A message about Joe Biden and for the Chicken Littles

I didn’t feel like writing this diary entry, but it’s clear that people are still in an uproar over Thursday night’s debate and its implications, so I thought I’d share what happened next.

First of all, yes, it was a poor performance by our president. But one 90-minute misstep over a convicted felon who unleashed a verbal diarrhea tirade of lies and question dodging without any opposition is absolutely no reason to change horses mid-race. In fact, this isn’t the first time a sitting president has struggled in a debate but come out stronger and won the election. Barack Obama stumbled in his first debate against Mitt Romney after his administration was finally starting to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression, but he recovered and easily won re-election. Even Ronald Reagan, who I by the way could not stand as president and was actually showing early signs of Alzheimer’s during his re-election campaign and was only just starting to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression, declared on Morning In America that he had not only won re-election, but had also won electoral votes not seen since Nixon vs. George McGovern. And by the way, this wasn’t the first time Joe Biden was knocked out and left for dead politically. The same thing happened during his 2020 presidential campaign.

We all remember how crowded the 2020 Democratic field was back then, and there were some very well-qualified candidates including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and even Michael Bloomberg. Pete Buttigieg narrowly won the Iowa caucuses over Bernie Sanders, while Joe Biden finished a distant fifth. After the New Hampshire primary, which Bernie Sanders won handily, Biden had another poor showing. I even remember reading an article in the New York Times or the Washington Post documenting the Biden campaign and interviewing his campaign staff, and even then it was described as a funeral-like atmosphere with people telling Joe Biden to give up his campaign because he was too old for the voters’ taste at that point (never mind that Bernie Sanders is about the same age as Biden). Biden would make a small breakthrough for the delegates in the Nevada caucuses, but once again Bernie Sanders won that one fairly easily, so his campaign more or less desperately threw all their remaining chips into the South Carolina primary. As it turned out, Joe Biden won a decisive victory in the primary, winning every county in the state. He then dominated Super Tuesday, knocking all of his competitors except Bernie Sanders out of the race. After a few more primaries, Sanders eventually dropped out himself, conceding the nomination to Joe Biden.

Despite Trump being impeached for meddling in Ukrainian affairs and demanding more information about Joe Biden in exchange for weapons to defend their country from what was then a potential Russian invasion, he was still a favorite to be re-elected. But then COVID=19 swept our shores, and his subsequent bungled response to the pandemic, as well as his hostile response to the Black Lives Matter protests and Amy Coney Barrett’s hasty appointment to the Supreme Court after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, led to the election of Joe Biden to the Oval Office. We all remember what happened next, from the spreading of the Big Lie in court to the failed insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

So among all these events, Biden inherited a bullshit storm. Nevertheless, despite a pandemic that refused to go away despite the presence of vaccines, and the resulting inflation that occurred due to supply chain problems, Joe Biden managed to get us out of those crises through the American Rescue Plan, the CHIPS Act and the CHIPS Act to be passed. the Inflation Reduction Act, which not only created thousands of new jobs but also increased real wages for the first time since the 1970s. He also approved an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, which lifted millions of children out of poverty until it was undermined by the MAGA Republicans in Congress and by the treasonous Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Likewise, he passed a progressive budget despite a Republican House that couldn’t even agree on how to tie their own shoes. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was charged with 91 crimes in four separate criminal cases, while also being criticized in civil court and found liable for sexual assault and financial fraud. He was recently convicted of 34 felonies for falsifying company records to cover up illegal campaign hush money payments he made to a porn star he dated after the third woman had just given birth to his fifth child. And he is about to be sentenced for these crimes on July 11.

So despite Biden’s history of bouncing back from adversity and tragedy (and he’s bounced back from more tragedy than most of us have ever experienced or would ever want to experience), why is everyone ready to give up now? Lawrence O’Donnell has already laid out the logistical reasons why it can’t happen, but Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Jasmine Crockett have offered the most impassioned reasons to keep the program going. In fact, I’ve read some comments over the last few days saying that we don’t need to save Joe Biden; he needs to save us. The reality is that we all need to save each other and save our country and democracy itself. Joe Biden is not some mythical all-powerful figure who can just do anything for us, but he is a good man and a patriotic American who has served our country well. But he can’t do it all by himself. In fact, that’s why we elect representatives, senators, governors, state legislatures, mayors, city councils, school boards, and even dog catchers to represent our interests. Isn’t this entire site designed to elect more and better Democrats to public office in the first place? That’s why we should not just stand behind Joe Biden, but behind all of our candidates who are fighting for our democracy, an economy that works for everyone, women’s reproductive rights, voting rights for all Americans, protections for the rights of people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community, and our climate. We already know that our opponents want to dismantle the American democratic experiment, and while Trump is the visible face of the autocratic fascist movement, he’s got a ton of help from MAGA Republicans in Congress and red states, a corrupt Supreme Court, a ton of wealthy oligarchs, big corporations, and foreign adversaries. That’s a lot to fight against, but it’s a fight we all have to fight whether we like it or not. Too many have suffered and died for the rights we have now, such as the countless African Americans who were lynched during Jim Crow, the women workers in the Shirtwaist factory, Emmet Till, Medgar Evers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Scherner, James Chaney, Matthew Shepard, Tina Brandon, George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and countless others. We need to stand up for all of Joe Biden’s accomplishments, and for all the evangelicals who continue to follow Donald Trump, we need to go straight to their religious core and ask them if Jesus Christ would be okay with a serial liar, adulterer, and cheat leading the people of Abraham and Moses? Sure, some of them probably aren’t helpable, but we will plant a seed in some of their brains, and eventually the truth will sprout and bloom in their faces. That’s why we still need to go door to door and even confront the lies on social media. They try to manipulate us with lies, we manipulate them with the truth. It won’t be easy, but it’s something we have to fight for, and we have to do it now.