The Debate Debacle

The Biden camp has been stubbornly oblivious to political reality.

The president’s terrible debate performance last week has led to many calls for him to drop out of the race, including more than a few from otherwise sympathetic allies overseas:

A few hours after the US presidential debate, Poland’s famously frank top diplomat made an oblique yet unmistakable comparison between the US president and the last of the so-called five good emperors in ancient Rome who made a bad decision in his final years that led to civil war.

“It’s important to manage one’s ride into the sunset,” Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on X.

It has been clear for some time that Biden should not have run for re-election. Any incumbent president with such miserable approval ratings should be able to read the writing on the wall, but for whatever reason Biden and his advisers have refused to see what was in front of them. The Biden campaign has pretended that the polls are wrong or that the electorate will eventually rally behind the president, but this is more self-serving nonsense like their belief that voters horrified by the war in Gaza will resign themselves to voting for Biden in spite of his steadfast support for it. The Biden camp has been stubbornly oblivious to political reality, and that is now coming back to haunt them and the rest of us in a big way.