Only 11 minutes into the first US election debate on Thursday, Joe Biden lost himself in the abyss. He froze for the longest 10 seconds of his long political career, while next to him Donald Trump looked at his opponent for the first time, with whom he had refused to shake hands. One of the CNN moderators, Jake Tapper, then cut off the US president in an act of mercy. The 51 million viewers of a face-to-face meeting that is set to be decisive in the outcome of the November polls not only witnessed a moment for the history of presidential debates; they also witnessed live the difficulties of finishing a simple sentence for an 81-year-old man who wants to spend another four years in the most difficult job in the world.
The disastrous role of Biden, who had prepared for a week for the big day, caused a shock wave that crossed American borders. It caused concern among foreign chancelleries and unleashed panic among voters, strategists, donors, talk shows and Democratic politicians, many of whom began to express their doubts in public for the first time since suspicions about physical and mental abilities almost two years ago. of the candidate were placed at the center of debate. Also, among the main concerns of Americans reflected in the surveys.
The liberal media joined in a chorus of voices, with a harsh editorial of The New York Times published on Friday in front, which called for the candidate to step aside to make way for someone capable of beating Trump, first, and fulfilling the obligations of the office, later. After the hard punch of the times, a text titled If he wants to serve his country, President Biden should drop out of the race,echoes of the famous Vietnam War speech by Walter Cronkite, perhaps the most universally respected journalist in American history, resonated, which, the story goes in shades of myth, pushed Lyndon Johnson not to seek re-election in 1968. Sitting presidents almost never give up running for a second term, which is what Biden is now being asked to do. Only Johnson and Calvin Coolidge, in 1928, made that decision in the past century.
In that cosmopolitan simulation that is the city of Washington, Biden’s role in the Atlanta debate also featured emergency reports and meetings the day after the face-to-face meeting, as confirmed by diplomatic sources. A senior official from the Mexican Embassy, which has the largest consular representation in the capital, summarized the “concern” with which they continue “the new phase into which the US campaign entered on Thursday.”
This unexplored scenario pits a candidate whose team has spent months denying that he has mental acuity problems – and continues to do so despite abundant evidence to the contrary – with a Republican candidate, a convicted felon, who during the debate lied or exaggerated beyond belief. admissible in a narcissistic personality like yours. He did it at least 30 times (to Biden’s nine).
The former president, who no longer even makes an effort to hide the self-sufficient plans he has prepared for his second round, only shrugged his shoulders during the debate when asked whether he would take the country out of NATO to feed the anxiety of his allies on the other side. side of the Atlantic. He lashed out at the Biden administration’s aid to Ukraine, boasted that under his presidency the United States “wasn’t in any war” abroad, called for “letting Israel finish off Hamas,” and promised that geopolitical tensions would be resolved. They will disappear with him in the Oval Office. “If we had a real president, whom [el ruso Vladímir] Putin respected, he would never have invaded Ukraine,” he said. It is obvious that the image of Biden’s weakness that Trump and his followers interested in feeding was reinforced after the debate and that this brings closer the option of seeing the tycoon in the White House, and with it the strengthening of the illiberal populist clamp in the world while Europe is witnessing the rise of the extreme right.
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Domestically, the United States woke up on Friday with the feeling that the country is sleepwalking toward a slow-motion disaster, trapped by the impotence and anxiety of knowing that it is trapped between two candidates that satisfy almost no one (the group of double haters, (The share of voters who hate them both is now close to 20%). Two men who have two things in common: their advanced age (Trump has just turned 78) and the fact that both consider the other to be “the worst president in history”. The hangover from the Atlanta debacle also underlined the frustrating feeling that everything is hanging over the handful of undecided voters in a handful of swing states that will decide the most crucial elections in their recent history.
Trump’s situation seems to have no turning back. There are 20 days left until the Republican Convention, from which he will emerge hailed as the chosen one of a party that turned its back on him after the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and that, no one can understand exactly how, has managed to bring him back to his feet.
Those calling for Biden’s resignation have reviewed the rules of the Democratic National Committee in the last 48 hours to conclude that this will only be feasible if he himself throws in the towel before his convention in Chicago, scheduled for August 19-22. . The president offered a much more forceful image on Friday at a rally in North Carolina and at a fundraiser in New York. He sent two messages: that Thursday was just “a bad night” on the worst possible day and that he wouldn’t be trying so hard if he weren’t sure that he was “capable of doing the job.”
To do otherwise would mean admitting that he has been guilty for months of what he accuses his rival of: thinking only of himself and not of saving, by getting out of the way, American democracy, seriously threatened by a possible return of Trump to the White House, according to Biden and also to all those who now call for his replacement. Many Democrats these days blame in private conversations the team surrounding the president for hiding an uncomfortable reality under the carpet and wonder if they did not ignore for too long the signs of the decline of their leader; it should not be forgotten that before the debate there was the alarming report by the special prosecutor who investigated his handling of secret documents from his time as vice president.
Three and a half years, 90 minutes
His closest advisors assure that there is only one person capable of convincing him, the first lady Jill Biden, who tried to minimize the Atlanta debacle and has not left his side since then. Striving to project an image of confidence and normality, her strategy involves making the world see the injustice of reducing her husband’s three and a half years in the White House to a painful 90-minute performance.
The candidate has also received public support from party heavyweights, including Barack Obama and some of those called to replace him if necessary, from Vice President Kamala Harris to California Governor Gavin Newsom. For some analysts, it is the expression of an irresponsible pact of silence. For others, an inevitable exercise in political pragmatism: is it realistic to think about replacing the candidate at this point, or is all this phenomenal noise only contributing to tipping the balance of the undecided on the Republican side?
The problem is not timing, says University of Virginia presidential historian Russell Riley, because “four months [los que quedan hasta las elecciones] It’s an eternity in American politics.” “It won’t be easy to reverse the situation, but anything is possible,” believes Riley. “Today’s ‘panic’ will literally be yesterday’s news tomorrow, and the only thing we know for sure about American voters is that their attention span is extremely low and their memories are short-range.”
Georgetown professor Alfred Kazin, author of the most comprehensive history of the Democratic Party, does not see it as feasible that Biden will be replaced at the convention, nor that it will be “open,” as was the 1968 convention, also in Chicago, after Johnson resigned. “Biden has the support of even progressive Democrats, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” he warns. And if Kazin’s book on the party demonstrates anything, it is that it is an amalgam that, in Whitman’s manner, contains multitudes: from traditional progressives and liberals, to factions close to social democracy and the most conservative minority voters. One of Biden’s successes has been to unite all these groups under his umbrella, and it is not clear that any of the candidates who are rumoured to replace him will be able to harvest that consensus before November and in the midst of the tensions that support for Israel and defence of the Palestinian cause have created among their own. “It is obvious that a chaotic convention would cost them at the polls,” Kazin said.
Another argument of those who support Biden continuing is that bad debates do not necessarily lead to losing elections, but even they recognize that the president lost more than just the thread in those 10 seconds during which he froze. The million-dollar question now in the United States and in the world is whether that television moment will remain an embarrassing mishap or whether it will mark the beginning of the end of the Biden era. As is often the case with million-dollar questions, this one also lacks a moment for an answer.
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