Political Dharma: Democrats prepared for debate disaster with pre-convention roll call

Some of the best 2024 election reporting is coming from a long-time Eugene resident.

Alan Zundel (Political Dharma): Hello again, this is Alan Zundel presenting Political Dharma. Of course, the big news this week in the presidential campaigns was the debate on CNN between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

[00:00:18] I watched it not from CNN, but from the (Robert) Kennedy campaign’s RealDebate.com website, where they had set up a system in which you can watch the CNN debate and listen to what Joe Biden, and then Donald Trump had to say in response to the various questions as they were presented to them.

[00:00:38] You would then be taken back to a Los Angeles studio where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took a podium himself so that he could present his own answers and be a kind of a participant in that debate. Very clever way of going about this, I thought.

[00:00:56] So I watched it on that and my impressions were similar to what I heard from a lot of other media sources, that Joe Biden performed very terribly and Trump was Trump as usual. So just in comparison, they were mostly saying this really hurt Joe Biden…

[00:01:15] Trump was Trump. He often evaded questions and went on tangents and was very on the attack all the time. It’s not going to change anybody’s mind for or against him after this debate, I think, but what it did do is change a lot of people’s impressions of how bad things are with Joe Biden.

[00:01:31] Now in the main, he was able to answer questions, even though sometimes he a little bit lost the thread of what he’s trying to say, or he wasn’t quite presenting himself well. He was not very animated, didn’t make a good impression, but it wasn’t about the things he said so much as how he presented himself. And the main question in people’s minds, of course, was: Is he able to handle the job for another four years, given his age, which I think is about 82.

[00:01:56] This is one of the worst parts of the debate and it came very early on. He began to fumble and stumble his way through this. Really, I turned to my wife after this clip and I said, ‘He just lost the election.’

[00:02:08] Joe Biden: He got $2 trillion tax cuts that benefited the very wealthy. Now what I’m going to do is fix the tax system. For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America, I mean, billionaires in America and what’s happening, they’re in a situation where they in fact pay 8.2% in taxes. If they just paid 24%, 25%, either one of those numbers, they’d raise 500 million dollars, billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period. We’d be able to right wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do.

[00:02:39] Child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with the COVID, excuse me, with, um, dealing with everything we have to do with, uh, look, if, we finally beat Medicare.

[00:03:05] Jake Tapper (CNN debate moderator): Thank you, President Biden. President Trump.

[00:03:08] Donald Trump: Well, he’s right, he did beat Medicaid, he beat it to death, and he’s destroying Medicare.

[00:03:12] Alan Zundel (Political Dharma): As you probably saw in the news reports immediately after the debate and continuing in the last couple of days, there was quite a panic in the Democratic Party establishment over his performance, and in fact we saw a lot of folks actually talking about trying to get him out of the race.

[00:03:33] And a lot of media commentators have been coming out and saying they think that he should step aside and let somebody else run. But is that very likely to happen? I would say no, not very likely to happen. And I’ll give you a demonstration of why.

[00:03:49] So far, I haven’t seen any leading Democrats coming out and saying he should step aside from the nomination process, but here is Joe Biden in a rally in North Carolina, I think, the day after the debate and what he had to say. And ask yourself after you hear this if he is likely to step aside.

[00:04:08] Joe Biden: I know I’m not a young man. (Crowd protests) Well, I know. (Crowd cheers and starts chanting ‘Joe! Joe!’) Well, I know—folks! I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as fluently as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth! I know—I know—I know right from wrong! And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. and I know what millions of Americans know: When you get knocked down, you get back up.

[00:05:20] Alan Zundel (Political Dharma): So as you could see and hear there, Joe Biden probably with a little rest and the help of a teleprompter was able to make his case for his candidacy much more strongly and already starting to show how he’s going to be spinning his poor performance by acknowledging that he is older and that he’s not always on point about when he has to debate or make statements or the rest. That’s been obvious for a while.

[00:05:48] And a lot of people just tuning in for the first time saw how obvious it is and how badly he can lose the thread. Anyway, this is his modus operandi, and it has been for a number of years. When people tend to count him out, he decides he’s going to double down. So, he can be very stubborn about these kind of things, and I don’t think anybody—any bigwigs in the party, or his wife, Dr. Jill Biden—is likely to start pressuring him to step aside.

[00:06:15] More likely, they are going to fall in line like they generally do in the Democratic Party, trying to protect their own position within the party by not going against the Democratic establishment, by going along with the party line.

[00:06:26] But that hasn’t kept people from continuing, behind the scenes or in front of the cameras, media commentators, all of them speculating about, ‘Well, what are we going to do about this?

[00:06:35] Now, is it possible that the Democratic Party can get rid of Joe Biden at this point, even if he does not want to go? Well, yes, it is possible, and I’m going to tell you why here.

[00:06:46] First of all, the Democratic Party has already issued its convention call in which it gave the rules for how the convention is going to be conducted. This says that automatic delegates, which we usually know as superdelegates, ‘retain their ability to vote according to their own preferences.’

[00:07:04] It means they’re free to vote for anybody they want who has been put into nomination in the convention. And then Subsection D says that the rest of the delegates who are pledged to a presidential candidate ‘shall, in all good conscience, reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.’

[00:07:23] Now, the question for them is, whether those who elected them are feeling like they should replace Joe Biden. Or by the time you get to the convention, how they’ll feel about that. So a lot of them could join with automatic delegates or superdelegates to decide to put somebody else in nomination and then make that person the candidate instead of Joe Biden.

[00:07:46] So it’s possible, especially if things continue to not go very well for Joe Biden in the couple of months before August—the Democratic convention is August. In the time between now and then, if things continue to deteriorate for the Biden campaign, maybe some of them will get together and try to put other names into the nomination process.

[00:08:05] Of course, there will be already names other than Biden’s, like Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, who did earn some delegates. And there are a lot of delegates who are uncommitted to any candidate, because primarily of that effort to get people to vote on ‘Uncommitted’ and similar types of votes during the presidential primaries because of Biden’s position on Israel’s war against the Palestinians in Gaza.

[00:08:32] So there could be enough people to try to bring the convention to a different nominee. If they can find somebody. I don’t think either Marianne Williamson or Dean Phillips is going to be somebody who can collect enough delegates at the convention, but possibly some big-name Democrat such as Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, or there’s talk about the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer. That’s possible, but again, I don’t think it’s likely.

[00:08:57] And the reason here is that the Democratic National Committee has already decided that it is going to choose the nominees with a virtual roll call in advance of the national convention. Now it hasn’t determined yet the date of this. But it’s going to be later than July 21, which is when the credentials committee for the convention meets.

[00:09:21] But now it’s becoming fairly clear why they set up this nomination process. And it wasn’t simply because they were trying to get on the ballot in states where there’s early deadlines for putting the nominee on the ballot. Early, that is, before the convention could be held.

[00:09:38] In this case, I think it’s become clear that the reason they’re holding this online vote is because they anticipated that even though they were going to try to have this early debate under their own rules, and try to get Biden pumped up and ready for it, that he could not perform very well, and so they thought it’s important to head off the possibility that there could be a runaway convention that nominates somebody else.

[00:10:02] So they’re going to have this process of an online vote to make sure he’s locked in as a candidate. So I think the most likely scenario here is that Biden’s going to remain the candidate. He doesn’t want to step down. Nobody’s—none of the head honchos in the party so far (that I know of) have stepped forward to tell him to step aside for somebody else.

[00:10:22] So it looks like he’s going to stick in the race and it looks like they’re going to make sure he’s the nominee before we even get to the convention.

[00:10:29] John Q: That’s a clip from this week’s edition of Political Dharma, the podcast of long time Friendly Area Neighbor Alan Zundel, following the 2024 presidential campaign. Subscribe and donate at PoliticalDharma.com.