the power of the incumbency? I don’t think so, but educate me.
What you do have are polls which you spread on social media which try to predict what might happen 8 months into our future. Eight months is a lifetime.
Too bad President Truman isn’t alive to teach you something about polls, i.e. Dewey didn’t win.
What alarms me is the lack of education among your polled Americans about Tom Paine and tyranny:
“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered;”
Adios my Substack friend,
http://johnadamsingram.substack.com
It's true that if you go back 76 years to 1948, you'll find a sliver of hope for Biden in Truman's surprise win, despite his similarly low approval numbers. But aside from that, there's nothing encouraging in Biden sitting in the high 30s nine months out from the election. Incumbency is an advantage unless people don't like how you've used your term in office. I agree with you about Biden's record, which I think is pretty good overall. The problem is that lots of Americans don't agree. Here's a recent poll showing that Americans think Trump's presidency was "better than expected" and Biden's has been "worse than expected." https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/voters-are-rating-trumps-presidency-better-expected-hindsight-rcna137971
If the "adios" means you're ending your subscription, I wish you well -- and hope your dogged optimism gets validated, rather than my pessimism.
My “Adios” doesn’t mean that. It’s only goodbye. I can be educated.
This is what I’m learning from your blog. You used it to reply with and spread another corporate-funded poll. Your blog is an echo chamber.
What concerns me is that your blog seems to support ditching the only candidate which has a solid record, plus has the only victory under his belt of defeating a former President whom the public has now learned is a communist sympathizer.
If Gretchen "A Really Bad Thing Happened In An Area Of The World I Am Afraid To Name" Whitmer, JB "Lucky Sperm" Pritzker, Gavin "Slimeball" Newsome, and Raphael "Beat My Wife" Warnock are considered formidable candidates than the Democrats are in a world of trouble.
Maybe you're correct. After all, look what happened when we got "grab them by the pussy".
Right on all counts.
Better late than never.
The one element that I would point to in your article that is to this reader weak is that I find your list of possible Dem Presidential nominees devoid of a candidate with the gravitas, charisma and leadership needed for the Presidency. I think that polling, although scant, has demonstrated that none of those you mentioned would fare any better than President Biden... Here's myUnicorn ticket Kristen Sinema and Will Hurd. As you I will also be voting for ABT come Nov. Woe betide the U S of A
Just a quick comment. What about the others mentioned in the report who also had lapses of memory but no one (not even the Press) mentions their age or even a possible reason for those lapses but "Biden, he's too old".