(Ur-Fascism - or Eternal Fascism - is Eco's generic form, as opposed to a particular type of fascism, ie: the Nazis, Mussolini, etc)
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
You call them undecided - I call them fuckin' idiots.
Puh-tay-ta / Puh-tah-toh
Dear Undecideds,
Let's review - again. Cuz some of you seem unable or (more likely) unwilling to grok the situation.
Let's say this election is like looking at a breakfast menu.
Option 1: A big steaming bowl of lumpy, greasy, tequila hangover squirts.
Option 2: A short stack, some crispy bacon, 2 eggs (any way you like 'em), fresh-squeezed OJ, and some coffee.
But you're telling me you can't decide because you're just not sure about the fucking syrup?
WaPo pretty much misses the point - again - because WaPo needs to fill space and sell ads for dick pills and panty liners.
And yes, WaPo - we are a "nation divided" - it's the shit-eaters versus the normal people.
But, hey - do your dumbass thing, Press Poodles.
The elusive ‘policy-driven’ undecided voter
It’s useful to the media to suggest that undecided voters are seeking out more information about Harris and Trump. But, often, the reverse is true.
There is a canonical presentation of voters in a democracy. Attuned to the central issues of the election — be they national, state or local — these voters carefully consider the positions of the candidates and perform an elaborate mental calculus. Candidate A aligns with the voter on a few things, but Candidate B aligns on more, and more important ones. Candidate B it is. On to the next contest on the ballot.
Written out like that, the idea is obviously ridiculous. Most voters scan their ballots for the candidates indicated as Democrats or Republicans and vote for those candidates. There’s nothing wrong with that, as such; the point of political parties, in part, is to provide a mnemonic for Americans to quickly identify candidates who broadly share their values. Why spend all that time reading about issues when the D and the R serve as accurate summaries?
That has become particularly true as partisan polarization has sharpened in the United States. Fewer legislators and candidates hold heterodox positions, meaning that the D and the R are more effective presentations of their views than they used to be. If you are moderately well informed, those two letters can tell you most of what you want to know about the candidates on most issues, even at the state or local level. At the presidential level, the letters are almost completely descriptive, given that the parties’ presidential candidates help define where the parties stand.
And yet there are still numerous voters who say they haven’t been able to decide between the two major-party presidential candidates in 2024. But there are different strains of “undecided.” For many, the question is probably less whether they prefer Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump than whether they plan to vote at all. For a handful, their calculus of how the candidates’ positions comport with their own personal values is complex. And for many — perhaps, if we allow ourselves to be cynical, most — they simply haven’t been, and are not now, paying much attention to politics.
This isn’t new. There’s always been a clutch of Americans who are loosely attached to politics and whose opinions on political issues are therefore idiosyncratic. It’s been 20 years since Chris Hayes (well before his MSNBC days) described talking to undecided voters in Wisconsin during the 2004 election. He found fewer of the theoretical cautious/conscientious voters than people whose politics appeared to have been picked at random from piles of newspaper clippings.
One thing we’ve heard a lot this year is that undecided voters are still making up their minds in part because they want to learn more about Harris’s positions. This makes sense in theory; Harris’s presence as a candidate has been relatively short-lived, given the transition the Democratic Party made at the end of July.
But that’s just short-lived in the American sense. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced parliamentary elections on May 22; they were held on July 4. That’s a 43-day election cycle. Harris has been a candidate for 78 days. There was a Democratic Party convention that dominated the airwaves for four days. There was a debate. Harris released policy platforms. If voters want to know what she’s running on, it’s there for them to consume.
In fact, the New York Times released polling last week delineating why voters who still described themselves as “undecided” were refraining from settling on a candidate. Conducted by Siena College, the poll asked those voters what their concerns about the candidates were. A plurality of those voters said Trump’s personality was their biggest point of hesitation. For Harris, a smaller percentage said they were concerned about her honesty and judgment.
Only a handful of people indicated that they wanted to know more about her candidacy.
If we sketch out a more realistic picture of an undecided voter, we can see why this isn’t a surprise. For the most part, they are not carefully sitting down and considering the information at hand, finding that their stack of information about Harris is still missing elements. They are, instead, not paying much attention at all and, perhaps, sometimes tacitly admitting they aren’t paying much attention by saying they need to learn more.
Some in the media nonetheless seized upon this idea with alacrity. Consider how Politico described the Harris campaign’s flurry of media appearances this week: “Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris. Instead, expect most of these sit-downs to be a continuation of the ‘vibes’ campaign Harris has perfected.”
There’s been frustration from some reporters that Harris hasn’t centered her campaign on conversations with traditional media outlets but, instead, on a more limited schedule with podcast and online personalities. That seeps out of the Politico description: What voters want is policy information, which a Harris-Howard Stern conversation isn’t going to provide! The error in this argument should be immediately apparent — as should the reason that traditional outlets would elevate it.
Several things are true about the current media landscape. One is that the traditional media (including The Washington Post, obviously) has a more limited influence than it used to. Another is that some podcasts and influencers have much broader audiences — particularly among the constituencies the candidates hope to spur to the polls — than newspapers or cable news programs. A third is that this is useful for the campaigns, since they can more easily avoid tricky or challenging questions that traditional reporters might pose.
The solution is not to suggest that undecided voters are uniformly desperate for probing questions that will inform their votes. This is true of some undecided voters, sure. But everything else we know about those voters (including the Times poll above) indicates that those voters are anomalous. It’s safe to assume that the campaigns understand that, with four weeks remaining, the key to victory will almost certainly depend less on presenting undecided voters with complex policy proposals and extended, wonky conversations with editorial boards than on ensuring that those voters casting a ballot based on the D and the R are excited to go out and do so.
You've done this before - what were you waiting for this time?
5 key revelations from Bob Woodward’s new book
Trump, Putin, Biden, Netanyahu and other world leaders in secretive, off-the-cuff moments revealed in “War.”
Bob Woodward’s “War,” set to be released next week, is the author and Washington Post associate editor’s fourth book since Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016.
The new book opens the aperture to reveal how a years-long political contest between Trump and President Joe Biden — and now Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — has unfolded against the backdrop of cascading global crisis, from the coronavirus pandemic, to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran-backed proxies in the Middle East. At the book’s end, Woodward concludes that Biden, mistakes notwithstanding, has exhibited “steady and purposeful leadership,” while Trump has displayed recklessness and self-interest making him, in Woodward’s estimation, “unfit to lead the country.”
That determination is based on a series of key revelations. Below are some of the book’s main findings. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign issued a statement attacking the book and saying, “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true.”
1. Trump sent American-made coronavirus tests to Putin
When Trump was president in 2020, he sent coveted tests for the disease to Russian President Vladimir Putin during a crippling shortage in the United States and around the world.
As the book explains, Putin was petrified of contracting the deadly illness. He accepted the supplies but cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had shared them, concerned for the political fallout that the U.S. president would suffer.
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward.
Woodward reports that Trump’s reply was: “I don’t care. Fine.”
“War” also suggests that Trump and Putin may have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021. On one occasion, this year, Trump sent an unnamed aide away from his office at his Mar-a-Lago Club so he could conduct a private phone call with Putin, according to the book.
A campaign official, Jason Miller, was evasive when Woodward asked him about the contact, eventually offering, “I have not heard that they’re talking, so I’d push back on that.” 2. Biden’s profanity-laced outbursts about Putin and Netanyahu
“War” portrays Biden as a careful and deliberate commander in chief, but combustible in private about intractable foreign leaders — especially Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden called Putin the “epitome of evil” and remarked to his advisers, about his Russian counterpart, “That f---ing Putin.”
The intelligence community believed racial animus — namely the idea that Ukrainians were a lesser people than the Russians — was a significant factor in Putin’s designs on Ukraine, as “War” explains. The book quotes Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, saying of Putin, “He is one of the most racist leaders that we have.”
Biden’s anger toward Netanyahu boiled over in the spring of 2024, Woodward reports, as Biden concluded that the Israeli prime minister’s interest was not actually in defeating Hamas but in protecting himself. “That son of a b----, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f---ing guy!” Biden reportedly told advisers.
3. Harris’s two-track approach with Netanyahu
Harris delivered high-profile remarks after a July face-to-face meeting with Netanyahu, shortly after she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. She seemed to separate herself from Biden’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza by speaking forcefully about the costs of the military campaign and pledging to “not be silent” about Palestinian suffering.
Her public tone surprised, and infuriated, Netanyahu because it marked a contrast with her more amicable approach during the private conversation the two had shared, Woodward reports. The book quotes the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Herzog, saying: “She wants to be tough in public. But she wasn’t as tough privately.”
The episode is one of several in the book about Harris, who appears as a loyal No. 2 to Biden but hardly influential in major foreign policy decisions.
4. Frantic de-escalation in the face of possible Russian nuclear use
Woodward details some of the stunning intelligence capabilities that allowed Washington to foresee Russian plans for an all-out war against Ukraine in early 2022, including a human source inside the Kremlin.
This insight, however, got the Biden administration only so far as it sought to foreclose Russia’s nuclear option. In the fall of 2022, that option seemed like a live one, as U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Putin was seriously weighing use of a tactical nuclear weapon — at one point, assessing the likelihood at 50 percent.
An especially frantic quest to bring Moscow back from the brink came in October of that year, when Russia appeared to be laying the groundwork for escalation by accusing Ukraine of preparing to detonate a dirty bomb. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flatly denied Russia’s accusations in a phone call with the Kremlin’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, instructed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team to summon the International Atomic Energy Agency to absolve themselves immediately. And Biden called out Russia’s apparent scheme publicly while privately leaning on Chinese President Xi Jinping to emphasize to Putin the dire consequences of nuclear use.
5. The pervasive influence of the Saudi crown prince
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials MBS, is not a major figure in the book but looms large at critical junctures, with key assessments of him delivered by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Mohammed, currently the prime minister of Saudi Arabia, matters greatly as the de facto ruler of the Arab world’s wealthiest country. He cultivated close ties to Trump, who made Riyadh his first foreign stop as president. So, too, he has been crucial to matters of significant interest to Biden, especially oil supplies and the prospects of normalized relations with Israel.
Woodward summarized Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s perception of the crown prince this way: “MBS was nothing more than a spoiled child.”
One of the Saudi royal’s important interlocutors has been Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.). The Republican senator kept Biden’s aides apprised of Mohammed’s perspective on the possible normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, according to Woodward, and also kept the gulf leader in communication with Trump. During a March visit to Saudi Arabia recounted in the book, Graham proposes to the crown prince that they call the Republican presidential candidate. Mohammed proceeds to conduct the conversation over speakerphone.
On an earlier trip, Graham had asked the crown prince to contact Sullivan, so the senator could inform them both about a discussion with Netanyahu.
“Hey, I’m here with Lindsey,” the Saudi royal reportedly announced to Sullivan over the phone.
I have to say, I've gotten a few kicks out of this year's DNC convention. These things aren't as boringly mesmerizing as I remember from way back when all 3 networks ran all-day coverage, and it was summer vacation, and I just desperately needed my TV fix, and what the hell - let's watch the grownups make fools of themselves for a while.
I was kind of an odd kid.
Anyway, Olbermann turned me on to this piece from Meredith Shiner in The New Republic. It makes a lot of sense, and acts as a bit of an antidote to keep me from drinking any Kool-Aid.
Although, in my defense - really, you can't leave me unsupervised for this long, but also, I've learned that just like back in the day, the key is to see and hear what the actual people are doing and saying, and try to ignore the Press Poodles as best you can.
The Corporatized, Profit-Centric, Access-Driven, Cocktail-Party Media is not our friend.
Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention
As everyday Americans tune in to watch Kamala Harris receive her party’s nomination, they should trust what they see with their own eyes—especially as D.C.’s chattering class tries to gaslight them.
It’s one of those moments that is tattooed on your brain forever—if your brain is the kind that is fully occupied by an encyclopedic memory of inane political moments that normal people forget: Donald Trump steps out onto the stage for the first debate of the 2016 Republican primary, fields the first question, and retorts, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” when debate moderator Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, reminded him, “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’” et cetera.
From the vantage of 2024, that Rosie O’Donnell jab is just one of thousands of ephemeral, pointless, and mean Trump utterances sloshing around in his larger ocean of vitriol. But what I remember most vividly was not the Rosie O’Donnell line itself. It was how every other candidate on stage—Republican robots in navy suits, white shirts, and red ties—short-circuited before our eyes. Everyone else in that debate (a veritable murderer’s row of forgettables like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker) had arrived preprogrammed by Washington, D.C.’s unwritten rules of political theatre, honed over decades of recycled bookings on Sunday morning’s vacuous matinees: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and This Week.
Trump was unique among that field of suits in that he did not slide from Polite Washington’s slick political candidate widget factory. He didn’t care to perform the same canned lines on tax rates, entitlements, or the national debt. And he showed the world that audiences didn’t care about that long-running political vaudeville act, either. The Trump era, however you define it, yielded few gifts and cured little about the broken political discourse coming out of Washington. But if it didn’t wreck the political press’s performative vacuity, it at least exposed it for all to see.
Now, with nearly four years of Trump out of the White House, Trump back on the trail, and a Democrat at the top of the ticket who can actually campaign, the gap between the Beltway Truman Show and what people outside of D.C. actually are experiencing is widening. And this rift in reality imperils the media at a time when journalism is fighting a multifront war against anti-truth Republicans, declining revenue, and predatory venture capital mismanagement.
When Trump burst onto the scene, I was still a reporter in Washington covering national politics and Congress. I watched as the journalism-industrial complex of D.C. reporters and operatives around me tried to cast Trump as an atypical candidate who blew up the Republican Party. Casting Trump as an outlier—trying to make him an aberration instead of an outgrowth of a decades-long Republican effort to break our country—obscured the collective national gaze from something much more troubling for the people who make their living on politics: Trump didn’t break the Republican Party at all. He just broke the made-up Washington rules that empowered every lobbyist, reporter, and staffer to attend parties together without fear or reservation.
Trump disrupted the Washington status quo of White House Correspondents Dinners, of bipartisanship as an outcome agnostic to the policies brokered by those arrangements, of speculative horse-race coverage as seemingly innocuous instead of the over-juiced, monetized, and corrosive clickbait driving our country to the brink of authoritarianism.
As this class of political elites descends on Chicago this week for the Democratic National Convention, the average consumer of news needs to know they are not really coming here to workshop policy, interpret or execute progressive politics, or even discuss electoral strategy. They’re coming to attend corporate-sponsored happy hours, eat free meals together at the CNN Grill, and maybe, if they’re really lucky, snag a selfie with John Legend.
And now, more than ever, we should ask who all of this—this punditry, this hobnobbing, this navel-gazing—is really for.
Because if this summer has revealed anything, it’s that, just like the Scott Walkers of yore, we are watching the national media short-circuit before our very eyes. They are insular. They are unprepared. And after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves. While this may seem ancillary to the main plotline of our national politics, the mainstream media own-goaling themselves out of civic relevance is a net negative for anyone who believes in the outcome of better, more representative, good government.
For years, largely because Republicans are better at working the refs and crying foul about any effort by the media to hold them accountable for their actions, the idea that the media are dyed-in-the-wool liberals has become the orthodoxy. Of course, the Beltway media are conservative. This is not a novel argument by any means: It’s an industry run by (increasingly reactionary) plutocrats, who reliably summon their charges to lead a highly effective, “But how will you pay for it?” pincer movement against anything resembling liberal policy. Meanwhile, there is seemingly no sin grievous enough to earn a Republican the same sort of nullifying skepticism—the Trumpists who aided and abetted the former president’s attempt to overturn a lawful election remain in the good graces of America’s cable news bookers.
Still, we need to acknowledge that the media are conservative in the most traditional, unideological sense of the word: They are clinging to a status quo, their status quo, that has not matched our reality since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the Tea Party emerged as the energized manifestation of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s fever dreams. Their rules, their conventional wisdom, their savvy takes become more stale, more detached from normal life, and more cartoonish with every passing day.
The roller-coaster news cycle of this summer has revealed not only how little the media have learned from the Trump era of politics, but also how badly they want their little old world back, one where Republican operatives dressed as cable news pundits can shape the decision-making of the Democratic Party, “sensible” Democratic leaders are the ones who tack to the right to win over voters and politicians who can never be won, and everyone can grab a martini at Café Milano—Washington, D.C.’s version of what the late Anthony Bourdain would call “The Despots’ Club”—and laugh about it afterwards.
Let’s consider the past few weeks in the life of The New York Times. This summer, the paper of record demanded President Joe Biden’s departure from the race. After getting their wish, they had criticism galore, which they expressed by pushing full stories on crystals-loving Marianne Williamson’s complaints that the party needed an open nomination process (without regard for the legal and logistical impossibility of such a process), followed by multiple columns chastising the elevation of the current Vice President, Kamala Harris, to the top of the ticket as a “coronation” (again, despite the fact that she was the only Democrat in the United States who could actually surmount the aforementioned legal and logistical challenges).
They got what they wanted but, oh no, not how they wanted it! And when the veepstakes didn’t go to their precise specifications they then found a half dozen of Minnesota’s nearly six million residents to say they do not love Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s pick for a running mate, even as his favorability jumped 20 points after his announcement. Finger on the pulse, baby!
It is as if the media are actively trying to direct chaos or uncertainty because chaos and uncertainty would create something new or interesting to them—a good show—which is what they’ve decided the news is about. As our country has inched closer to collapse, as we are not even a full presidential cycle away from Trump sending insurrectionists to the Capitol to murder members of Congress and his own vice president to steal an election, this direction seems clumsier and more desperate than it’s ever been.
During no event was this media disconnect from reality more evident than at the August 7 announcement of Walz as Harris’s number two on the ticket. Watching CNN, you would have thought that Harris had made a fatal error, that she was antisemitic and politically radical—despite being married to a literal Jewish person and having no such political record—for opting against Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Anchor Jake Tapper could not process how Harris could have chosen an effective, proven Democratic legislator over an anti–public education governor whose state needed to pay almost $300,000 to settle a sexual harassment case involving Shapiro’s top liaison to the state legislature, who also happened to be Republican. Reporters and the Republican operatives-turned-pundits who are permanently seated next to them were flabbergasted, as a person with actual agency went against the stage direction they had coalesced around.
Meanwhile, the images from the stadium at that very moment, which we could all see, showed thousands of people finally energized by and enthusiastic to support a ticket comprised of two fully animate human people who could put together cogent sentences about what it means to be a Democrat. Not to mention applause lines on how the GOP’s vice presidential pick is a weirdo. If the media’s job, in part and during live events, is to document what they are seeing to translate those observations to an audience, it appears they would prefer to create a fantasy world to talk about, rather than simply discuss what’s plainly in front of their faces.
Which brings us back to the Democratic convention. It’s impossible to know every flaw or fault this chattering class will find in a convention that does not feature a lineup of Kid Rock or Hulk Hogan, or cheer on the likes of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban or any of a number of extremely creepy and weird religious zealots. But you can bet there will be pearl-clutching about how Democrats are not reaching for a middle that is actually center-left, how clear articulations of the threats Trump poses to democracy constitute dangerous political rhetoric, and whether Democrats can win white votes using every euphemism for “white voter” that you can imagine.
Do not let these talking heads fool you into thinking that normal, commonsense people or ideas—like keeping kids out of poverty, safe from being shot in school, and free to read books of their choosing at their public libraries—are fringe. We can see with our eyes what’s happening before us, and we know the stakes of what lies ahead even if that understanding does not make us as savvy as them.
Let them go to their parties, drink their cheap house wine on some grifting consultancy’s dime, and sneer amongst themselves behind our backs. I’ll be watching C-Span until they figure out their real responsibility or democracy completely collapses, whichever comes first.
Republicans and Progressives have picked Chicago 16 times.
So how is it that WaPo has decided to remind everybody of that one time when shit went down in Chicago during the '68 DNC convention?
Because American political reporting has only two themes:
Democrats in disarray
Both Sides
SI'm so fucking sick of Press Poodles constantly pimping the bullshit manufactured drama.
It was 56 years ago for fuck's sake.
The author (Joel Achenbach) does make an attempt to redeem the thing by pointing out that this year's circumstances bear virtually no resemblance to what was happening in 1968, except that an incumbent POTUS has bowed out and his VP has stepped in - which is kinda the way it's supposed to be, Joel.
Auchenbach spends 4 short paragraphs telling us it's very different this time, after the bleeding headlines and the initial 2 paragraphs, which conform perfectly to the standard formula of "Dems in disarray".
So why even bring that shit up? Click bait?
The American political press is either in the tank for the plutocrats, or poised on the edge, and about to fall straight into the shitter.
Anyway, it's important to remember that the DNC convention is Chicago was just one episode in the year-long clusterfuck that was 1968.
As Democrats gather in Chicago, the spirit of ’68 is a painful memory
The party is returning to the scene of a convention conflagration, featuring fighting inside the hall and rioting outside on the streets.
The Democrats are converging on Chicago, scene of their greatest convention disaster. Even after 56 years the party can’t forget the fiasco of 1968, when police battered protesters on Chicago streets, jeering and fistfights broke out in the convention hall and the bitterly divided delegates sent their nominee careening toward a defeat by Richard M. Nixon.
The return to Chicago this week comes amid echoes of 1968. The party has once again had to find its footing when the sitting president made a stunning decision to not seek reelection. Thousands of protesters are expected to march outside the convention and law enforcement is prepared for the possibility of violent disruptions. Cultural and generational divides in the party are pronounced. And there has been gunfire on the campaign trail, a jangling reminder that an election year can be turned upside down at the speed of an assassin’s bullet.
And yet despite those echoes, the Democrats are gliding into Chicago with little or no resemblance to the polarized and grieving party of 1968.
Unlike in 1968, the Democratic ticket is settled. The poll numbers are rising. The party activists are euphoric, with enthusiastic crowds greeting Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on the campaign trail.
And, unlike in 1968, there’s just not much left to decide in Chicago. When President Joe Biden stepped aside, some party leaders and pundits advocated for a protracted nomination contest culminating at the convention. With stunning speed that idea evaporated. In just days, Harris became the consensus choice and is already officially the nominee.
“Democrats have already done the main thing that was necessary to avoid the chaos of 1968: They’ve unified in advance,” said David Farber, a historian at the University of Kansas.
“[Vice President] Hubert Humphrey could not pull that off in 1968. He could not unify the party. And he had many months to do it,” Farber said. “Harris did it in 48 hours.”
The four-day convention of 1968 turned into such a bitter, televised spectacle that the word “Chicago” became shorthand among political professionals for a catastrophe. The entire process of nominating presidential candidates was overhauled in the aftermath, shifting power from party bosses to state primary voters.
The debacle set in motion a multi-decade trend in which conventions in both parties became rigidly preprogrammed, designed to demonstrate party unity, avoid controversy and build momentum for the fall election.
“The memory of ’68 is always there,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and political affairs at Princeton University. “The potential for chaos is why these conventions become so scripted.”
A general view of the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 28, 1968, during the nominating session. (Anonymous/Associated Press) Although this year has been chaotic, it has not seen the levels of violence and horror of 1968.
For America, 1968 was the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. The war split the Democratic Party. Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an antiwar candidate, ran a stunningly close second to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York announced his opposition to Johnson’s war policies and jumped into the race. Johnson, painfully aware that he was bleeding party support, shocked the nation on March 31 with a televised announcement that he would not seek reelection.
Four days later an assassin murdered Martin Luther King Jr. Amid civil unrest, cities burned. Two months later another assassin killed Kennedy, who had just won the California primary. His last public words, minutes before he was struck: “Now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there!”
By that point Humphrey had entered the race. But Humphrey did not compete in any primaries, which in those days were few in number. Party bosses and governors controlled most of the convention delegates. Humphrey went to Chicago with what appeared to be enough pledged delegates to get the nomination.
But it wasn’t a done deal. The situation invited plenty of backroom negotiations and Hail Mary schemes by Democrats opposed to Humphrey. McCarthy had hundreds of delegates from the primaries. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, also a war opponent, had entered the contest just two weeks before the convention. Some party leaders hoped to lure Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, still shattered by the assassination of his brother, into the race.
Delegates on the convention floor hold a large banner that reads “Bobby We Miss You,” during the final session of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 29, 1968. (AP) “I was actually counting delegates for the AP, and no one had enough delegates at the beginning of the convention to win,” recalled reporter Carl Leubsdorf, who later became Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.
There was even some possibility that Johnson himself — nursing his political wounds at his Texas ranch — might storm into Chicago to reclaim what he felt was rightfully his. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley hoped to lure him back into the race.
“They had a helipad ready for him,” said Heather Hendershot, a professor of communication studies and journalism at Northwestern University and author of “When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America.” “The Secret Service thought it was too dangerous because everything was so crazy in the streets.”
No one this year is talking about Biden reentering the race — except for former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump, who on his social media platform recently floated a scenario in which Biden “CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination.”
This summer, a coalition of 200 organizations is planning protests and marches in Chicago during the convention. Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to demonstrate against the Biden administration’s support for Israel.
“We recognize the Democratic Party as a tool of billionaires and corporations,” declares the website for the March on the DNC 2024.
The number of protesters this year could be greater than in 1968, when many antiwar protesters chose to stay home amid signs that Chicago could become a bloodbath. Protest organizers had predicted 100,000 people, maybe even 300,000, would descend on Chicago. The actual number was closer to 15,000.
Earlier that year, Daley had notoriously ordered police to shoot to kill arsonists amid the urban uprisings following the assassination of King. Police also should “shoot to maim or cripple” looters, he’d said. For the convention, Daley put 11,000 police officers on 12-hour shifts, supplemented by 5,600 National Guardsmen and 7,500 regular Army troops on standby, according to reporter Jules Witcover’s book “Party of the People,” a history of the Democrats.
“This is happening in the midst of one of the worst periods of urban unrest that the country has ever seen,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Johns Hopkins University. “America is on fire. America is burning during this period.”
From the start of the week, police roughed up protesters. Informants infiltrated the antiwar groups. Some protesters pelted police with rocks and bags of urine.
The protesters were a motley bunch. Some wanted to overthrow the entire establishment, which they deemed irredeemably corrupt. Others were focused on ending the war in Vietnam. In the mix were the Yippies, who combined counterculture politics with street-theater hubris. They ceremoniously nominated a pig (“Pigasus”) for president, earning a spot on the evening news before getting hauled off by police.
Inside the convention hall, Vietnam supercharged divisions among the delegates. Hundreds of antiwar Democrats pushed a peace plank calling for an immediate bombing halt, but they were outnumbered by delegates loyal to Johnson and Humphrey. Johnson demanded Humphrey’s fealty to the administration’s hawkish war plan, and Humphrey was reluctant to chart his own path.
On Wednesday, the third night of the convention, Humphrey was formally nominated after midnight, by which time the situation both inside and outside the hall had gone totally out of control.
Fistfights broke out among delegates. Reporters got roughed up by plainclothes security agents working for Daley. At one point early in the week Dan Rather, working as a floor reporter for CBS News, was punched in the stomach by a security agent when he tried to interview a delegate being forcibly hauled out of the hall.
Rather recalled the atmosphere as poisonous from the start.
“From the moment I stepped onto the convention floor, it was like a boiling pot,” he said. “It came to a total big-time boil on Wednesday night.”
On the podium, Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who was making a nominating speech for McGovern, glared at the nearby Daley and said, “With George McGovern as president of the United States, we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.”
Lip-readers in the television audience could see Daley cursing Ribicoff, including several f-bombs.
A strike by city electrical workers greatly limited what networks could televise live from the streets of Chicago. The live reports from inside the hall were interspersed with delayed footage showing police beating protesters and, later, journalists and bystanders. An official investigation later described the events as a “police riot.”
“The whole world is watching!” protesters chanted.
The news of the mayhem downtown spread among the delegates. After Wednesday night’s raucous session concluded, antiwar Democrats took buses downtown to join the protesters.
“We were chanting ‘Dump the Hump,’” said Curtis Wilkie, who attended the 1968 convention as a Mississippi delegate, wound up staying up all night among the antiwar protesters and later became a political reporter for the Boston Globe.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say that Chicago and the convention were sheer hell,” said Al Spivak, who worked for Humphrey’s campaign that year and remembers smelling the tear gas that infiltrated Humphrey’s headquarters at the Conrad Hilton.
So many things today are radically different from 1968.
“As historians one of the things that we know is that history rarely repeats itself,” said Wright Rigueur, the Johns Hopkins professor. “There might be parallels. I tell my students that history often remixes itself.”
In 1968, the Democratic delegates were overwhelmingly White men, and some southern states remained resistant to racially diverse delegations. The Democratic Party was in the midst of a historic realignment, rapidly losing its Southern bloc in the wake of civil rights legislation. The segregationist Democrat George Wallace of Alabama emerged as a third-party candidate and would go on to win five states in November.
There is more realignment happening today as the parties continue to evolve, or, as Wright Rigueur would put it, remix.
“The Democratic Party has really become the party of more affluent, college-educated people, and the Republican Party has become more of a working class party, especially a White working class party,” said Bruce Schulman, a historian at Boston University.
Historically, Democrats were known for disputatious conventions. They were the scruffier of the two major political parties. They had a broader, more diverse coalition, one that ranged from conservative Southerners to Northeastern liberals to blue-collar union members. As the party has grown more ideologically uniform, and its leaders more determined to project unity, the Democratic conventions have become less cantankerous.
“They began to take on the appearance, dare I say, of Republican conventions. Abided by their timetables. Very little strife on the floor,” said Wilkie, the journalist.
“There’s no such thing as a rowdy convention or one that’s much fun to cover anymore,” Wilkie said.
The way people consume news is totally different from 1968. Back then, broadcast networks produced gavel-to-gavel coverage of the proceedings. The story of the day was whatever anchors Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and leading media pundits said it was.
Now, niche audiences have overtaken mass audiences, Hendershot said. The political narrative today can take the form of a meme, a phrase or an image of an awkward moment, propelled by algorithms across social media.
“You can’t predict which memes will go viral and seem meaningful to people,” she said.
Another significant difference between 1968 and 2024: the opponent. In 1968 the Republican nominee, Nixon, was a two-term former vice president and the narrow loser of the 1960 presidential election. Nixon had devised a “Southern strategy” to pick off Democrats opposed to racial integration, and he claimed to have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.
Nixon was despised by Democrats but did not loom large over the proceedings in the way that Trump will this week. For Democrats, the idea of another Trump presidency “has overwhelmed any serious fissures over the Middle East” or any other conflicts that might threaten to divide the party, Zelizer said.
This is not the first time the Democrats have returned to Chicago for their convention. They did so in 1996, and exorcised a lot of the demons of ’68 as they held a lovefest for the incumbents, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
The country was at peace, and the polls for Democrats were blissful. The party partied. After 28 years, Chicago ’68 looked like a terrible but fleeting phase the party had endured.
But for some Democrats, 1968 remains a vivid, disheartening memory. Spivak, the Humphrey campaign aide, is shocked that the Democrats would again go back to the shores of Lake Michigan. He is now 96, long retired and living in Florida.
“I don’t understand why the Democrats chose to have their convention in Chicago,” Spivak said. “I’m not the only American with memories of the ’68 convention. It was a disaster.”
Trump's acceptance speech was another 93-minute Festival Of Prevarication.
And the question for the Press Poodles is: Where the fuck is all this good-journalism fact checking in real time - as the lies are falling out of that prick's mouth? Like when it actually matters, and might do some good?
Press Poodles love to stir the shit for the sake of stirring the shit - because calm, steady, and practical doesn't sell dick pills and panty liners as well as "Democrats In Disarray!"
I'm not saying Biden has absolutely no problems. I've never said that, and I never will, so this time, I'll say it this way: The guy dodders, and he goes on side trips to Grandpa Land on occasion. That's Biden - and that's always been Biden.
And this:
For me, it's Biden -
until Biden tells me it's not Biden
Take a listen to Tennessee Brando talking about ratings, and then tell me the WaPo piece that follows couldn't possibly have anything to do with keeping up the drama for the sake of clicks, and the revenue they get from pimping the show to drive that traffic, to peddle their advertisers' shit.
In the end, it won't be an asshole fascist like Trump that blows it all up. It's going to be some schmuck in the Marketing Dept who's convinced the boss that simply getting eyeballs on a website is more valuable than providing voters a little boring truth about what's at stake in the election, and how mailing in one ballot can make enough of a difference that maybe we change things enough that we don't have to feel like we're at the broken end of the bottle every fucking minute of every fucking day.
And now it's time for WaPo to shit on Biden's head in a piece that spills a gallon of ink on a story that boils down to He Said / She Said.
They name names when there's something to say about how the old guy is sharp and involved, and asking pointed tough questions in (eg) a foreign policy meeting that was scheduled for 90 minutes and then goes for 3 hours, but all the shit-talk is from anonymous sources.
Biden’s aging is seen as accelerating; lapses described as more common
Aides, foreign officials, members of Congress and donors say President Biden has seemed slower and more often loses his train of thought in recent months, though close aides insist he remains mentally sharp.
President Biden, who at 81 is the oldest person ever to hold the office, has displayed signs of accelerated aging in recent months, said numerous aides, foreign officials, members of Congress, donors and others who have interacted with Biden over the last 3½ years, noting that he moves more slowly, speaks more softly and has moments when he loses his train of thought more often than even just a year ago.
None of those who spoke to The Washington Post said they had seen Biden appear as lost and confused as he did at the presidential debate against Donald Trump on June 27, where his halting performance sent panic through the Democratic Party. They largely did not question his mental acuity, and several senior White House aides who interact with Biden regularly said that he continues to ask probing, detailed questions about complicated policy matters and can recall facts from previous briefings in minute detail.
Nevertheless, Biden has slowed considerably over the last several months, according to 21 people, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic and share candid assessments.
No names - cuz we wouldn't want any verifiable sources now would we.
And 21 people - now there's a big time cohort. I guess we can't possibly get any kind of skewed results form a sample so huge.
They said Biden’s physical signs of aging have become more apparent — the stiff gait; the need at times for assistance in moving from place to place; a raspy, softened speaking voice that can make the lifelong politician known for impassioned and at times seemingly unending speeches now difficult to hear and understand. In addition to these traits, he has exhibited occasional lapses in which he has appeared to briefly freeze up or suddenly veer off topic, instances some said they easily dismissed before the debate but have now caused them to question his ability to do the job for another four years.
During the Group of Seven nations summit in Italy last month, several European leaders came away stunned at how much older the president seemed from when they had last interacted with him only a year, or in some cases, mere months earlier, several officials familiar with their reactions said. “People were worried about it,” said one person familiar with leaders’ reactions.
At an immigration event at the White House less than two weeks before the debate, some participants worried about the president’s frailty and how his energy ebbed and waned, wondering how he would be able to debate Trump. One person who attended termed Biden’s performance “terrifying.” Others said they thought the president seemed physically diminished but otherwise fine. At an internal meeting at the White House this spring, an official recalled struggling to hear Biden speak even though he sat just a few feet away and noticed that the president answered some questions with puzzling non sequiturs.
“There’s been a decline over the last year. He was much more vigorous in 2023,” one former administration official said. “His age is progressing, and I’m pretty sure that’s normal. … The question is how long can he do this job for, and I don’t know the answer to that.”
Biden has said he had a cold on the night of the debate. There is no indication he is more seriously ill, and a White House doctor declared him “fit for duty” after an examination in February 2024.
The White House has pointed to Biden’s long record of legislative successes and his management of complex foreign policy matters in numerous countries as evidence of his ability to continue for another four-year term.
“As he has proved by earning the strongest record of any modern President, Joe Biden is unflinchingly capable and fighting for American families, with sharpness and resolve, every moment of every day — whether it’s managing rapidly-evolving national security events in the Situation Room or working with members of Congress late to pass the biggest climate investments in history,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
Several White House aides who work with the president regularly and accompany him on foreign trips said that while he may move slower and look older, they do not see signs that he is mentally diminished and say his physical aging has no bearing on his ability to continue the job of president. And many Democrats and White House aides who interact with Biden regularly said they were stunned by his debate performance because he had appeared far sharper and more energetic in private meetings.
But during the Group of Seven nations summit in Italy last month, a number of European leaders were struck by Biden’s appearance and demeanor, according to four people who spoke directly with multiple leaders. The general impression among leaders, the people said, was that while Biden appeared capable of carrying out his duties today, they were concerned about how he would be able to serve another four-year term.
The leaders noted that Biden seemed more tired, frail and less lucid at certain moments. Several said he was hard to hear, prompting meeting participants to ask him to speak up at times, according to a summit participant. The president also sometimes lost his train of thought, though he would return to the point quickly, three of the people said.
Biden’s appearance at the G-7, coupled with his debate performance, has further heightened anxiety among European leaders about a possible second Trump term. European capitals have long been preparing for another Trump presidency, but Biden’s halting debate performance has put those efforts into sharp focus and made the stakes “more real,” one person familiar with the conversations said.
“The impression was, we don’t see him being able to run the country for four more years. How are you running this guy for four more years? How are you going to win this election?” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, who was familiar with several leaders’ reactions. “It’s very, very rare in a democracy that the person you run for an election is someone that you all know can’t lead the country for four more years.”
One person familiar with the conversations among leaders said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni observed that Biden was “mentally on top of his game” but physically weak, leaving her worried. The person said those concerns became more pronounced after the debate. A spokesman for the Italian Embassy did not provide a comment.
“What has changed the discourse here in Europe is not the G-7. It’s the debate,” the person said. “Leaders were dismayed by Biden’s performance — they told themselves they should have realized at the G-7 … and came to the conclusion that he cannot win in November.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was with Biden at the G-7, and Amos Hochstein, a senior national security official also on the trip, said all the leaders at the G-7 looked to Biden for leadership on complex matters including Israel’s war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and China. Blinken said Biden held at least a half-dozen working sessions with other leaders, and Biden often came back to offer additional thoughts on various matters.
“What I saw and experienced at the G-7 is a president who was plunged into the work,” said Blinken, who like several others was made available by the White House to vouch for Biden’s fitness. “The question — and it’s a fair one — is ‘Does he have command of the job and is he getting results?’ And the answer to that is yes.”
But others who have interacted with Biden in recent months said they have been struck by changes in his demeanor.
One White House official said he noticed Biden had aged significantly over the past year during a meeting this spring when he found it difficult to hear and understand the president. In another meeting, a senior aide was telling Biden the order in which to call on people in an upcoming event. Biden was alert and engaged but jotted the names down slowly, the official recalled. “That took longer than one would expect,” the official said. “It wasn’t that his mind was trailing off. He was slowing down.”
While campaigning in 2020, Biden said he viewed himself as a “bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leaders. But after a string of legislative victories and a better-than-expected showing by Democrats in the 2022 midterms, Biden announced his intent to seek a second term.
Trump, who is 78 and prone to non sequiturs of his own, has also faced questions about his acuity, particularly as he has rambled incoherently at several recent public events. Still, polls show voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s. In a post-debate CBS News-YouGov poll, 72 percent of voters said they did not believe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, compared with 49 percent who said the same about Trump.
Biden’s age has been a frequent target of Republican attacks. They frequently take videos from public events — often with critical context missing — that make Biden appear confused and inept. White House aides have fiercely pushed back on any suggestion that Biden is too old to do the job, saying he aggressively asks questions in briefings and speech preps. They also point to his continued ability to work a rope line and talk about complicated policy matters on the fly.
Emmy Ruiz, the White House political director, recalled a meeting with Latino leaders that Biden held this spring that covered policy issues including housing, immigration and the border. She said Biden walked in with one card of notes, initially intending to simply drop by and say hello, and instead held a 45-minute unscripted policy meeting.
“He’s constantly pushing us,” Ruiz said in an interview. During speech preparation, she said, Biden often asks what people are expecting to hear from him and requests to speak with local politicians to better understand their constituents.
After a group of senators returned from the Middle East after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, they went to the White House one evening to brief the president for a meeting they expected to last 30 minutes, said Jonathan Kott, an adviser to Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a key ally of the president.
“They had a detailed conversation about foreign policy for over two hours and thought he was sharp, alert and in command,” Kott said.
Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said she attended a recent meeting where she briefed Biden on the minutia of the administration’s health-care policy, a plan to lower the cost of inhalers and talked through how the Medicaid rebate program works. Biden asked detailed questions about the policy and its real-world impact, she said.
“My experience with the president is that he is demanding on facts and policy and wants to deliver for the American people so he asks tough questions,” Tanden said.
Mark Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family who spent a day with Biden at the White House in March, said he “doesn’t move around like an athletic 55- or 60-year-old.”
“But he had a lot of energy. He was telling jokes and showing off the White House and was completely fine,” Shriver said.
Those who do not interact with Biden regularly, such as Democratic donors and foreign leaders, are often the ones who notice the change most acutely. Senior aides who interact with Biden regularly said they have not noticed stark changes.
And some of Biden’s lapses have taken place in public.
While addressing a crowd on the White House lawn during a commemoration of Juneteenth last month, Biden briefly became unintelligible, as he slurred his words before regaining his footing and completing his speech. At a White House meeting on reproductive health in January, Biden directed the crowd’s attention to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who the president said was “sitting” in the room — but it was actually Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The two Cabinet secretaries do not look alike; Mayorkas is bald, while Becerra has a full head of hair and wears glasses.
During an impromptu news conference in February, Biden referred to Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, the president of Egypt, as the president of Mexico. Biden had called the conference to try to allay concerns about his age and memory after special counsel Robert K. Hur determined that he should not be prosecuted for careless handling of classified documents, in part because a jury might conclude that he was a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden had a childhood stutter that aides say sometimes resurfaces. Experts say lifelong speaking challenges are separate from lapses of memory.
Since the debate, Democrats have expressed frustration that Biden has been slow to forcefully come out and show to voters he is up to the job. He held a rally in Raleigh, N.C., the day after the debate, reading scripted remarks from a teleprompter, where he was energetic and impassioned, briefly allaying some concerns. But many Democrats and White House allies were befuddled as to why Biden and his team had not quickly scheduled a television interview that would demonstrate that Biden could handle unscripted settings and added more events to his schedule this week.
Biden is now set to record an interview with ABC News on Friday and has a series of campaign events in Wisconsin on Friday and Philadelphia over the weekend. Next week, the president is expected to hold a solo news conference during the NATO summit being hosted in Washington. Biden and his senior team have said they understand that the president must demonstrate his fitness for office to salvage his candidacy.
Much of the anger inside the White House and on Capitol Hill has been directed at Biden’s closest aides, who have largely kept the president away from spontaneous and unscripted events, sparking suspicion among those who interact with him less often that his condition may be worse than aides have acknowledged.
Bates, the White House spokesman, noted that Biden has done interviews with major networks and speaks in more informal settings with reporters, such as when he is boarding Marine One at the White House.
Biden has traveled the country over the last couple months campaigning, but the vast majority of his events are carefully choreographed, with the president reading from a teleprompter — even for intimate fundraisers or brief remarks. He does few media interviews, and even when the president does hold news conferences, they are often with foreign leaders and limited to a small number of questions. (White House aides counter that the president holds plenty of unscripted interactions in photo lines and in impromptu meetings and drop-bys, and that teleprompters are standard for presidential events.)
Donors have complained that Biden’s team has barred them from asking questions even at small group events, unusual at high-dollar political fundraisers.
Biden’s aides also adjust his schedule to avoid overly taxing him. During a private meeting with Democratic governors at the White House on Wednesday evening, Biden said that he needs to get more sleep and had instructed staff to avoid scheduling events for him after 8 p.m., a person familiar with his comments said.
Two former and one current White House official said most high-priority meetings and key events are scheduled midday, when aides believe Biden is at his best. They also said that White House schedulers keep meetings with the president as small as possible, particularly compared with prior administrations — a sharp departure from Biden’s earlier White House stint as vice president, when the garrulous politician loved to be at the center of large gatherings. Biden also sometimes wears tennis shoes and uses a shorter series of steps to Air Force One, to reduce the chances he might trip.
One veteran leader who has met Biden several times over the years said they were surprised by how much older Biden appeared when they saw him on May 27 for a Memorial Day breakfast in the East Room of the White House that was attended by a few hundred grieving military family members, veterans service organizations and administration officials.
While there were no “red flags” in Biden’s brief remarks at the event, the veteran leader said, the president had “noticeably aged a lot” since the previous Memorial Day weekend, noting his gait and physical demeanor, when he also greeted guests and took photographs.
At the White House nine days before the debate, four people who were present said they worried about the president’s fitness after observing him at a celebratory gathering to announce a new policy to help immigrants.
Under the sparkling chandeliers in the East Room on June 18, the president seemed off. He appeared frail as he navigated to the stage before the packed crowd of more than 100 people. He sometimes mumbled. In one jarring moment, he appeared to freeze while introducing Mayorkas, and then waved it off as a joke. A White House aide said the difficulty with Mayorkas’s name in that moment stemmed from Biden’s stutter.
Aides reportedly said it was Biden being Biden.
But others at the event said lawmakers and other attendees whispered concerns about Biden’s fitness over iced tea at the White House afterward, as a mariachi band played.
“Everyone talked about it with each other,” said a former Biden administration official who attended the event. “We were all like ‘That was horrible. We’re going to lose the election.’”
An advocate who was in the room recalled saying to others after the event, “he’s not going to make it four more years,” adding “he’s walking like an old man.”
“I was in shock,” the person said. “It was like I was seeing something nobody else was seeing. … It was so obvious to me.”
Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who also attended the event, came away with a different impression. She said Biden seemed sharp, empathetic and capable of leading at the June 18 event.
Barragan said Biden at previous events has sometimes asked for her hand to help him descend from a stage. But she said she had confidence in his ability to be president.
“Joe may not walk the same. He might be stiffer,” she said. “I don’t think that goes to his inability to be president of the United States.”
But the former Biden official was struck by the moments the president seemed less like himself and worried about what it would mean about his ability to take on Trump.
The former official came away from the event thinking to themselves: “I don’t know how that man’s going to debate next week.”
Again, I'm not saying there are no problems. I am saying I'm pretty fuckin' sick and tired of Press Poodles taking the word of anonymous sources, and then reporting it as if it was Gospel, and keeping me blind with no way to check it for myself.
If it's real, then show me. And as far as the observers making comments that border on diagnostics - let's look at where those folks took their clinical training.
Finally: Biden has always gotten himself off onto tangents. Maybe what we're seeing now as "glitches" are just Biden trying to self-discipline.
The big problem with going toe-to-toe with Trump is that the lies are so thick that you have to resist the natural reflex of trying to rebut everything in the Standard Trump Gish Gallop, and stay focused on the main point.
For a guy having to deal with that stutter, if his handlers aren't prepping him properly, he's going to come off as confused - and that perceived confusion is almost sure to be interpreted as "old and fuzzy-headed and not up to it" by Press Poodles looking to drive clicks and revenue from as wide an audience as possible, with no regard for reality-based consequences.
