By Steve BermanPresident Joe Biden’s campaign insisted on debating former President Donald Trump. Insisted. They wanted to get their guy up on the stage, in real-time, to answer questions and face off against a guy who spent decades doing reality television, beauty pageants, and staged events. They set up the debate with rules to silence the non-talking person’s mic, mostly so Joe could answer questions without Trump talking over him and interrupting, as happened in the first debate of the 2020 election.
The Biden campaign went around the Committee for Presidential Debates, which has managed the debate process since 1989. They went directly to CNN, and negotiated the rules with the Trump campaign: no audience, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash as moderators. The debate was purely for entertainment, except Tapper and Bash did an excellent job staying neutral and asking questions on the issues.
I bet you can’t remember a single issue they asked about, or really anything on policy or those issues that either Biden or Trump said. All you can remember is that Joe Biden came across old, decrepit, and not in full possession of his faculties. The bar for his performance was not to be a doddering, drooling idiot. He cleared it so barely that nobody could argue that this is the sharp-as-a-tack, in-control Joe Biden his campaign and White House staff was touting. Biden froze, but his supporters on the left didn’t freeze.
See, there’s a whole industry and area of corporate governance called “crisis management.” Some of that is what Rahm Emanuel famously said during the Obama years: never let a crisis go to waste. But that’s for crises that you didn’t create yourself to be stage-managed. When a crisis falls into your lap, take political advantage. But there’s another kind of crisis management based on things that are very likely to happen, designed to game out, practice, and coordinate responses. For example, oil companies rehearse their response to tanker leaks and accidents. Airlines rehearse their response to crashes.
These crisis management sessions are typically coordinated among multiple companies, so everyone is singing from the same song sheet. I’ll give you a real-time example that’s gone way wrong. Boeing launched its long-delayed Starliner capsule to the ISS a few weeks ago. The two astronauts were only supposed to stay a few days and then head home. But technical problems with Starliner have kept the astronauts at the ISS much longer than planned. Many say they are “stuck” there. Of course they’re stuck there, because if they weren’t, they’d be back on earth.
But the New York Times is reporting “Astronauts Are Not Stuck on the I.S.S., NASA and Boeing Officials Say.” What most of the mainstream media is not reporting, is that NASA could ask SpaceX to bring the astronauts home, and they are probably well into that planning cycle. The New York Post asked the question, and got no response from either company, other than the managed crisis message. that everything is fine, and NASA is just doing its due diligence. The Starliner capsule launched June 5th. It’s certified to be in space for up to 45 days. That means after July 21st, all bets are off, but now NASA wants more testing at White Sands, which could take weeks. There’s your crisis management in a nutshell. Boeing is on its last hope to survive as anything but a government-funded weapons maker, and NASA is circling the wagons to protect it, despite the fact everyone knows the astronauts are stuck–not in danger, mind you, just stuck.
Everyone knows that Joe Biden is a doddering old man, whose control of his mental faculties is, at best, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., halting. After the sundowning hours or early in the morning, he’s mostly not there. Of course, actual crises don’t schedule themselves conveniently for dementia patient hours. But honestly, I’m glad to know Joe Biden is not in control. But this brings me to my conclusion that the debate performance, and the resulting choir of “step down!” by all the leftist news outlets, is nothing but rehearsed and staged crisis management.
Let’s look at the facts:
- The Biden campaign asked for the debate, set the rules, the date and the hours.
- Biden’s campaign handlers, including Ron Klain, his former chief of staff, who was in charge of prep, know Joe best.
- The week of July 4th is when the American public checks out and allows the news cycle to reset.
- The media reacted with such swiftness and a single voice, how could it no be staged?
The best way to get ahead of a crisis is to tackle it head-on and initiate it. Biden’s campaign knew that eventually Joe would glitch, because that’s what he does. And they knew he is a doddering old man not fully in possession of his faculties, because, regardless of what the media has been saying in messaging, circling the wagons around him (like NASA and Boeing), eventually the undeniable facts would come out.
So the president’s handlers put him on stage and let him fail. I know, it’s elder abuse. They let him babble and freeze and glitch in front of the American public. They all came out, led by the New York Times editorial board, calling for Biden to leave the race. Today, the AP is reporting how Biden’s family is urging him to stay in (I know, more elder abuse).
Here’s the truth. Biden, short of his demise from natural causes, is not going anywhere. He’s in the race. Democrats have no other option. I’ve seen some people on social media say that anyone, like VPOTUS Kamala Harris, or Gov. Gavin Newsom, could beat Trump. Hogwash, and they know it’s hogwash, or Biden would have been out of the race six months ago. It’s Biden forever, Biden from the grave, Biden like “Weekend at Bernie’s.” There’s nobody else, and all the news organizations calling for Biden to step down know it.
The only possibility I see if that they rehearsed this entire scenario. They planned it. The calls to step aside, the existential crisis, the hero’s character arc, all of it is staged. Except Biden: his problem is very real.
My prediction: we will all enjoy July 4th and hopefully a long weekend. While we’re shooting our fireworks and eating our burgers and hot dogs, or going to the beach, the media will memory-hole any mention of asking Biden to get out of the race. It will simply disappear, dry up like a puddle from a passing thunderstorm on a hot Atlanta day.
The media news cycle will reset, and a new, vigorous, recharged, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., teleprompter-and-note cards ready, spoon-fed and propped up President Joe Biden, standing hand-in-hand with his wife Jill, will emerge. The media will circle their wagons around him, and the debate will become just “a bad night” never to be mentioned again outside of Trump-friendly media. And reports of Biden’s decline will go back to “cheapfakes” and misinformation. Except everyone will know the truth of it, and having dealt with the crisis, the media will smugly say “of course he’s old, but he had a cold.”
The Democrats, with their lickspittle media accomplices, planned this all along. They knew, and they planned the crisis management down to the hour. If I’m wrong, color me a liar, but I’m pretty sure I’m not wrong. Things just don’t happen so smoothly. The crisis management has to be staged.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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