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This is one of the worst gotchas in the history of gotchas. I can’t believe people keep saying this. He’s fit for office for a few months, he’s not fit to simultaneously run a campaign or for office for four more year. There, I just drove a truck through the widest needle in the universe.
No. He is obviously not fit for office today. He hasn’t been fit for office for at least a year. He can’t put two sentences together.
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It's not a "gotcha," though, it's a serious question about predicting the future. The reasons we have to believe that Biden is "not fit to simultaneously run a campaign or for office for four more year" are the same reasons we had to believe that four years ago, and two years ago, and six months ago. What has changed now isn't Biden; what has changed now is that the Left has been forced to accept that these reasons are not "cheap fake videos."
It's hard to get people to change their minds, but it's not impossible. The weight of the evidence has long been against Biden's mental competence, but for a while there people could do the political thing and ignore that evidence as cheap political tactics. The problem is that now we can look back at all the evidence and see that it wasn't cheap political tactics; if it had been, then there would be no new reason for Joe to drop out now. Trump almost getting assassinated did not change Joe's mental fitness. Trump dominating the debate did not change Joe's mental fitness. If nothing has changed about Biden, then why drop out? If it's purely a question of trying to beat Trump, that makes strategic sense, but his withdrawal is not being phrased that way, either.
So we get this Schrodinger's excuse; the narrative is that Biden has decided it's time to retire for purely personal reasons, but also somehow that those reasons have absolutely no bearing on the remainder of his term in office. Those reasons are not new, and yet they are newly relevant, and which part of that narrative you deny depends on which political point you are trying to make.
It would be simpler to just be honest about it: he can't beat Trump, and that's all the Party cares about at this point. Whether Biden is mentally competent has never been the Left's concern; if anything, his lack of competence probably made him an easier puppet to ply.
Posters here and Vance are advancing the following logical argument: unfit to run implies unfit to be president for the next 6 months. It obviously doesn’t follow. You can argue about A and you can argue about B but A doesn’t imply B.
But the same presently available evidence that supports the proposition "unfit to run" also supports the proposition "unfit for office." We don't actually know what Biden's mental state will be 6 months or 4 years from now. But the same evidence (from his speeches, debates, public appearances, etc.) that he won't be fit for office in six months, or four years, is also evidence that he isn't fit for office now.
If the same evidence supports both A and B, then discussions of A will naturally invoke discussions of B. Your ability to frame what is being argued in a way that does not logically follow is irrelevant to the arguments that do follow, and so your focus on this one particular framing looks like cherry-picking.
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Would either American party preemptively defenestrate a President because of mental competence concerns? The Reagan experience in his second term suggests not, though I suppose one could argue Republicans have shifted to caring more about mental competence since then.
Not the same at all. Look at Reagan's press conferences in December of 1988...the dude obviously had command of himself and of detail.
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No, I expect the "Reagan experience" is baseline; even the White House webpage has an entry praising Edith Wilson's handling of her husband's incapacity.
But the kayfabe is important; it may be the most important thing about the office of the President. When it falls apart, it is unlikely to fall apart selectively, in the way that is most politically advantageous for the people involved. That's what I'm pointing out here, I think, about "Schrodinger's excuse." Maybe it would be better put as "Schrodinger's dementia." The same evidence that supports Biden's withdrawal, supports his immediate resignation (or removal, or etc.).
An aside: interestingly, the first time the Edith Wilson page URL was saved on the Internet Archive was January 20, 2021.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210715000000*/https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/first-families/edith-bolling-galt-wilson/
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I don't know if it's Schrodinger's dementia; there's a consistent position that looks something like "there's a baseline for mental competence; Biden is above it now, and two months ago we believed he would be above throughout his second term; the debate added new evidence to indicate he will not be above the baseline two years from now, but that he's still above it and would be throughout the remainder of his first term; so the change in candidate while Biden remains in office is perfectly reasonable."
This is pretty tenuous, to say the least, but it doesn't require holding mutually inconsistent positions. The issues in that argument are a willful misreading of evidence (both the debate and everything that preceded it) and a decision to choose a baseline in a very narrow, convenient interval.
Political considerations are, of course, what is driving this, not logical ones, but I don't think that's a surprise to anyone.
But how could one watch that debate, especially in light of other evidence, and conclude “he is fine now.”
Is there a theoretic argument that he is just above competency now but might not be in two years. But does anyone really believe that? Does anyone think they can calibrate that well? If Biden believes Harris should be the president, then why not give her the office given his advanced age?
It’s possible to believe that his decision making isn’t a particular concern but that his ability to speak under pressure is.
Personally I’m not afraid he’s going to cause some catastrophic error in the next 6 months, but I also don’t think he has it in him to effectively campaign especially while governing at the same time.
I guess in theory. But it wasn’t bad speaking; it was incoherence. And it wasn’t just a single speech. And it wasn’t just in speeches (eg wandering off).
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I have a hard time imagining how someone could honestly conclude that, but then again I've thought Biden was obviously mentally incapable since long before the debate.
(And the same for Trump! To a much lesser extent: he roughly seems at the point Biden was in the mid to late 2010s.)
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