Handwringing over Biden's age has Democrats worried about a repeat of Ruth Bader Ginsberg's refusal to step down
Handwringing over Biden's age has Democrats worried about a repeat of Ruth Bader Ginsberg's refusal to step down
This logic destroys my fucking brain cells.
And trump/republicans would???!? What a fucking joke of an article to push lmao.
A reminder trump is a few years younger than Biden. Not by much.
If Trump drops dead from being old, bully for us. If Biden drops dead but Trump doesn't we are fucked. That is the issue and risk. That is why we want a younger candidate. Why take the risk when you can avoid i?
Why?
Because Biden is still the person with the best odds to defeat Trump in an election.
That's really all there is to it.
This doesn't make any sense to me. If Biden dies and Trump doesn't then we will still have the VP. By the time the next election rolls around, assuming Trump loses, Trump will have already faded into obscurity.
I also want this, but it will not fucking happen this year. Both sides don’t play fair, just look at what they did to Bernie Sanders when he was fucking running.
Personally I was a fan of Yang too, but as far as I can tell, this machine seems to only have 2 gears. You can’t expect to try and hot swap one of those out without getting your fingers punched.
Local elections were always more effective, I think everyone could probably agree with that
Except there is a line of succession for president, whereas trump got to pick RBG'S successor.
Republicans have entered the chat and proceed to make up reasons why the line of succession doesn't apply.
Look, my ONLY goal is to have D’s in leadership
DAE read this as dicks in leadership?
I assume the office attracts plenty of dicks.
Generally, people who seek power should NOT have it.
Oh, they were in your face with it:
Clyburn calls for Democrats to 'shut this primary down' if Biden has big night
Oh we definitely remember.
I really wonder how much of this “Biden old” talk is just GOP propaganda.
It might be a "broken clock is right twice a day" situation.
Jon Stewart's glorious return to The Daily Show covered this very topic.
Liberals have the right to question our leadership. It's okay for us to wonder if the president has the ability to make good decisions.
The problem is that conservatives won't hear the same questions for their candidate.
Is it propaganda if it's true? 80 is old as fuck.
Name one other industry or company who would hire an 80 year old. Not saying he can't do the job, just saying 80 is fucking old to still be working and it's a valid concern.
Is it propaganda if it's true?
Yes. Propaganda is just promoting a certain ideology over another. That classification has nothing to do with truthfulness or even the virtues of the ideology it is used to promote.
I had literally never seen this dumbass RBG comparison until a day or so ago. Suddenly, in the past few days, I've seen multiple people use RBG as an argument against Biden.
This is absolutely astroturfing.
Yeah, I'm confused about this take. RBG should have stepped down because by not doing it she created the opportunity for Trump to tilt the majorities in the Supreme Court. Notably, nobody had the balls to criticise her for it, even after she died and made that exact thing happen.
If Biden dies in office Trump doesn't get to pick the vice president. And somehow he still gets constant crap despite the other guy being just as old.
We're doing "but her emails" again. I thought we weren't gonna do "but her emails" again.
I have a feeling that if Biden dies in office, suddenly there will be this concern whether Harris was born in Kenya and can't be president and the Speaker of the House should be elevated instead (assuming the GOP maintain their leadership).
I think a lot of the "concern" over Biden's age is really because they're terrified of a black woman getting the presidency. They hate her more than they hate him.
Well, they can be concerned all they want, but ultimately things work how they work. So no, that scenario is complete fiction and there is no valid equivalence between a Supreme Court Justice and a President in terms of succession.
If the president dies in office, the constitution requires the vice president to become president. It doesn't matter if anyone has concerns, there is no mechanism to prevent the VP from taking over.
I think she was trying to wait out Trump before stepping down. And even if she stepped down before Trump took office the GOP would've tied that seat up, Obama couldn't even his pick in with a year left till election.
Biden is probably in a similar boat.
That's why she should have stepped down much sooner. Had she done it on the first year of Obama it wouldn't have been feasible to delay for that long. And yet you heard the mildest possible suggestion that this was the case before she died and barely anything at all after.
So why go so hard with Biden when the other guy isn't even four years younger and was already in a questionable mental state before he ran?
Because her emails.
You know what pisses me off the most? When all is said and done and democracy is a vague memory among the cave-dwellers, we'll all have to admit that the stupid combover and the orange spray actually worked. Dumb orangutan guy managed to hold the fiction that he's not decrepit by spray painting himself and shouting past his brainfarts, and it's actually gonna get him the election, with the cooperation of tons of well meaning "just asking valid questions".
We're doing "but her emails" again. I thought we weren't gonna do "but her emails" again.
Your making it sound like that strategy was a mistake and not intentional.
It's intentional from the Republicans, and that's fair.
It's the amount of slack and the "just asking questions" and the "it's reasonable criticism" from the centre and the far left that is the problem. Trump is running after having judges confirm that he raped a woman, committed fraud and tried to commit a coup, and the entire party and their base rallies around him against all evidence.
Biden is old and Clinton was moderately technically clumsy and the dem base is out there going "huh, maybe you make some fine points, actual fascists".
It is infuriating. It'd be funny if it weren't terrifying.
I'm not sure what "mistake" Biden could be repeating here. If he dies in office, Harris becomes President.
If they want to argue that if he dies before the election that leaves the Democrats with no clear candidate which would lead to a Trump win they need to be more clear about that.
Harris, undoubtably, would see herself as the candidate as the sitting President, which makes sense, see Johnson - 1964, but her unpopularity even among her own staff would make her unelectable.
But that's not a Biden problem and that's not the same mistake Ginsberg made.
My only real concern is if he dies after getting on the ballot, but before January 20th. We need him in a plastic bubble those months.
There's a fantastic novel on the topic called "The People's Choice" by Jeff Greenfield of all people.
Here's the scenario:
Election happens, winner dies, but he dies before the electoral certification.
VP thinks he's the candidate, but he isn't.
The 2nd place finisher argues he should be President as the next largest vote getter.
Faithless electors then decide who becomes President.
I'm not sure I understand your comment, if him and Harris win the election then she would still become president if he dies in The intervening time between then and January 20th. They would have voted for her on the ballot that's how the election works.
Manufactured outrage. It’s not like he could legally do another term after he’s elected in ‘24.
He’s extremely competent, ethical, and experienced.
Genocide Joe is the most ethical president the US had in a while.
Edit: to all the people trying to paint him as being in the "hot seat" (wtf lol), he wanted and worked towards this for a long time now
Decades of presidents on both sides of the aisle have supported and sent arms to Israel.
It’s unfortunate (for everyone, especially the poor Palestinians) that Netenyahu is such a fucking creep and sleazeball that he manufactured this whole thing to distract from his deep shittiness. Biden happened to be the guy in the hot seat.
Genocide is an american problem, not a presidential one lmao.
The sad part is that’s probably true. Before that was Trump, Dronebama, and Bush - all four of them continued to support Israel so that’s a moot point when comparing them.
That's not how the presidency works? If he dies, the Senate can't hold the presidency open until they place a Republican in there. Kamala Harris just steps into the position.
But then again, this is Business Insider.
RBG was a Supreme Court Justice with a lifetime appointment.
The comparison literally doesn't make sense on any level whatsoever.
So we’d get president Harris. What’s the issue?
Normally I would not like that outcome, but considering that the alternative is a man who thinks “indictment” starts with the letter N, I can stomach it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Even some expected to be in Biden's corner — from liberal comedian Jon Stewart to progressive journalist Ezra Klein — have publicly worried the incumbent president will be unable to maintain the energy needed to face off against Donald Trump in this year's election.
Instead, Ginsburg, who had a long history of health problems, including multiple bouts with cancer, died in 2020, allowing Trump to nominate a third justice — Amy Coney Barrett — which solidified the conservative court majority and led to the rollback of abortion and voting rights across the country.
On the campaign trail, Clinton indicated she'd fill Supreme Court vacancies with justices who supported women's rights, as well as LGBTQ+ issues, and would defend Roe v. Wade, CNBC reported at the time.
Gavin Newsom — have other hurdles to overcome: Harris is widely regarded as "unlikeable" (a criticism often levied against female politicians, The Washington Post noted years ago).
"The only time that an incumbent president stepped down rather than running for reelection in the modern era was Lyndon Johnson and there is no evidence that that helped Hubert Humphrey, who eventually lost to Richard Nixon anyway," Buchler said.
"It's worth noting that Trump is roughly the same age as Biden, and his verbal missteps more egregious," Peter Loge, the founding director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication, told BI.
The original article contains 1,491 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 85%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
No, I don’t ever remember that. I remember Bernie calling “conspiracy” when Warren dropped out, because he knew he would never defeat Biden in a fair 1:1 fight. He needed Warren to split the vote. This is also the reason Harris dropped out. Harris and Biden were going to take the same votes.
Biden and Harris are better politicians, because they actually know how to play.
I remember Bernie calling “conspiracy” when Warren dropped out
Got a source for that?
You mean the conspiracies that she was staying in to split the left vote and help Biden? What are you on about, this is the opposite of what happened. Do you not remember the snakes thing to try and get her to drop so Bernie could pick up her supporters?
What. The. Fuck.
Jon Stewart is in Biden's corner, he's just being honest that age is a concern. If you watch his segment you'd see he dropped a big steaming dump on Trump.
And, as an aside, to avoid having your candidate critiqued for their age just fucking run a different candidate.
People are extremely bad at understanding what Jon said. It fucking sucks. Sorry, Democrats, you're not going to win over voters by demanding they pretend your stinky candidates don't stink. That's not how this works.
This is what bugs me the most, their instinct is to get worried not to you know, do something because they are the ones behind the wheel…
Stuff like this convinced me that democrats are not interested to do anything but show that they are following “the correct process”, results be damned.
You’d think in an election where they claim “democracy is on the line,” correct process would include a fully fledged primary election, with debates, campaigning on a strong platform from which to lead, etc.
Stuff like this convinced me DNC is just controlled opposition, and from that perspective results have been spectacular.
They're confused that Democrats are capable of criticizing their own while still supporting them unlike the right wing cult.
Honestly, good fucking point. I never thought about how infantilizing this bullshit is.
Yeah, well, welcome to why you don't talk shit about your candidate during a campaign. Your nuanced point is going to get flattened down to "even his allies are criticising him". Weirdly, this exact quote dismantles his entire monologue there.
The best joke in that entire thing was Klepper accusing him of bothsiderism and asking whether he had saved democracy yet. Because it was poignant. Lampshading it is funny, but it doesn't change the outcome.
Well, second best joke, the best was Ronnie Chieng going to town on potato skins, but that's neither here not there.
I don't think it's fair to say Stewart shouldn't critique Biden during a campaign just because dishonest talking heads will spin it to their advantage. Someone has to be willing to give an earnest and nuanced take that doesn't ignore valid criticisms of their own side. That's having integrity. And we need more of it, not less.
If Stewart had ignored all the criticisms of Biden during the show, the talking heads would have just spun some other show's takes like they always do. They're gonna do it regardless of how honest Stewart is cause that's their job.
Having allies doesn't mean you're immune from criticism. The entire concept is dumb.