Letting Go Is The Hardest Part

Will The President Heed Calls to Step Down? My Analysis.

I watched the debate Thursday night. Every excruciating minute of it. And at the end I shut down the computer (I don’t own a TV), and drove to an open-mic in South Pasadena that I frequent. I expected that it would be lightly attended. That most of the regulars would have stayed home. Instead, it was a full house.

I walked in to a very warm scene. A friend was onstage and he was singing a song about accepting one another across the political divide. He finished to rousing applause. And to a personal thanks from the owner of the venue for his efforts to lessen the divisions cutting our country in two.

Needless to say, I was delighted. I’ve now been carrying the post-partisan torch consistently for 3 years. Making the case as best I can, that partisanship itself is preventing us from seeing our differing natural tendencies as the opportunity for greater perspective in how we should take on the future.

I sang a couple of songs, and had a few good conversations. And did not mention the debate to anybody. Nor did anybody mention it to me.

When I got home, I had a snack, and made a cup of decaf and posted this to my Facebook page. It was 10:50pm.

Then I scrolled around Netflix for something dull to put me to sleep and finished off my cup of defanged coffee. Just after midnight I went back over to Facebook and to the color-block statement I’d left an hour earlier. Nobody had left a comment or reacted in any way. So I left the following comment myself before I closed the laptop and nodded off:

”If he was to step down and help to locate and prep a suitable replacement, he'd always be remembered as a guy who did his best late in life to be the 'transitional president' he promised to be in 2020. A patriot who lived up to the meaning of 'civil servant' in an age of grifters and show-boats. That is the legacy available to him if he's humble enough to accept it.”

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The next morning I looked at the headlines and found that I wasn’t alone in thinking that Biden had finally proved that he was no longer up for the job. Though I myself am not a Democrat, I was interested in seeing how highly placed voices on The Left had reacted to Joe’s performance.

The first thing I saw was a column written by Thomas Friedman, a personal friend of Joe Biden.

”I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, he should preserve his dignity and leave the stage at the end of this term.

”If he does, everyday Americans will hail Joe Biden for doing what Donald Trump would never do: put the country before himself.

“If he insists on running and he loses to Trump, Biden and his family — and his staff and party members who enabled him — will not be able to show their faces.

They deserve better. America needs better. The world needs better.”

It wasn’t long before a real consensus on The Left seemed to appear. Even the magpies at The View managed to agree that Joe needs to go.

And by late afternoon, the editorial board of The New York Times had offered it’s decision.

”The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.

“It is the best chance to protect the soul of the nation — the cause that drew Mr. Biden to run for the presidency in 2019 — from the malign warping of Mr. Trump. And it is the best service that Mr. Biden can provide to a country that he has nobly served for so long.”

I didn’t vote for Biden in 2020, and I’ve made it clear for months that I wouldn’t vote for either party’s candidate, come November. But I seem to have reached exactly the same conclusion on the issue as did those who have defended Joe every step of the way and are more consumed than ever with hatred and fear of Donald Trump.

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Friday morning, I got sucked into a Facebook thread on a post made by a female singer-songwriter friend who is moderate in all things except for her deeply held disgust for the 45th president. She’d posted this during the debate.

”This is Unbelievable…. Biden is overly qualified to be our leader…. And all these lies! The LIAR! Turn Joe Biden’s mic UP!!!!!”

She thought that Biden’s microphone was the problem? That Joe Biden is actually over-qualified to lead the greatest nation on Earth?

I tried to reason with her and her friends. To convince them that for their own best outcome, they needed to move on to a candidate with some chance of actually beating the Orange Devil who haunts their dreams.

Another popular Los Angeles performer on that thread told me this:

”Dave Morrison … I don’t see Biden with diminished or diminishing capacity. He had a bad hour and a half not a bad 3 1/2 year term.”

Really, Jodi? Not diminished? This is not a stupid woman. With as much kindness and respect as I could muster, I asked that she take a look at the following clip of Joe Biden at age 50 in the spin room after the presidential debate between George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot … and compare it to the current version of the same man.

I didn’t get a response.

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Friday evening I attended a concert. Outdoors on the wrap-around deck of an A-frame house in Kagel Canyon. A house where I lived for three months in late 2014. The owner and I had later fallen out because I’d defended Trump voters against a song of his that attacked them as idiots. For years I’d not felt welcome in his home. But I’d been invited to this concert and I went.

I was welcomed as warmly as everybody else. Five musicians performed in two groups. I doubt that any of them is a Donald Trump fan. None of them mentioned the previous evening’s debate. It was a gorgeous warm evening full of beautiful music under an infinite sky.

And the next night - Saturday night - I journeyed with Alexia to another outdoor concert. This one in the west San Fernando Valley. There were well over a hundred people there to see a group featuring venerable performer Joe Chambers of The Chambers Brothers. And another band as well … one of L.A.’s best and most loved.

All in all there were ELEVEN performers onstage. Two and a half hours of music and storytelling and laughter and dancing. Another couple of hours of socializing and conversation and pot-luck feasting. Wine and beer were moderately consumed.

The crowd must have been at least 80% Democrat. I didn’t hear one single mention of the debate or of either candidate.

And this morning, Sunday June 30, it seems as if the nearly unanimous calls for their guy to step down have gone a bit quiet.

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I’m no stranger to the human capacity for denial. I’ve been in situations many times that would have terrified anybody thinking clearly. But I was blissfully blind to the dangers I had put myself in. Even now I’m known to procrastinate so expertly that I probably spend five hundred dollars a year on late charges.

I’ll often just put things out of my mind and focus on something else, while problems go unsolved.

Some years ago, science writer Michael Specter wrote a book explaining what he calls denialism. This is when “an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie”.

I’ve seen so much ‘denialism’ in our politics that I can’t, in good conscience, belong to either party. Policies continue for decades that have never worked and won’t ever work. Narratives about everything from stolen elections to basic human sexuality are cooked up and adopted so fully that doubters are publicly shamed.

I joked with a friend Friday night about an old riff by Alan Watts. That the human memory is nothing compared to the much more powerful ‘human forgettery’. The human capacity to pick and choose what we’ll remember, and what we’ll miss entirely.

We weren’t commenting on Joe Biden’s declining faculties, but we might as well have been. Not just his own forgettery, but the denialism surrounding him.

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What will happen now? I don’t know. An awful lot of well-known Democrats have publicly called for the president to withdraw from the race. They have staked their reputations on a shared opinion that Joe Biden cannot defeat Donald Trump. But most all of them agree that unless Joe Biden himself releases his delegates, he will become the nominee at the convention in August.

It’s hard for me to imagine Joe trading a guaranteed nomination, for what he must see as ‘giving up’. The man strikes me as arrogant and stubborn. He's been working his way up the political ladder since he was in his twenties. He ran for president in 1988, and again in 2008. Then he grudgingly took a backseat to a handsome articulate rookie for eight years, on the assumption that he’d finally win the Oval Office in 2016.

By all accounts, Joe Biden really really likes being President of the United States. He’s proud of his record, and he undoubtedly thinks that, even with age nipping at his synapses, he’s still the country’s best bet to send Trump packing.

Bottom line? He won’t go without a fight.

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There are two people on my Facebook feed who are absolutely obsessed with Donald Trump. Consumed with hatred puts it mildly. In wrapping up this morning’s musings I looked at each of their pages to see what they were thinking. Ginny seems to have spent virtually every waking moment since Thursday searching the internet, to repost amateurish memes that disqualify Trump from a debate win, because he’s a big fat lying liar.

Carl, on the other hand, is a somewhat more intelligent person. And his Facebook page has been stone silent since the debate.

The singer-songwriter whose thread I got bogged down in? She’s been largely quiet too, except for reports of how well Joe did at his rally in Raleigh Friday, where he read from the teleprompter with good energy. She’s doubled down a little more on her belief that ‘a cold’ caused Joe’s Thursday lapses, and otherwise has been quiet.

Jodi, who’d asserted so strongly that she sees no decline at all in Joe Biden … has been as silent as Carl.

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All day Friday, I had the sense that the previous night’s debate had been an historic moment. I heard the same thing from several of the Democratic pundits who called for Joe’s withdrawal during that day. It just felt like something had happened, that could never be forgotten, because it’s long-term effects would be so clearly visible.

At that point I was assuming that those long-term repercussions would spring forth from a party’s determination to halt a candidacy in its tracks. That the actions begun with the press-consensus we all witnessed, would speak of courage in the clutch and the ability of an enormous political group to admit its miscalculations and reset its course.

That, as the NYT editorial board wrote, Democrats would “… acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr. Trump in November.”

I thought that Democrats creating such a process would qualify as historically important. Of course, with their phrasing, the Times editors were also telling us that no such process currently exists.

By Sunday morning, with the DNC still voicing support for Biden, and his big-donor fundraiser in The Hamptons having gone off as planned, I’ve changed my mind. Oh I still think that I witnessed an historic moment when watching that CNN debate. But now I think it more likely that the repercussions will spring from a political party’s lethargy and indecision.

And not just since Thursday’s debate. How long ago was it that we first knew Trump was leading in the swing states? How long has it been common knowledge that Biden’s lead with minorities and young voters was leaking away?

Now it appears that the events that will establish this debate as a hinge of history, will transpire during Donald Trump’s second term in office.

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From my perspective at noon Sunday in California, it looks like all of the public hand-wringing by left-leaning journalists over the past couple of days wasn’t so much a sincere attempt to dislodge Joe Biden, as it was a going-on-the-record move intended to cover their own ink-stained butts.

If Trump’s momentum holds, and Joe goes down in flames on November 5, a whole lot of liberal pundits can now say, “Hey … don’t look at me! I begged Joe Biden to leave the race!”

Yeah. That’s what my gut tells me today.

Thanks for reading, -Dave