If there were any doubt that President Joe Biden‘s age and mental state would be a problem in the campaign, the presidential debate on Thursday night put that to rest.
It took barely 15 minutes into the first debate of the 2024 general election for Biden to freeze up and utter an incoherent sentence. And it only got worse from there. Whether it was immigration, abortion, Medicare, or the economic situation of black people, Biden fumbled and stumbled through sentence after sentence, regardless of the issue.
In the age of social media, Biden’s freezes are going to be shared far and wide and be viewed millions of times on any and all platforms. And no matter how much his campaign claims it is unfair, the president’s age and mental state are now a primary issue of the campaign.
Biden will be 86 by the time a second term in office concludes, and he looks and acts it. Former President Donald Trump would be 82 by the end of a second term in office, but his energy and coherence could not be a more stark contrast from that of his opponent.
On MSNBC and CNN after the debate, some of the most committed Democratic partisans, such as Van Jones, acknowledged that Biden’s cognitive decline was a major problem.
For Democrats, Biden’s deteriorating mental state is a five-alarm fire. But as much as there will be a clamor to replace him as the party’s nominee, such an endeavor will be extremely logistically difficult.
There are less than two months until the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Biden is set to be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for the 2024 presidential election. If he is to be replaced, the party must move quickly.
But even if the party manages to convince the president to set aside, further hurdles involve who would replace him.
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The Democratic Party is a deeply divided political movement that will not so easily coalesce around a replacement nominee. And while the obvious replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, she has the dubious distinction of being less popular than Biden.
At the end of the day, the Democratic Party and Biden are now sleeping in the bed that they made.