BULLETIN: BIDEN'S TROUBLING "I GAVE IT MY BEST" ANSWER; WARNER PUSH TO OUST HIM - 7.6.23

Published Jul 6, 2024, 1:51 AM

SERIES 2 EPISODE 208: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:44) COUNTDOWN BULLETIN: In a disturbing end to an otherwise low-news interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, President Biden was asked how he will feel if he stays in the race and loses to Trump. "As long as I gave it my all and I did as good a job as I know I could do, that's what this is all about." I'm not sure how that question could be answered, but that answer is terrifying.

As Mr. Biden undertakes his second rehab tour this year, with the interview and a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia is reportedly convening a meeting among his Democratic colleagues to urge them to join him in a trip to the White House to burst what they see as an informational bubble around the president. In the meantime, Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who just six weeks ago led a big-money fundraiser for the president, issued an on-the-record statement urging Biden to carefully reassess whether he's the right candidate to defeat Trump. And House Minority leader Jeffries will convene his committee ranking members on Sunday to discuss the situation.

While a groundswell seems to be forming for a consensus Kamala Harris candidacy, there seem to be two questions to ask yourself in formulating your own opinion as to what to do next: 1) the debate is two months from next Tuesday. Do you want JOE Biden participating in it? And 2) Do you want a story, the lead story, or the only story every day between now and the debate to be some form of: How does the president seem?

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.

This is a.

Special weekend bulletin edition of Countdown. I do not see how this is going to get any better, and I do not see how this story is going to go away. And I do not see how this answer suffices.

If you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January? I feel, as long as I gave it my all, I did to good a job as I know I can do. That's what this is about.

I don't know what other answer there is to that question. How would you feel if you lose to Trump and America dies? Maybe the answer is no, I'm not going to lose. I guarantee you I am not going to lose. But that answer in the Friday interview with ABC News is harrowing at times. While President Biden spoke coherently and energetically and crisply on ABC and at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, Friday, the early signs nevertheless became a parent of an organized effort among key elected Democrats to convince the President to retire from the ticket, and unlike previous overtures and feelers and whispered doubts. This one resonates like the crack of doom in the distance because it is on the record. The Washington Post now reports that on Monday, Senator Mark Warner Virginia, possibly the least controversial and most knows to the grindstone Democrat in the Senate since Biden himself left for the vice presidency, has told his colleagues that Biden has to go, and that he has organized a meeting with at least some of them on Monday, and ultimately wants a group of them to go to the White House to talk with the President directly and in person. Quoting Warner is telling Democratic senators that Biden can no longer remain in the election in the wake of his faltering debate performance. Warner has told that he is deeply concerned that Biden is not able to run a campaign that could beat Trump. No other names are mentioned. The Post sources say Warner would not limit the meeting to other Democratic senators who want Biden to go if there are others beyond the record. Statement to the Post by Senator Warner spokesman Rachel Cohen is ominous, to say the least quote like many other people in Washington and across the country, Senator Warner believes these are critical days for the president's campaign, and he has made that clear to the White House. Unquote. One of the other ripples in the water after what is to me, frankly a shocking story, is that behind the leak about Warner's doubts is what he wants to do next. This idea of going as a group of Democratic senators to the White House and again quoting the Post, use that for hum to air candid concerns in person. That line and similar lines in similar stories about Warner by NBC News, at in Politico, and at punch Bowl News. He immediately invokes the legendary march to the White House on August seventh, nineteen seventy four, when Senator Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott House Minority Leader John Rhodes went there to tell Richard Nixon that he was certain to be impeached, convicted, and removed. He resigned the next night. If the analogy were not both solid and brutal enough, there's something else in the post piece that makes my blood run cold. Quoting there's a growing consensus among Senate Democrats that the situation with Biden at the top of the ticket is untenable, and senators are trying to determine the best way to relay that message to an insulated president. This is the operative part, the chilling part. Some senators don't believe Biden has people around him who are giving him an accurate picture of the fallout. According to one Democratic senator and a senior Democratic aide, unquote, if you saw the Stephanopolis interview, you might tend to agree that he is not getting an accurate picture of the fallout. Worth is not enough to indicate that the president's rally and interview may not encourage those of us who care deeply for him, or just those of us who care deeply for the nation. There is another meeting about the president's viability on Sunday, NBC News reporting the leader of the Democrats in the House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, we'll meet virtually with the ranking Democratic members of all the congressional committees. In that report, though there is less to indicate that Jeffries is doing more than just sounding out his colleagues, whereas Senator Warner is clearly advocating for change in presidential candidates. As he left Wisconsin Friday afternoon, President Biden was asked on the tarmac if he had completely ruled out dropping out.

Fearing that out, and I've gotten more gun than any president has. Do you learn a Congress? But you've been wrong about everything so far. You're wrong about twenty twenty, You're wrong about twenty twenty two.

You're gonna get wiped out.

Remember the red wave. You're wrong about twenty twenty three, He said, all the tough face, we're gonna be one involved two. So look, we'll see. Have you spoke the members of Congress I have who have spoken to you at least twenty What are they telling you?

What are they telling you?

Sir? Telling me to stay in the race.

They're gathering together to.

Holloce, Well, what born of mind? Stand? Is the only one who considers you that no one else has called me? You got? Do you tell you than your president? Coming together? I hope they'll debate me. I'll reim the meeting one committee now absolutely, whether he's in or no.

Do you call you the thoughts of the members of your own party when it comes to your decision to say.

Sure, I do. That's why they've said. Read I saw the governors. Everyone I'm in that room. Lawla's governor said, stayed the race. I'm Mary war Haley. Didn't say anything when I was in a room.

That was not a random reference there to Mara Healey, the governor of Massachusetts and a strong and loud Biden ally, who just six weeks ago headed a giant fundraiser there and urged donors to pull out all the stops for Joe Biden. Even before the Mark Warner news broke, Healey issued a remarkable on the record statement Friday afternoon in which she did not explicitly call for the president to drop out, but she came close, quoting, the best way forward right now is a decision for the President to make over the coming days. I urge him to listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump. Whatever President Biden decides, I am committed to doing everything in my power to Donald Trump unquote. According to The New York Times, on Monday, on a call with fellow Democratic governors, Healey called the president's political position quote irretrievable. CBS News reported that while the President continues to insist he will not withdraw, there is an unexpected phenomenon in the background that a consensus is forming that no other prominent Democrat would even privately begin to prepare to challenge Vice President Kamala Harris's natural position as the heir apparent if it comes to that that, as Robert Costa of CBS added, let the fight be over the running mate. That there is something to this was indicated by twenty eight stunningly glowing paragraphs at Axios on Friday titled Harris's Epic Edge all Glowing, including this quote. Polls show her running no worse than Biden in a hypothetical matchup with Trump, and in some cases better. A post debate CNN poll found Harris in a statistical tie with Trump and slightly stronger than Biden because of broader support from women. Fifty percent of female voters back Harris over Trump versus forty four percent for Biden, and independence forty three percent Harris versus thirty four percent Biden. That is the attempt to start, if one had not already begun a Kamala Harris boom. Meanwhile, the irony of the ABC interview with George Stephanoppolos was there was damn near no news in it. At his Wisconsin rally just before the interview, Biden said he would beat Trump in twenty twenty. Then after applause, he corrected the timeframe. He made about one thirtieth the average number of gaffes Trump makes per rally. That gaff did not come up in the ABC interview. It's not a big enough one to merit here. The only real news was when the president was asked if he had watched last week's debate and he said he didn't think he had. The only real news besides that disturbing sound by it at the beginning of this update. There is one more and one much more vague development to mention hints that if Biden does drop out and Harris does succeed him, that Republicans are poised to open a House investigation into the president's health, whether a correct assessment of it is being hidden or has been hidden from the public, and if so, by whom, and naturally enough, how much did Kamala Harris know about whatever conspiracy the GOP fabricates this time. It is harrowing stuff and something to consider. On the other hand, it seems, based on the ludicrous proposition that if Joe Biden were to fully swerve out of this skid tomorrow and by Tuesday, if all talk of replacing him on the ticket became part of a scenario in which we looked back with a shutter and said, remember that time we almost forced the president off the ticket just before he won reelection. If that rosiest of outcomes occurred, why on earth would anybody think that the Republicans wouldn't launch House committee to investigate the president's health anyway, only the target would change from Harris to Biden. Lastly, here is my assessment of where things are now after the rally in Wisconsin and the interview with George Stephanoppolis of ABC News. And again the differences in the Warner and Healey stories, their importance, their precedence over the Wisconsin rally and the ABC interview, those are about the on the record nature of these statements. Heeey literally on the record, and Warner, for all intents and purposes, essentially on the record. That story did not go out to multiple news organizations by accident. I love Congressman Raoul Grajalva but Raoul telling Biden to go is nothing close to as important as Mark Warner organizing disaffected Democratic senators who think it is so bad that now their reelections may be impossible, and who want to go to the White House and try to personally pierce they perceive as a bubble around the president. Secondly, we should not for a moment subtract the human equation here. For Joe Biden or the first Lady or members of the family to accept the idea that he should withdraw from the ticket to end his presidency now or in January is to jump a long way down the psychology spectrum to accept that their lives in public service are over. This would also be true of everybody working in his administration. I am not suggesting this is more important than the democracy. I'm just suggesting we need to remember it is a factor in these decisions. Thirdly, there is a reality in the wake of the ABC interview and the Wisconsin campaigns beach Friday that really only hit after both were concluded. The reality is this, no matter the absence of a real faux PA and the strength he summoned in many of his comments of these things, is going to answer the questions raised by the debate. He had a teleprompter in the speech, he had a pre recording in the ABC interview. He needs to be live, plus what he's going to do one of these every day. You and I may loathe this reality. We may curse the forces responsible for it, and rightly ask why Trump is not being subjected to this level of scrutiny by the media, when if it were to be applied to him, he would be out of the race before I finished this podcast. We may hate this, and I think rightly so, and damn the reporters to hell who have let it happen, but it is the reality. We cannot fix a fatally broken political system, and we cannot fix a perhaps even more fatally broken media system, led by places like CNN and The New York Times falling apart as we watch them. We certainly cannot do that in the next one hundred and twenty odd days. They should be driving the head of the Federalist Society into the ground for threatening everybody who opposes his American Revolution, threatening them with violence. They should be joining me in a call to designate the Federalist Society as a terrorist organization. They should be hounding Trump off the Republican ticket for pretending to deny he has anything to do with Project twenty twenty five, which is run by all his former staffers and the Federalist Terrorist Society. Guess what they won't. These American reporters are the ones we have here. They are going to do this. They don't give a damn about fairness or balance. They have no idea of how fragile democracy is. They have always wanted to see all of them a president resign or bow out of a campaign because they have all at some point wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, except for Woodward and Bernstein, and the two of them, guess what they would like to again be Woodward and Bernstein. A Joe Biden rehab tour is simply not going to work because it's not going to end because he already did a Joe Biden rehab tour in February and March. When this question last crested. This an incredibly large percentage of Democrats and Independents and voters and reporters and commentators thought had been settled by his robust performance at the State of the Union to need a second Joe Biden rehab tour is the problem, especially since the White House waited a week to even start it. How do we know this one's going to stick? The last one clearly did not, Which lastly raises the two questions I think we all need to ask ourselves, and I raised them in sorrow. Do you want President Biden at that debate two months from this coming Tuesday? And regardless whether you answer yes or no, there is also this in that span from now until two months from Tuesday, barring unforeseen developments? Do you want the lead news story, and often the only news story between now and then, to be how the President seemed today? Followed the day after that? Bye? How the President seemed today? Followed the day after that? Bye? How the President seemed Today? The next scheduled countdown podcast is Tuesday Bulletins, as developments warn't until the next one. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Howtown with Keith Alderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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