OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST MAR-A-LAGO:
To be fair Kilgore, a former vice president for policy at the Democratic Leadership Council, didn’t buy into Joe Scarborough’s Soviet-level “Best Biden Ever” rant, but he did sound like Biden was probably fine for another four years. In February of last year, he wrote, “An Old Guy’s Defense of Our Old-Guy President:”
Like Joe Biden, I got my dream job at a stage of life when most folks are planning or entering retirement. After writing hundreds of thousands of words for politicians and organizations without getting much credit for it, I became a rather geriatric blogger and then a political writer for New York Magazine and blew right by the age at which I could have packed it all in. Best I can tell, I still produce more words — though perhaps not higher-quality words — than my whippersnapper colleagues. So I am naturally sympathetic to the president’s desire to stay in the saddle as long as he can, and naturally hostile to partisan efforts to depict Biden as senile or incompetent, particularly when the beneficiary of undermining confidence in his abilities is Donald Trump.
The day before the now infamous debate in June, he asked, “Could the Biden-Trump Debate Actually Be a Game Changer?” before tut-tutting, nahh, probably not:
Political scientists have long concluded that debates rarely have a big and enduring impact in the general election. They are much more significant during presidential primaries, particularly when there is no incumbent or clear front-runner. To the limited extent that general-election debates matter, they tend to be the initial debates between the two contenders, where viewership is high and familiarity with the candidates is relatively low.
Even though the June 27 debate is the initial encounter of this cycle, it’s not like a Biden-Trump debate is any sort of novelty; they met twice in 2020 and are the ultimate known quantities. Back in 2020, most observers thought Biden easily won the first debate over a blustery Trump, while the second debate was more of a standoff. But it’s hard to say either debate really mattered when voters voted. And barring some calamitous misstep by one of the candidates, it’s hard to envision this one mattering much either.
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Unfortunately for both campaigns, the 2024 presidential election looks like a grim and remorseless battle between two large and immovable electoral blocs with murky turnout patterns ultimately mattering as much as the decisions of largely unhappy swing voters. That doesn’t mean the June 27 debate isn’t worth watching for those who are civic-minded enough to feel some obligation to tune in. But no one should count on knowing the country’s fate on June 28.
Which seems fair in retrospect — the (p)resident’s self-styled “Politburo” kept the nation in the dark for another three weeks before it determined his fate, a month after their news apparatuses issued any talk of Biden’s age and ailments as “cheap fakes.”