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Home » If I were a Democrat, this would make me cringe

If I were a Democrat, this would make me cringe

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, even though I’m not a Democrat, it makes me cringe.

This might be a good time to mention that I bet Biden’s handlers are rueing the day that Joe promised that his VP pick would be a woman. It narrows the already-narrow field down in a way that was unnecessary. The people considered at the moment to be the top contenders – Kamala Harris and Susan Rice – not only both have considerable baggage, but come across as cold and unlikable. Ah, but good old Joe has likability to spare, supposedly.

I know a lot of people keep saying that it will be Michelle Obama who ends up as the VP nominee. I’ve never thought she wanted it. But anything is possible in this extremely strange year of 2020.

Comments

If I were a Democrat, this would make me cringe — 30 Comments

  1. He says he’s eager to debate. I doubt he can stand up to it for the required ninety minutes without descending into gibberish.

  2. Just pitiful. And I mean that in the literal sense. Biden is worthy pity. How anyone can watch videos like these (and there are plenty of others) and still insist Biden is in control of his cognitive faculties, and has the cognitive wherewithal to hold the most powerful office in the world…it truly escapes me.

  3. I’m guessing that the lion and elephant line is Joe misremembering the clip where a couple of leftist anchors (CNN? MSNBC?) couldn’t tell if the picture was a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus. “Did you watch that?” Joe asks. But it wasn’t Trump who flunked that test.

  4. Hmm.

    That didn’t make me cringe on Joe’s behalf as much as I’d expected. With so much hanging on it, I was frankly hoping it’d go worse.

    One part that went badly for Biden was his facial expressions before he started talking. Up until he starts smiling, about 5 seconds in, he looks a bit wide-eyed and blank and does something with his lip that reminded me of an elderly and confused great-aunt trying to eat soft food in the last year of her life.

    Then, the 1.21 gigawatt smile lit up out of nowhere (did someone off-camera say, “Smile! Smile, Joe!”) and that seemed artificial. (What’s he suddenly grinning at?) Perhaps it’s because he hears the words, “mental state” and has been instructed, “Joe, remember to smile in a relaxed way every time you hear that topic raised. Don’t mumble, don’t say random things, and don’t lose your cool, because all of those are things that elderly people with dementia do.” So he hears the phrase and switches the grin on.

    Next, there’s the line about being tested for cocaine. He didn’t deliver it quite clearly as he could have, but I got the gist. And “c’mon, maaaan” worked okay, inasmuch as it fits with the narrative of “Straight-talkin’ Joe, just a normal guy.” Now, I don’t believe that narrative, but I think it’ll play that way to any low-information voter who wants to be reassured.

    Then comes the only real cringe: “Well, if he [Trump] can’t find out the difference between an elephant and a lion, I don’t know what the hell he’s talkin’ about.” He seems to know where he’s going with that comparison, but the rest of us have no clue. (“Uh, elephant? Lion? Huh, what?”)

    So that makes one pause, if one is watching the clip on replay. But live? A viewer would be briefly confused, but the moment’s over so fast that it barely registers.

    Next, Biden flips the words “looking” and “forward”: “I’m so forward-looking to sit with the president, or stand with the president, in the debates.” But anybody, young or old, might do that. Like G.W. Bush, Biden has a sufficient reputation for malapropisms that a mere word-order error will get ignored as insignificant. It’s “baked into the cake.”

    Oddly, though, I think Trump’s folks could make a funny campaign ad from that part of the clip, featuring Joe…
    (a.) calling Trump “the president” (it would have been smarter persuasion if Joe had said “Mr. Trump”); and even
    (b.) making himself sound like a Trump supporter: “I…stand with the president.”

    Then he says, “I’m gonna say something I probably shouldn’t say….” Does he ever get around to saying it? I didn’t hear anything.

    Then there’s a quick tongue-stumble over “physical and mental fitness.” Again, that isn’t as smooth as a typical modern politician, but with Joe, it doesn’t fall below expectations.

    Aaaand…that’s pretty much it. Two mild malapropisms that Dems can easily shrug off (and call Trump supporters irrational for exaggerating the importance of!), and a weird elephant/lion reference.

    There are problems there, but it’s not enough. It won’t sway votes.

    And, if Biden does no worse than that in the debates, and if Trump has a merely-average night, Biden will be painted the winner and the “mental competence” issue will be put to bed for the rest of the campaign. To “win” the debate Biden doesn’t have to beat Trump; he just has to beat expectations, and all this questioning of Biden’s mental competence has set the expectations-bar rather low.

    Furthermore, if Biden does as well as he did in that clip, but Trump has a single response where he wanders off the topic or says something random like “covfefe,” the mental competence issue will be flipped. They will start playing every video clip in which Trump paused overlong mid-sentence or said something of non-obvious relevance. Trump will be painted as the person with incipient dementia.

    I wish I could be more encouraging, after watching that clip, but I’m callin’ it like I’m seein’ it.

  5. @ackler
    More than pitiful, this is cruel.

    I lost my dad to complications from Alzheimer’s. He was showing signs that Biden is showing, about 8-12 months before we had to move him into an assisted living facility and he passed away 5 years later. I do not make this comparison lightly and hope and pray that Biden is not on that path.

    Biden’s family needs to step in here, put a stop to this and give the man the care he needs for his condition. It is terribly cruel to subject any human being, who is suffering from this condition, to this kind of stress and public humiliation.

    I suspect the Obamas and Democratic Party Operatives are driving this and the Bidens have lost control over this situation. Sad!!

  6. Cruel is the top issue here. If people were not being cruel enough to put this lich of an earlier actual person on display, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We’d be wondering where whoever the dems thought was the next best person had come from.
    Far as I can tell, Biden’s public appeal is that he looks normal but not so indistinct that you wouldn’t recognize him.
    He has a great smile, or at least a great orthodontist. It’s all you can see when he lights it up. Nobody looks at his eyes then. Saw a film the other day where the female lead’s smile–average looking mouth with heavy red lipstick–went clear back to her wisdom teeth. Distracting.
    Biden never does anything he can be condemned for by his base and the more or less lib fans. And that means he never does anything. His sentencing act only affected those blacks who don’t get heard.
    You think Obama was a blank slate….
    But, yeah, cruel.
    The real Biden deserved considerably more cruelty than this shadow does.

  7. That clip doesn’t end well either. He can’t even get the word fitness out without stumbling over it twice. And you are correct – Somebody off camera flashed him a smile as a signal to smile. Lastly, and seriously, he had that lost look on his face going into the question. The zoned out, brain cells stopped firing momentarily expression that my father, a survivor of a massive stroke gets.

  8. I don’t think avoiding debates will be enough to protect Biden. He can’t even manage short exchanges with friendly interviewers or reading from a teleprompter.

    Voters are going to notice, so the election hinges on their hatred of Trump and their faith in Biden’s handlers/Veep.

    I have no pity for Biden. I’m sure it’s OK with him, his wife and the party for Biden to be exploited this way, if only they can stop Trump. In a perverse way, like donating one’s diseased body to science, it’s noble.

  9. How do you, to a black reporter, say, “My taking a cognitive test for mental acuity is equal to your taking a drug test for cocaine” & not be fried by the other heads on the screen? How does anyone think black people are going to rush out and embrace that sort of not only deflection but black stereotyping?

    The only alternatives left, & I suspect both are in the D strategy plan, are massive voter fraud & suppression efforts in red precincts and Mrs 0 as VP. That’s the fail-safe for the Ds.

  10. R.C:

    As I’ve indicated several times before, I believe that most people willing to vote for Biden would vote for him even if he were demonstrably senile, because they are that opposed to Trump.

    But then there are those who are not quite as determined as that. For the not-small percentage of those of them who have had relatives with dementia, I think passages like this are worrisome because they are likely to recognize certain signs and similarities.

    Also, this clip is a short one. But it is not as though Biden’s “gaffes” (for want of a better word) are only seen in tiny clips. They are interspersed at regular and frequent intervals whenever he speaks extemporaneously (and even when he reads). This can easily have a cumulative effect on the viewer.

    Then there is his creepy quality. I can’t quite define it, but I perceive it very strongly. It is present in this clip even without the errors. He has a very strange affect. He’s always been a somewhat strange guy, but to anyone who remembers Biden even from a couple of years ago, the changes are notable. He seems twenty years older and twenty times more out of touch.

    If Biden continues to be the nominee, it really comes down to whether he continues to present this way, and how many potential voters care and how much they care. Of course, there are other events that can greatly impact on the election, too, but I’m just talking about the Biden factor here.

  11. huxley:

    I agree that Biden is fully onboard with wanting to be president. I don’t think anyone has to coerce or convince him to do this. He’s been wanting it for many decades. He’s nowhere near far gone enough to have forgotten that.

  14. Racist much? As it’s been said before – if Biden were a statue, Democrats would be tearing him down.

  15. I lost my mother to Lewy Bodies disease, a cross between Parkinson and Alzheimer’s, a few years ago. Everything about this man aligns with the symptoms she had. She was a selfless giving person that helped all that she could. This man is self-centered and has nothing to offer to people except lies.

  16. Aha!

    Earlier, I viewed the YouTube video…
    (a.) only once before forming an opinion (and then in small segments, a second time, as I wrote a post on it, above);
    (b.) on a small screen;
    (c.) in the context of the blog.

    But, just now, @Neo, your comment (“Then there is his creepy quality. I can’t quite define it, but I perceive it very strongly. It is present in this clip even without the errors.”) made me want to go look again, to see if I could perceive the creepiness.

    This time, I watched the clip on a larger screen, directly in YouTube, full panoramic screen width. So, it was much more like watching on a normal sized television.

    Whew, big difference.

    Yes, I see the creepiness now, and the gaffes seem more noticeable on the third hearing, the pauses more oddly-timed. The whole “vibe” of Biden’s presentation now comes across as vaguely…poisonous.

    Yeeech.

    Stepping back a bit to try to be objective, I asked myself: What details lend the video this creepy vibe?

    I think part of it is the fact that his eyes don’t seem to have a lot of light in them. At times they look black, and they don’t seem to be looking right at me as he speaks; they seem to be pointed slightly past my right shoulder. I assume that means he had a teleprompter (or maybe Jill? with cue cards?) positioned there (ahead and to his left). It gives the impression that there’s not a man, but a very lifelike mannequin, sitting there talking to me.

    Also, the smile seems overbroad. In combination with how his eyes look lightless whenever he laughs and they narrow into a squint, Biden starts to look a bit…diabolical.

    His handlers should definitely advise him not to do any interviews while wearing a black suit or shirt, and especially not with a red tie. If Biden dressed like that, and started laughing and squinting that way, you’d have hardcore atheists saying, “Oh, yeah, that guy’s sold his soul to satan.”

    In fact, some pro-Trump person with video-editing skills should just re-release that whole video, with nothing altered except the color of the suit, shirt, and tie: Black, black, and red. It’d be funny to watch…and yet, somehow, not very funny.

  17. My FB friends on the left are totally in for Biden due to their extreme TDS. He could be a corpse and they would still vote for him. It’s going to come down to those middle voters, or the dead ones if the Dems have their way.

  18. All Democrats understand that they are electing Biden’s running mate as President.
    The question is whether or not Independents are willing to go along.

  19. Michelle Obama’s initial plan was to avoid Trump and run and win in 2024 and rule for the next 8 years, but now she’ll be forced to enter the fray as VP this year. Her presence and mail-in voting will guarantee a landslide win. They’ll drag Biden out for two years, replace him in 2022, and then she’ll rule us for the maximum 10 years that one is allowed. However, if the Dems take control of both Houses, they have a chance to get some RINOs on board to repeal the 22nd Amendment, which will allow her to rule until one of her brilliant children is of age to take over for the rest of any of our lifetimes.

  20. “How do you, to a black reporter, say, “My taking a cognitive test for mental acuity is equal to your taking a drug test for cocaine” & not be fried by the other heads on the screen? How does anyone think black people are going to rush out and embrace that sort of not only deflection but black stereotyping?”

    Do you actually think black people will ever hear about him saying such a thing? And if they did, would they actually believe it or care, after being inundated with one racist tale about Trump after another? They probably already assume both Biden and Trump are racists, being old white men, but have been programmed to believe the worst about Trump and Republicans.

  21. Emma Sky, who was quite opposed to the Iraq invasion but became involved in the British administration of Mosul, then ending up as the “right hand man” for General Odierno, wrote a book called The Unraveling, which covers all of her experience but in particular gets into what happened once Obama & Biden took over and matters in Iraq began to go downhill. Although British, she spoke fluent Arabic, and she got along particularly well with the tribal leaders, who began to be screwed over by the Shia president and his gang.

    I’ve taken a long time to get to it, but I read this book a couple of years ago, and something that stuck out was how much Emma Sky and others came to dislike Joe Biden. Obama had little interest in Iraq, evidently, and so Biden exercised more hands-on power than I’d ever suspected. Power he exercised in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Sky talked about that smile, and how much everyone came to dread the moment Joe heard something he didn’t like. The smile would disappear and the VP would turn mean. He only wanted to hear what he already knew he wanted to hear.

    Anyone who witnessed Biden in the 2012 VP Debates or back in the Clarence Thomas knows what Joe’s like when he turns mean. He smiles in a different way.

  22. Neo, if I were a Democrat this would make me cringe, too. But then, I have a conscience and a soul. Many of today’s Democrats have neither.
    This is not the same Joe Biden gaffe-machine that we’ve watched for years. I had no trouble laughing at that guy because he was so full of himself that he had no clue of his own verbal missteps.
    The man in this video is just sad. It appears he had prepared, canned answers ready, but he just couldn’t quite remember all the words. Couldn’t quite make complete sentences. Couldn’t remember if it was time to smile but did anyway. Couldn’t remember the question he was trying answer.
    These are not gaffes. These are blank spots where short-term memory recently resided. I watched my Dad deal with this for three years before he died. Anyone who has witnessed a friend or relative suffer through dementia knows exactly what’s going on with Joe Biden.
    What I really have difficulty comprehending, and is most cringe worthy, is why people close to him, including his wife Jill, allow this to continue. That’s just heartless. But then, they’re Democrats.

  23. This should be a cake walk. We should absolutely already have this in the bag. That we dont and that the outcome of November’s election is still an uncertainty cant entirely be laid at the feet of the leftist media and democrat operative dirty tricks. (Although they’re naturally working overtime on that). Donald Trump seems perfectly willing to screw his own chances with a bunch of unforced errors of his own.
    Sometimes I think Trump’s handlers sould shove him into the same basement the dems are keeping Biden and let the professionals take over till the election is over.

  24. “…dead ones…”
    Oh, yeah.
    Biden has them in the bag.
    And who knows how many times they’re going to vote? (As many as possible, given that political activism is pretty much the only activism that’s still permitted them.)
    Ditto for the unregistered voter vote.
    Ditto for the suffering-from-dementia vote.
    And the TDS vote.

    And all of ’em are “Vote-early-vote-often” types.

    It’s going to be a close thing. Which is why voting by mail is going to be next Gettysburg.

    Anyway, here’s today’s head scratcher:
    https://www.foxnews.com/media/michael-tracey-riots-aftermath-cities-media

  25. The Convention will have to choose another Candidate.

    Bernie as Pres and Elizabeth as VP?

    Or maybe Elizabeth as Pres and Bernie as VP.

    Hillary as Pres and Michelle as VP might fly?

    Restore the Swamp.

    If not now when? If not us who?

  26. I really believe that there is a 60/40 chance that Biden will be replaced right before before or shortly after the convention. The key is the VP selection. If it is Elizabeth Warren (after all she is a person of color) he will be replaced. Warren is the only person that can stand up to Trump in a debate and if she has Sanders blessing bring the progressives with her.

    Michelle Obama by saying she has a mild depression is taking herself out of the race. She doesn’t want the responsibility now that she has all the perks of being an ex-president’s wife and socializing with the beautiful people. Frequently you heard reports from various sources that she was very unhappy about living in the White House bubble while Obama was president. I believe that. Why go back to that? Also enough material has come out about the all the illegal activities done during Obama’s term has come out to cause some very uncomfortable situations. Even the propaganda arm of the Democratic party will have to start covering it. So I think it is less than 10% chance that she takes the VP slot.

    The only caveat is that by running and winning she can make sure people don’t go to jail. If Durham indicts people before the convention then you might see her take the nomination. That may be one reason why there has been no action on Durham’s part.

    If the democrats believe their true internal polling showing Trump winning then they will put a Karen Bass or Susan Rice up as VP so not to lose a potential viable candidate in the future. If they believe there is a chance then it will be Kamala Harris which I believe will be a huge mistake. The black vote is not near as solid as it use to be.

    In the end it all comes down to Trump and what he does in the next 90 days. He is the issue this election.

  27. Neo, Nothing happens in the Democrat party without preplanning by the wealthy elite. They have mapped out the plan to close down the country,riots in the streets,overwhelm the voting system with mail in ballots and blame it all on Trump..
    The savior is ,of course Moochelle who will bring back the glory years.. This depression thing is planned..she reflects the mood of the country but she will rise above all this to lead our nation out of depression and into the land of racial healing. The current top picks for VP have big time baggage..so does Moochelle but the difference is that she is adored by a hard core group of women ,has barrick as her body man and has an adoring press worth millions in campaign money.. My money is on Moochelle.

  28. “In no way did I mean to suggest the African American community is a monolith—not by identity, not on issues, not at all,” Biden tweeted Thursday night.

    “Throughout my career I’ve witnessed the diversity of thought, background, and sentiment within the African American community,” he went on. “It’s this diversity that makes our workplaces, communities, and country a better place.”

    The former veep made the head-scratching “diversity” remark during a roundtable interview with black and Hispanic reporters released Thursday.

    Biden was responding to a question asking if he would “re-engage” with Cuba’s Communist government, to which he responded, “yes,” before comparing beliefs of blacks and Latinos.

  30. That is devastating, Snow on Pine. Much as I disagreed with the 2008 Biden, he was there. Now, he’s not.

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