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| Source:NBC News Meet The Press With Kristen Welker. On this Sunday, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (Democrat, California) sorry, I've always wanted to do a parody of Tim Russert. |
From NBC News
KRISTEN WELKER:
I do want to ask you about the Democratic Party. There's a new book out by Chris Whipple who reports that in the days before President Biden's devastating debate performance with President Trump, his first chief of staff, Ron Klain, returned to help him prep. Klain reports that he was surprised by the fact that he thought that President Biden was struggling to focus. He said he seemed confused about President Trump's policies, and even fell asleep by the pool after cutting one debate prep session short. Do you think that former President Biden's advisors misled the American people about his capacities?
SEN. ADAM SCHIFF:
You know, it's hard for me to gauge what the closest advisors to the president were seeing at the time. I can only speak to the interactions that I had with him, which were, you know, in the months leading up to his getting out of the race, largely ceremonial occasions. But, you know, I will say this. He made the decision to get out of the race. I think that was the right decision. The vice president, as the vice president, I think ran a great campaign but could not run away from being a representative of the status quo. And, the fact is that people are hurting and have been hurting for a long time. This is a frankly decades in the making problem where people are working harder than ever and still can't get by. What Donald Trump is doing right now is making that so much worse. But we have to address it. Both parties are going to need to address this. Right now this budget that you're talking about is going to give a massive tax cut for billionaires. And they're going to take it out of middle class families. And they're going to explode the deficit and debt. That's just going to move us further in the wrong direction. So, we're going to have to grapple with some of the central challenges, structural challenges in our economy. I think the failure of Democrats to do that in the past resulted in our losing the White House. The catastrophic, you know, damage they're doing to the economy now is going to cause Trump and Republicans to lose Congress. But both parties are going to have to tackle this global challenge to our economy.
From NBC News
The New Democrat talking about whether or not President Biden should run for reelection again in 2023-24:
"So it's either stick with Joe, or Joe drops out and we see a Democratic free for all, between left-wing Democrats who'll promise the world to everybody and tell everyone it won't cost anything. Versus center-right Democrats who will try to run a general election campaign during the Democratic primaries, but when they think they need more Democrats, while try to talk like they're actually leftists, leaving everybody to believe who is this person and why do they actually believe. Versus The Devil in Donald Trump, with American voters probably choosing The Devil that they already know, over the Democrat."
From The New Democrat
"I talked about this back in October, when Bill Maher was basically trying to make Joe Biden look like the presidential version of deceased U.S. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who stayed in too long and then ends up dying, when the Republican Party still had The White House and Senate back in 2020. And then the country goes to hell, etc, because Justice Ginsberg stayed in too long and was replaced by a Conservative Republican.
And now what those bedwetters are arguing is that if President Biden runs for reelection, he'll lose to Donald Trump, even if Donald Trump is a two-time convicted felon by the time the presidential election comes around. So again we would have a MAGA White House and a MAGA Congress, with Republicans holding and adding to the House and winning back the Senate...
From The New Democrat
"If you are wondering why The New Democrat is going with the center-right, Republican, Never-Trumper reactions to this debate, I'll tell you anyway. We''re not Republicans at The New Democrat. But we are New Democrats and we are center-right, JFK/Henry Jackson/even Joe Biden even Democrats. We know what MSNBC and company is saying. You either have far-left Democrats up there saying that Joe Biden has to step down. Or Democrats trying to argue that the debate doesn't matter. I'm not interested in that. And to their credit, even left-wing, hippie, Rachel Maddow talking about what's the best move going forward, knowing that Joe Biden will most likely still be the Democrat for President. So it's not all MSNBC arguing that it's not a disaster for the President, or he should simply drop out.
And I don't think there's much point in talking about President Biden stepping down, until he actually does that, because it would be like debating what would happen if Donald Trump suddenly plead guilty to all the felonies that he's facing. There's not much point in talking about what it would be like if this happened, if there' very little, if any possibility of it happening...
From The New Democrat
"To put it simply: if President Biden announced let's say by April, 2023, that he promised not to run for reelection in 3-1/2 years a go to assure voters that he would pass the torch (so to speak) and because it was time "for a new generation of leadership", the Democratic Party would've had a full primary season and Vice President Kamala Harris probably wins the nomination anyway. And she would've been my preferred candidate right out of the gate. And all those townhalls, those debates, those TV interviews, that she didn't want to do this summer and to a certain extent this fall, all those things would've been taken care of during late 2023 and early 2024.
And it's not just that President Biden broke his promise not to run for reelection. It's why he did that is even worst, his lack of reasoning for it. He made it about the economy and that he was the only person up to task of bringing down the high cost of living. When the fact is he knew damn well that his background as a public servant is not economics. He made his carer in Congress as a foreign policy and national security expert. As well as criminal justice and the Constitution. Not economic policy.
The reason why President Biden tried to run for reelection, is the same reason why any other President who ran for reelection did that, because he wanted to be a two-term President. It's almost embarrassing for President's to not get the 2nd term. And probably feels worst when you don't bother to run. Worst than that when you own damn party doesn't want you to run for reelection...
From The New Democrat
Just to be clear: The New Democrat doesn't blame Joe Biden 100% for why Kamala Harris lost in 2024. She made her own mistakes:
Not doing any interviews at all for 2 months after it was clear she would be the Democratic nominee
Not doing any townhalls, even in the blue wall states that she had to have, until October of 24
Too dependent of celebrity endorsements to get her own voters out to vote for her, etc.
But as Erik Schneider said, had President Biden simply kept his promise to to a one-term President and announced like in April of 2023, that he wasn't running for reelection, he might not have been an issue in 2024, at all. Because whoever the new Democratic nominee would be, that person would have had about a year or so to introduce themself to the country and lay out exactly what they want to do as President and not have to worry about what the President thinks of their agenda. And Vice President Harris might have won the nomination anyway.
We'll never know this because the people around the President, who knew he was struggling mentally and had low energy, didn't have the courage, the character, to either tell the President that he shouldn't run for reelection and why, or at the least leak what they know about his physical and mental conditions, or resign and go public with what they know about him.
You think Democratic donors would've been backing the President the way they did, financially, up until his debate, if they knew he was struggling to remember names of people he knew very well, struggling just to get through his work schedule, physically, getting stuck in-between thoughts when trying to speak? Of course not. If they knew this 2 years ago, if the public knew as well, the Democratic leadership, even, would've called for the President not to run for reelection.
And to respond to something that Senator Schiff said:
"You know, it's hard for me to gauge what the closest advisors to the president were seeing at the time. I can only speak to the interactions that I had with him, which were, you know, in the months leading up to his getting out of the race, largely ceremonial occasions. But, you know, I will say this. He made the decision to get out of the race. I think that was the right decision. The vice president, as the vice president, I think ran a great campaign but could not run away from being a representative of the status quo. And, the fact is that people are hurting and have been hurting for a long time. This is a frankly decades in the making problem where people are working harder than ever and still can't get by. What Donald Trump is doing right now is making that so much worse...
You notice how he wanted to get the discussion off of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and back to an area where he's more comfortable talking about, which almost everyone's political boogeyman, Donald J. Trump. Who is a subject that no Democrat (at least from a blue state like California) will ever had to ever worry about losing political support, when it comes to criticizing Donald J. Trump.
If Kristen Welker was a better interviewer, she could've asked a follow up, like:
"Senator, we're you personally seeing from President Biden, or hearing anything about the President that would suggest to you, that maybe he's not up to running for reelection again?"
A good interviewer can put their interviewee on the spot, when they think that person is trying to dodge a topic that comes with political risk to them and want to change the subject.
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