14 Million People Watched The Debate Thursday-- Enough To Lower Biden's Irrational Standing In The Polls?

Right after the Thursday night ABC News debate ended, CNN.com published a column by their in-house pundit Chris Cillizza asserting that Biden was a winner and Elizabeth Warren a loser. Many decades ago I was managing local San Francisco bands. One of them was The Readymades and I had booked them an opening slot for a big touring band-- maybe Roxy Music?-- at a bigger venue than they usually played. I was disappointed when the top critics in town for the big newspaper didn't show up. However, towards the end of the headliner's show he made his entrance and came right over to me and asked me how the show had gone. I told him how great my band was-- a somewhat biased report-- and how the two bands were a perfect match. That review appeared in the newspaper the next day. I can't imagine that Cillizza actually watched the debate and came away with the idea that Biden did better than Warren; I wonder if it was Biden's campaign manager told him that was the case.

The following morning Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent did a more thought-provoking piece on the debate, Think Castro Was 'Mean' To Biden? Get Ready For An Absolute Bloodbath. "Biden's Democratic rivals," he wrote, "have now begun to raise questions about his age and mental competence. But they are doing so ever so gingerly, and even apologetically. President Trump is not being nearly as cautious or circumspect. In that contrast resides something that deserves more attention about the Biden age issue. The question isn’t merely whether Biden has the stamina for a grueling campaign, or whether Biden will be able to handle debates with Trump. It’s also whether Biden or indeed other Democrats are prepared for the massive onslaught of absolutely brutal and distortive attacks that Trump and his propaganda apparatus will wage on this particular front-- attacks that you can be certain will include all sorts of shamelessly propagandistic media manipulation and outright disinformation tactics."

James Hohmann also covered the Castro attack on Biden: "Castro follows in the footsteps of Eric Swalwell, who ripped into Biden and told him to 'pass the torch' during the first debate only to get nowhere. The California congressman dropped out days later. Castro certainly won’t. This isn’t fatal. But the exchange illustrated Biden’s underappreciated strengths. While he’s widely perceived as having a tenuous lead in the early polls, Biden’s support has thus far proven remarkably durable. At the same time, however, Castro broached an issue that is of genuine concern among many Democratic leaders and may have foreshadowed what’s to come as the field winnows and lower-performing candidates become desperate to break through.”

As the Boston Herald reported this week, "Biden has lost his lead in New Hampshire with U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders jumping ahead in what is now clearly a three-person race for the Democratic primary, a new Franklin Pierce University-Boston Herald poll shows. Sanders tops the poll at 29% of likely Democratic primary voters. Biden comes in second with 21% of the vote and Massachusetts U.S. Sen Elizabeth Warren is third in the poll with 17%.

And it isn't just New Hampshire Where Biden Is No Longer "Frontrunner"

And that was before Biden flopped Thursday night. Politico's John Harris: "Biden’s previous uneven performances didn’t dislodge him atop the race, and so caution is justified in predicting bleeding wounds from this one. Even so, discursive answers on substantive issues like deportation of undocumented immigrants and Afghanistan, an oddly dated reference to a 'record player,' disrespectful digs and patronizing swipes from rivals, all raise the question: Can he withstand four more months of this before actual Democratic voting begins?”

Eric Levitz asked the question all Democratic primary voters need to ask themselves: Would You Leave Joe Biden Alone With Trump? Levitz's 3 main takeaways from the debate that Cillizza thought Biden won: "The Democratic front-runner cannot speak in complete sentences when he is feeling tired or defensive. And 90 minutes of debate is enough to make him tired. And a reference to something that he said about race in the 1970s is enough to make him defensive." They left him feeling "rather apprehensive about the prospect of the Democrats sending Joe Biden into battle against Donald Trump next year. A three-hour debate can be tiring. But a 14-month campaign would seem considerably more so. If Biden can’t keep his talking points straight for an entire evening, what shape will he be in after running the gauntlet between today and his televised showdowns with the president next fall? And if a pointed question from an ABC News anchor can reduce him to spasms of anxious blather, how well will he hold up when Trump comes after his family? ...To my eyes, the following exchange between Biden and ABC News’ Linsey Davis on the question of our collective responsibility for slavery reads like dialogue from an obscure Beckett play-- but to an objective observer, perhaps this reads as a thoughtful, cogent answer from a man manifestly equipped to be the next president of the United States:"

Linsey Davis: Mr. Vice-President, I want to talk to you about inequality in schools and race. In a conversation about how to deal with segregation in schools back in 1975, you told a reporter “I don’t feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation, and I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.” You said that some 40 years ago, but as you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?

Joe Biden: Well, they have to deal with the … Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining, banks, making sure that we are in a position where-- Look, we talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal of … A raise of getting out of the $60,000 level.


Number two, make sure that we bring in to the help with the stud-- the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we need … We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are required-- I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them.

Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have three, four, and five-year-olds go to school. School! Not daycare, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not want they don’t want to help. They don’t know want-- They don’t know what quite what to do. Play the radio. Make sure the television-- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night. The phone-- make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school-- er, a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.

Davis: Thank you, Mr. Vice-President.

Biden: No, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay? Because here’s the deal. The deal is that we’ve got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million to see to it those three countries, in fact, change their system so people don’t have to chance to leave. You’re all acting like we just discovered this yesterday! Thank you very much.

This is what President Obama had in mind when he warned Biden to think long and hard before running and embarrassing himself and his family. Levitz wrote that nominating Biden is "a needlessly risky bet to make, given the party’s myriad other options. Polling continues to indicate that, contrary to conventional pundit wisdom, Bernie Sanders is a formidable general-election candidate. Elizabeth Warren’s favorability has steadily increased throughout the duration of her campaign, as has her standing against Trump in the polls. But if you are more moderate in your ideological sympathies, or nervous about nominating someone 'too progressive,' there are plenty of sharper centrists you can back. Cory Booker is a gifted orator. Amy Klobuchar is good at winning elections in the Midwest. Beto O’Rourke is tall. Before Thursday, none of Biden’s ideologically sympathetic competitors had dared to explicitly sell themselves as a more mentally 'with it' alternative to Uncle Joe. But after Julián Castro (clumsily) went there during the debate, Booker embraced the 'many people are saying Joe Biden’s lost a few steps' line of attack."

My one fear is that a Trump-Biden general election will hinge about which one is more senile and which one lies more. What could possibly discourage voters from bothering to turn out? Nielsen reported that the debate had 14 million viewers on ABC and Univision, beating everything else on TV. Millions more watched on their computers. I suspect that "Sleepy Joe" could never hold up against Trump. Tom McCarthy, reporting for The Guardian wrote that "while Castro’s attack on Biden might not have landed, the frontrunner repeatedly seemed to fumble the facts: he at one point mistakenly referred to Sanders as the president, he badly botched the name of the Moms Demand Action gun safety group and he said nonviolent offenders shouldn’t be in prison when he (apparently, aides later said) meant nonviolent drug offenders. When he got in trouble, Biden got punchier, and sometimes wilder, with an answer on education confusingly swerving into the previous topic, Venezuela and foreign policy.

Jacobin's Branko Marcetic wrote that we all know how these debates go: "moderators will drape a right-wing framing around their questions, almost everyone will attack Medicare for All, and Joe Biden will misrepresent his record." He conceded that Thursday night Biden's performance was "surprisingly nondisastrous... By clearing the extremely low bar of appearing coherent and not having any of his body parts malfunction on stage, Biden has already been awarded top marks for his performance, even declared the winner. But it’s important to remember that Biden’s performance rested on a patina of lies. Challenged by moderator Jorge Ramos on the distinctly Trumpian nature of the 'Obama-Biden' administration’s immigration policies, Biden dubbed the comparison 'outrageous.' 'We didn’t lock people up in cages,' he said. 'We didn’t separate families.' Both are untrue."

As fact-checkers quickly pointed out, Obama and Biden infamously did detain immigrants, including children, in cages. And while it’s true the administration didn’t make snatching children from migrants an official policy as Trump has, breaking families apart, sometimes permanently, was a cornerstone of the Obama-Biden approach to immigration, usually by arresting and simply disappearing the undocumented parents of US citizen children, but also, under the Alien Transfer and Exit Program, by separating families traveling together at the border, including minors. Pressed by Ramos for dodging the question, which asked if Biden and Obama had made a mistake by deporting as many people as they did, Biden was forced to re-endorse the policy, saying that Obama “did the best thing that was able to be done at the time.”

When the issues of mass incarceration and segregation came up, always fraught territory for Biden, the former vice president engaged in more rewriting of history. “I’ve been involved from the beginning,” he said about the fight for black civil rights, later repeating that “from the time I got involved, I started dealing with” institutional segregation.

This, too, is false. Biden was reviled by educators and the civil rights community for the Biden-Eagleton amendment, passed in 1977, which forbade what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to spend money on school busing. In 1980, the Education Commission of the States voted to declare the amendment the most “far-reaching” legislative roadblock to civil rights enforcement. On the 25th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1979, the Civil Rights Commission published a report that bitterly noted the lack of progress on desegregation and specifically criticized the law. The commission’s chairman charged it had “aided and abetted” anti-integrationist forces, called for its repeal, and labeled it “one of, if not the major civil rights issues confronting the country at this time.” Political scientist Stephen C. Halpern called it a “death knell” for the use of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s Title VI in education, and it ground desegregation efforts to a halt around the country, including in Chicago. Ironically, it had no effect on the court-ordered busing initiative in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, the ostensible reason he had crafted the amendment.

In the process, Biden staked out a position on desegregation that was far from liberal. He nonsensically claimed there was a “conceptual difference between desegregation and integration,” charged integration with being “racist and insulting” in some of its forms, and even said that integrating people “so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest” was a “rejection of the whole movement of black pride.” As he explained to the attendees of a fundraising dinner in 1975, the liberal idea that the United States owed its strength to its status as a “great melting pot” was “a bunch of poppycock because we know being black and white and Christian and Jew breaks us apart.” By the time Biden, who entered the Senate with a reputation as a civil rights advocate, ran for president in 1986, his hometown paper noted his major legislative accomplishment was arguably a tough-on-crime law he had authored with former segregationist Strom Thurmond.

With a history like this, it’s hardly surprising Biden would gloss over it.

Disappointing News For Señor Trumpanzee: Racist Presidents Are Not Eligible For Nobel Prizes

Trump grew up in a racist family. His father, who he has always emulated, was arrested as KKK street brawler and Trump was taught at an early age to discriminate against blacks and Latinos in their real estate business. "Throughout his public life," asserted the Washington Post [NOT FAKE NEWS] yesterday, "Trump has pitted one group of Americans against another and inserted himself in racial controversies… As he leads his party into the potentially perilous midterm election five months from now, Trump is trying to make cultural identity a central theme of the Republican pitch to voters. His messages have been amplified by his surrogates as well as by friendly broadcasters on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in the conservative media... Trump is calculating that by playing to people’s fears and anxieties he can maximize turnout among hard-core supporters to counterbalance evident enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Fueling Trump’s approach, advisers say, is an unremitting fear of his own: that his base could abandon him if he is deemed too weak on immigration, which was a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign."

I hope you took a look at our post yesterday on white evangelicals and racial anxiety. James Hohmann gave Post readers a comprehensive look at how Trump and Stephen Miller-- his in house neo-Nazi-- have outraged the county with their racist, xenophobic policies and how they have made a tactical retreat-- for now. "Young boys," he wrote, "who were forcibly taken away from their parents are waking up this morning at an old Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, that’s been converted into a shelter called Casa Padre. Painted on the wall is a mural of President Trump and a quote from The Art of the Deal, his 1987 book. 'Sometimes by losing a battle,' it reads, 'you find a new way to win the war.' Make no mistake: The executive order Trump signed Wednesday to end his own policy of separating families who are caught crossing the border illegally was a tactical retreat. It was not a surrender. The president’s war on immigration-- both illegal and legal-- rages on.

Trump made clear during a campaign-style rally last night in Minnesota that he hopes the order will let him shift the immigration debate back toward terrain he’s more confident he can win on. Speaking to 9,000 supporters at a hockey arena in Duluth, the president leaned into the us-against-them language that propelled his 2016 bid.

“I signed an executive order (so) we’re going to keep families together, but the border is going to be just as tough as it’s been,” Trump said. “Democrats don’t care about the impact of uncontrolled migration on your communities, your schools, your hospitals, your jobs or your safety. Democrats put illegal immigrants before American citizens. What the hell is going on?

“The media never talks about the American victims of illegal immigration,” he added. “What's happened to their children? What's happened to their husbands? What's happened to their wives? The media doesn't talk about American families permanently separated from their loved ones.”

As the crowd chanted “build that wall,” Trump attacked the caliber of Mexican immigrants to the United States: “They’re not sending their finest,” he said. “And we’re sending them the hell back!”

To wit, the Border Patrol says Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach will continue, which means any adult caught crossing the border will be prosecuted with a misdemeanor and families will now be held together in federal custody pending the trial. There’s a great deal of uncertainty among experts about whether this can pass legal muster, but immigrant advocates worry that Trump is laying the groundwork for indefinite detention.

“And senior administration officials said the order did not stipulate that the more than 2,300 children already separated from their parents would be immediately reunited with them … Top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their supervision, were unable to say when the families would be reunited,” David Nakamura, Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey report. “One senior DHS official acknowledged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has almost no ability to add detention capacity for families because its jails are already full. … The DHS official said ICE is not planning to put children in adult detention centers as prohibited under the 1997 court settlement in Flores v. Reno, which stipulated immigrant children must be placed in the least restricted environment possible while awaiting immigration court proceedings.”

Trump reiterated that Congress must come up with a solution. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen even told lawmakers during a private briefing that the family separations could resume if they fail to act.

...White House Counsel Donald McGahn pushed back internally when the president ordered an end to the separations yesterday morning, arguing that an order could not be written to comply with the existing legal limits on child detentions. “Many aides, though, including Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway, urged the president to end the separations. Eventually, after a number of meetings, ideas and drafts, McGahn said the final product could be legal,” David, Nick and Josh report.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has formally requested the Defense Department's help in prosecuting the surge of new immigration cases, and the Pentagon has agreed to deploy active-duty military officers to the border in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys. These judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, are being told to expect six-month tours of duty, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports.

ICE is also ramping up raids in the heartland: While we were watching the Southern border this week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 146 workers at a meatpacking plant in rural Ohio. It was one of the largest workplace raids carried out so far by the Trump administration. Agents lined up dozens of workers, in white helmets and smocks. Two weeks ago, ICE arrested 114 workers at a gardening company’s two Ohio locations. In April, the feds raided a meatpacking plant in rural Tennessee and arrested 97 immigrants. In January, ICE agents blitzed dozens of 7-Eleven stores-- but made only 21 arrests.

These raids, too, are tearing families apart. “One father said to me, ‘I feel like my heart is being pulled out.’ His wife was taken, and he has two children under the age of 2,” Sister Rene Weeks, director of the Hispanic ministry at St. Paul Church in Salem, Ohio, told Kristine Phillips after this week’s raid.

Trump remains keen on displaying resolve against illegal immigration and may look for other ways to do so. The president used the word “strong” nine times in rapid succession to describe himself during a meeting with conservative lawmakers in the Roosevelt Room, where he announced the order was being drafted. “We are very strong,” he said. “If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps, I’d rather be strong.”

The president has no intention of rebranding himself as “a compassionate conservative” a la George W. Bush. He made that clear a few hours later when reporters gathered in the Oval Office to watch him sign the order. Before Trump signed it, Vice President Pence announced that doing so showed “compassion and … heart … and respect for families.”

“But it’s still equally as tough,” the president clarified, “if not tougher.”

“Stoking racial tensions is a feature of Trump’s presidency,” White House bureau chief Phil Rucker reports: “Echoing the words and images of the white nationalist movement to dehumanize immigrants and inflame racial tensions has become a defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency and of the Republican Party’s brand. Trump has stirred supporters at rallies by reading ‘The Snake,’ a parable about a tenderhearted woman who takes in an ailing snake but is later killed when the revived creature bites her. It should be heard as a metaphor for immigration, he says. The president referred to some African nations as ‘shithole countries.’ He posited that ‘both sides’ were to blame for last summer’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And, again and again, he has accused black football players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest police discrimination of being un-American.

...The Trump administration changed its story on family separation no fewer than 14 times before ending the policy. JM Rieger tracks the evolving messages: “First it was a deterrent. Then it wasn’t. It was a new Justice Department policy. Then it wasn’t. The Trump administration was simply following the law. Then it said separations weren’t required by law. It could not be reversed by executive order. Then it was.”

...A Nobel Committee member says Trump is “no longer the moral leader of his country or the world.” Thorbjorn Jagland, one of the five members of the Norwegian committee which picks the winner of the peace prize, said: “Everything he does excludes him from the role American presidents have always had. He can not speak on behalf of the so-called free world.” Jagland is the head of the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg-based international human rights organization with 47 signatory states.

Melania Trump made increasingly clear to her husband in recent days that he should use his power to fix the mess he made. The Slovenian-born first lady’s own lawyer says the family separation policy evoked the internment of the Japanese during World War II and the inhumanity of detention in Nazi Germany. “It reminds us of past mistakes. It’s a big disappointment,” Michael Wildes told Mary Jordan. He also represents Melania’s parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, and her sister Ines, also from Slovenia. (Wildes declined to say what Ines’s immigration status is at this point…)

Theresa May condemned Trump's immigration policy, even as the British prime minister reiterated the importance of keeping open the lines of communication with the United States: “On what we have seen in the United States, pictures of children being held in what appear to be cages are deeply disturbing,” she said. “I clearly, wholly and unequivocally said it is wrong.” But she dismissed calls to cancel Trump’s upcoming U.K. visit., adding that when “we disagree with what they’re doing, we will tell them so.”