Saturday, September 16, 2023
In bed at 9, up at 6:47. Let Lilly out. 60°, high of 72°, cloudy all day, AQI=48, wind Sw at 7 mph, 4-8/14, some rain expected. The sun rose 15 minutes before I did, at 6:32 and will set at 7:00, 12+27 of daylight.
Like Romans in the Coliseum. JSOnline is reporting that on Monday we will learn of a bipartisan proposal from the state legislature for a $600,000,000 plan for renovatins to the Brewers ballpark. The financing would come from state, county, and city funds as well as from a contribution by the Brewers ownership. The proposal contemplates an extension of the Brewers' lease until 2050. The field opened in 2001 and I think of it as "new," like I thought of the Bucks' Bradley Center home on 6th Street "new" when, built in 1988 to replace the Milwaukee Arena, it was demolished in 2018, replaced by the Fiserv Forum.
More on Biden from Maureen Dowd in this morning's NYT.
I’ve covered Biden for 35 years. He has always been a babble merchant, prone to exaggeration and telling stories too good to be true, saying inexplicably wacky things. It was often cleanup on Aisle Biden. So when he acts like this now, it shouldn’t be attributed just to aging. Certainly, he has slowed down. But his staff has exacerbated the problem by trying too hard to keep him in check. Americans know who Uncle Joe is, quirks and all, slower and all. Let them decide.
The president’s feelings were no doubt hurt the other day by The Washington Post column by David Ignatius, a charter member of the capital’s liberal elite, saying that Biden should be proud of “the string of wins” from his first term but not run for re-election because he “risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.”
I don’t disagree, but I doubt it will make a difference.
David Ignatius and Maureen Dowd, two big Washington libs, and 3/4th of the American public including a solid majority of Democrats, tell Biden to stand aside and let some other Democrat take on Trump. Biden refuses. What does this tell us about "Uncle Joe"?
Then there was Ross Douthat in this morning's paper:
Biden got elected, in part, by casting himself as a transitional figure, a bridge to a more youthful and optimistic future. Now he needs some general belief in that brighter future to help carry him to re-election.
But wherever Americans might find such optimism, we are probably well past the point that a decrepit-seeming president can hope to generate it himself. (My underscoring)
How long will the country be victimized by geriatric hostage-taking?
Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:
How could anyone dislike that affable, empathetic, personal-tragedy-enduring, great-smile-flashing Uncle Joe? Let me count the ways. I am reminded of the most neglected sentence of Lord Acton's famous letter in which he wrote about power tending to corrupt; that sentence is "Great men are almost always bad men." We find it hard to think of Joe Biden as a "great man," but he is the nominal 'leader of the free world,' and the chief executive of the world's wealthiest and (in some ways) most powerful country. So I include him within Lord Acton's taxonomy of great men and thus a bad man, driven by a lust for power, fame, adulation, and the good (expensive) things in life, like mansions and Corvettes.But an exchange this week on “Morning Joe,” between Ignatius and the show’s co-host Joe Scarborough, captured the genuine concern that’s been bubbling up about the President’s standing. Scarborough told Ignatius that, in “every political discussion” he’s been having lately, when the subject of Biden running again comes up, “People say, ‘Man, he’s too old to run.’ ” And, Scarborough added, “When I say every discussion, I don’t mean ninety-nine per cent of the discussions. Every discussion.” This certainly has been my experience, as well. And, unfortunately for the White House, the anecdata are confirmed by actual data: in independent public polls lately, it’s not just fervently anti-Biden Republicans but even as many as two-thirds of Democrats who say that they consider Biden too old to serve a second term.
It seems to me that respondents are saying this not because they want Trump to win but because they want him to lose—and aren’t convinced that Biden can make that happen. Filing deadlines for the 2024 primaries are coming up soon, starting with Nevada’s in mid-October. If Biden were to drop out, he would have to do it very, very soon; the final moment of decision is at hand. It’s still not inevitable, but the Biden-Trump rematch that America seems to be dreading is very close to assured. ♦ (My underscoring)
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