Should He Stay or Should He Go?

Grace: 00:00:00

Should he stay? Or should he go? I recorded and erased and re-recorded and erased so many versions of this Frogmore stew on the topic of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, the debate, the interview, the G7, and literally as soon as I record something, it almost immediately becomes outdated, and that is exactly why this time in our American lives seems so unsettled.

Grace: 00:00:31

This feeling isn't new. I mean, we've been getting gobs and gobs of information thrown at us for years. Information that we, the political consumer, have to either attempt to ignore and then just vote for the party that we were raised to vote for or try and sift through the barrage of information of what is true, what is false, what's sort of true, what's sort of false, what's totally false.

Grace: 00:00:58

I mean, the news of the day that, frankly, only those who work in the political field have time to disseminate. It's exhausting and the election is still four months away. July was supposed to be the month that Frogmore Stu was going to go on hiatus. Take a little breather. Take a much-needed break from politics after the primaries and in anticipation of the upcoming general election.

Grace: 00:01:22

That has not happened. Our goal in this podcast is to sift through the noise and talk to people on the front lines of the decisions that affect each of us in the state and to generally find the calm and the understanding and the empathy that exists in our state's amazing communities. But here we are getting sucked into the national political conversation.

Grace: 00:01:45

So this is a summer Frogmore stew. My recap of the debate is basically that Trump lied obsessively, he defended the January 6th rioters, he bragged about Roe v. Wade being overturned, and he's still trying to convince us that he won the 2020 election. And yet he's the one that looked and sounded like the more capable candidate.

Grace: 00:02:11

Where are we? We all saw what we saw. We saw a man in Biden that is no longer in that slow part of aging, where he's able to pull from his wisdom. We saw the rapid part. That means he's only one incident away from complete decline.

Grace: 00:02:30

And what is voting if it isn't hope for the future? When you see a man that you know full well, likely has a shortened future, whether it be mentally or physically or both, basically we're voting for Kamala. That's what they're asking us to do. And so why would they even pull Joe and create more chaos four months before the election if that's what we all really deep down know we're going to do anyway.

Grace: 00:02:59

But the aftermath of the debate. Going into the debate, the Biden team was depending on voters fears about January 6th, political violence, saving democracy, Donald Trump's character, Donald Trump's criminal record.

Grace: 00:03:13

Even all of those things still didn't seem like it was going to be enough for Biden to win the election, but then the disastrous debate and then the interview and this intimate meeting with donors where he had to read from a teleprompter, even the call into MSNBC was riddled with odd and incorrect statements.

Grace: 00:03:34

So Biden has now taken to. Poo pooing the party elites, the pundits, the Washington set. He says the voters are all who matters. He's referencing the voters from the primaries and the specific people they've put around him so that he continues to hear people say, you should run.

Grace: 00:03:52

He says it's the voters that voted in the primary. That was February. That's like five years ago in political years. The people that voted in those primaries are Democrats. They would vote for Biden if the party carried him around like Weekend at Bernie's, but they aren't the people that will win this election. It's the moderates, those unicorns that both parties are trying to win over.

Grace: 00:04:16

Biden is also going after the polls, saying that polling is incorrect. But guess what? Those polls are made up of voters and they've been pretty consistent. It's in the 70th percentile range almost every time. The latest polls are showing that 74 to 78 percent of voters think the president is too old to serve.

Grace: 00:04:40

This conversation should have been happening a year ago. We should have had a full primary of candidates on the Democrat side, but the Democratic party leaders kept insisting that the Biden age issue was just a Republican talking point.

Grace: 00:04:55

So now, every day, the president's team must say that he is competent. Because after the debate, the first statement that they said was that he was really on top of things between 10 and 4. Which is probably true, but oh my god, that's a really troubling truth.

Grace: 00:05:13

And then they pivoted to, he had a bad night. Remember that? That was the line over and over. But that's the line you use for your aging grandparents. They have good days, they have bad days. They have good nights, they have bad nights.

Grace: 00:05:26

And then, it was an episode. What? He's having episodes? And now he's fighting. But he's fighting his own party. He should only be fighting Donald Trump at this point. This reality is like a death to Biden. It's the slow death of his presidency.

Grace: 00:05:45

The cancer is set in and he's still in the denial phase. Maybe now he's getting into anger phase. There are seven stages death, shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance. How much time do we have before it's too late? Forcing Democrats to defend Biden's debility with this preposterous look that he's vigorous and that he's got all of these qualities that we should pay attention to, never mind that he can't speak a full sentence and that when he walks, he looks like he's a hundred.

Grace: 00:06:23

No one is going to believe anything Democrats say ever again if they continue down this road. So now the question is, do we rip the Band Aid off quickly while the situation is still manageable, or is it a slow burn, which will be a disaster?

Grace: 00:06:42

This current situation has upended the Dems. That used to be saved for our disdain of how the Republicans handled Trump.

Grace: 00:06:50

The Democrats want us to vote for the party and not the person. That's the new line, but pay attention, the surrogates, they continue to talk about Biden's accomplishments and project 2025 is suddenly a major talking point. That's been out for a long, long time in various versions.

Grace: 00:07:08

Hey, past performance, that's no guarantee of future results. Democrats will struggle to sell their case with voters as long as their nominee is a man who appears unfit to serve as president for the next six months, let alone the next four years.

Grace: 00:07:25

And I know the difference between Trump's unfitness and Biden's unfitness shouldn't even be on the same level, but it's politics and so they are.

Grace: 00:07:34

Now this comes down to what we hold in truth and what lies we accept. Do we ever really know what is true? We have all become accustomed to being lied to.

Grace: 00:07:46

Renting a car as advertised for 19. 99? No way. Buy a concert ticket, start at 40? That's a joke. Aging cream that will make all of your wrinkles go away. Believe me, I've tried them all. That's a big fat no.

Grace: 00:08:01

So we accept lies in every facet of our life. Do we look past them because we don't feel like we have power to stop them? Or do we just not care? We need the rental car. We want to see the band. We trick ourselves that our face isn't as wrinkly as it actually is.

Grace: 00:08:18

Trump lies about everything and we roll our eyes because we've become numb to it. But Biden, he wasn't supposed to be the blatant liar.

Grace: 00:08:27

He was the liar that we accepted these little inconsistencies or little fabrications, not the bold, blatant lies. After the debate, Biden said he was tired from international travel. 11 days earlier, aides took responsibility for his makeup. He had a cold, he had prepared with too much detail. He got to the studio late and didn't have time to prepare for the camera angles.

Grace: 00:08:53

There's this trick that politicians use, they know that we have enough amazing reporters to scoop their secrets and share them with the public. So they depend on flooding us with information. They do the opposite of hiding and they create this fire hose of news until people become so overwhelmed trying to figure out what is real and then it's too much.

Grace: 00:09:18

So the most important thing for a leader is to know when you pass the baton. Biden has already made the poor decision to run again from the beginning, but now the cat is out of the bag. Biden and his team have put the country at significant risk by continuing to insist that he is the best Democrat to defeat Trump.

Grace: 00:09:39

And his aides and family have gone to great lengths to ensure that we don't see Biden in the last four years, the way that they saw him, the way that we watched him in the debate. They now are asking us to trust him instead of what we all saw.

Grace: 00:09:57

Remember the BlackBerry? The guy that insisted that he knew that people would always prefer the BlackBerry buttons over the iPhone? He didn't believe any of their internal research, and he had people around him that told him he was right over and over. But he didn't believe the staff that told him he needed to pivot. He didn't listen, and that did not work out so well for him. Blackberries have essentially become extinct, which is where the Democrat party is headed.

Grace: 00:10:27

So where does this leave the Democrats? One big difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Dems always say and show how government works for all of us, how government can solve some problems. Biden is proving right now that the government in fact does not work for us.

Grace: 00:10:46

So where do we go from here? How do we make choices in the conditions of uncertain information? I read a story that said something like Biden came across as someone in need of an adjustable bed and soft foods. Barely able to produce short bursts of relatively coherent political rhetoric before sputtering into foggy incoherence.

Grace: 00:11:08

That's some kind of writeup after a debate. You can't come back from that. All of us have elders in our family that we deeply respect, but we also have firsthand knowledge of their decline. We may not understand policy and things that politicians talk about, but we all understand age.

Grace: 00:11:27

So do we force Biden out? And does it put Democrats in another Al Franken situation where we've pushed him out on our higher ground and then we regret it? I mean, the Republicans still have Mitch McConnell who had several episodes of freezing for several minutes on camera. And somehow that dude is still working in the Senate. I digress.

Grace: 00:11:51

Taking lessons from Republicans probably isn't in the best interest of the Democrats either. Our two-party system feels like it is a situation of too big to fail. And that is not good for everyone. dems right at this very moment is that we need to stick together for our best chances to defeat Donald Trump. And every day that Biden is still in the race means it's another day that he's closer to staying in the race. And every Dem who doesn't have a platform on CNN is asking, why are we putting in our injured quarterback when we have a deep bench ready to play? Whether they're asking it in public or behind closed doors, they're all asking it.

Grace: 00:12:36

At this moment in time, there are many ideas being floated around. Blitz primaries, primetime specials, town halls with celebrity, and the deep bench of candidates. I believe we have a deep bench of candidates, and I get so frustrated listening to the media say that none of these candidates poll as well as Biden.

Grace: 00:12:55

No kidding. They haven't been campaigning. They haven't been sending out emails and mailers and texts every four hours, pushing their name recognition. The average voter doesn't really know a lot about them, but they sure would, if they started campaigning tomorrow. My question is who is in charge? Are we depending on Joe Biden to get through these last four stages of grief overnight so that we can move on?

Grace: 00:13:20

And what if he does? Then what, who are the people making the town halls and the primetime specials happen? The people want it to happen. The politicians are afraid to say anything out loud about Biden, but we can remind them he isn't their boss. We are. Biden's team is telling Democratic voters, you just have to believe. Trump's team is telling Republican voters, you should be afraid. What I believe is that I am afraid.

Grace: 00:13:52

That's all the stew for today. Just a reminder. We will be on hiatus for the next month and back in August with lots and lots to talk about. Thanks for listening today.