Some news day yesterday, huh? And I had to pick yesterday to meet my kids in the city for dinner and a movie. I was on the train to Grand Central when I heard someone say Biden had dropped out, so I checked my phone, and lo, it was true. And my heart breaks for President Joe Biden, because he didn’t deserve the way his own party has been treating him. But I also think this may be for the best.

So on the train back I checked my phone again and saw all manner of Very Serious People in media calling for an open convention, saying it would be good for the Democratic Party. “Vice President Harris may be the most likely replacement, but a contested convention is good for everyone,” opined the Washington Post editorial board. As of this morning, this Very Serious Opinion had almost 5,000 comments, roughly 99 percent of which said, “Screw you, WaPo. It’s Kamala. Deal with it.”

I think it’s fairly obvious to most of us that we don’t need more weeks of Democratic Party infighting right now. And it’s also obvious to most of us that the Dems didn’t dare pass over a woman of color to nominate one of the usual white guys. I’m seeing a lot of social media comments calling for a “dream ticket” of Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer, in fact. Hey, Trump has the He Man Women Hater’s Club sewn up; why not? And today a lot of headlines are declaring that much of the Dem party is rallying around Kamala. Because most of us want to get on with the campaign to beat Trump.

I understand that the Republicans are dumbstruck; this isn’t what they expected. Trump’s entire campaign was built around tearing down Biden as old, senile, and corrupt. And now they’ll have to start from scratch. Gee, I wonder how Trump will run against a Black woman? Josh Marshall:

Donald Trump and Chris LaCivita are about to hit Kamala Harris with an avalanche of racist and sexist attacks and a ton of slut-shaming. Democrats across the board need to be saying now what we all know, which is that this will bring out the very worst of Trump. Racism and sexism are his brand. Charlottesville is his brand. You can’t just be on the receiving end of this stuff. Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism.

Trump is losing the campaign he wanted to run, the one he and his campaign have spent years planning to run. There’s now going to be a furious race to define Harris first. Of course Trump will go there, and these attacks and those attacks can be very damaging. But Trump the racist bully and gangster is what kills him in the suburbs. It’s what embarrasses people.

Any normal person would have already been embarrassed by Trump, but whatever.

Even more typical of Trump: He’s now demanding a “refund” of money he spent campaigning against Biden.

“So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race. Now we have to start all over again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday night.

“Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the Fake News Media, knew he was not capable of running for, or being, President? Just askin’?”

Dana Milbank:

There is continued grumbling about why Trump won’t release real medical information about his bleeping ear. You know, the one with the conspircuous bandage that he obviously stuck on himself.

Yesterday he released a letter written by Rep. Ronny Jackson, his former White House physician,

Jackson wrote that he has “evaluated and treated” Trump’s wound on his ear daily.  … Jackson stated that Trump sustained a 2 cm wide wound from the track of a bullet “that extended down the cartilaginous surface of the ear.” No sutures were required for Trump’s wound, Jackson said, but “there is still intermittent bleeding requiring a dressing to be in place.” … Along with treating his wound, Jackson wrote, medical staff at the hospital “provided a thorough evaluation for additional injuries that included a CT [scan] of his head.”

The hospital system where Trump was treated declined to weigh in on the contents of the letter.

Of course, the hospital can’t release medical records if Trump doesn’t want them released. But if all they did was evaluate the state of his head, it seems odd why he wouldn’t just go ahead and release them. The only obvious reasons for not doing this are:

(1) The “wound” is just a minor abrasion that is barely visible by now and certainly doesn’t require a maxipad stuck on the side of Trump’s head, or (2) there is something wrong with Trump’s head. Hmmm.

Of course, as part of any exam the hospital would have taken Trump’s blood pressure, which I am betting is in the stratosphere somewhere, and listened to his heart and lungs and probably noted height and weight.

I seriously wish reporters would start hounding Trump to release real medical information about himself, especially considering he’s only three years younger than President Biden, and if he got another term by the end of it he’d be older than Biden is now. If Biden’s frailties are an issue, what about Trump? Who’s to know if he’s nothing but a stroke waiting to happen?

See also Emptywheel.

Speaking of medical records, I decided to do a mini-fundraiser to help pay for an unexpected medical bill. My insurance dumped a big co-pay on me for an echocardiogram I had last month and some smaller co-pays for some other tests. I’m actually doing pretty well, but because of the TIA I had in 2022 I’m being monitored. And I would be happy to release the results of the echocardiogram if I can figure out how to get to them. The doctor just called me and said he didn’t see anything alarming, which is as much as I wanted to know.

So if you can spare some change, here is the gofundme link and here is the PayPal link. Thank you!

Well, the RNC convention is over, so maybe it’s safe to watch MSNBC again. This morning I’ve been plowing through the reviews. One of the best bits of writing about the convention was published yesterday, by Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, Anti-party in a ghost town: Trump’s undead GOP holds an un-convention. Do read it all the way through. O’Hehir describes a party convention that was almost entirely severed from the history of the GOP. And the people who were there seemed weirdly directionless, as if they weren’t quite sure why they’d come. And here’s the meat of it:

The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history. My colleague Amanda Marcotte observed this week that the conventional wisdom describing the new GOP as a cult of personality slightly misses the point. She meant that Donald Trump is the funnel through which MAGA energy flows and the wizard who conjured it forth, but he has never truly controlled it. 

If Trump wins this election, he’ll be a lame-duck president in his 80s. More specifically, he’ll be the beloved but decrepit figurehead of the semi-normal popular front of a fascist movement whose darkest and most compelling energies lie elsewhere. Because that’s all the official, above-ground Republican Party is now. Their convention is a deliberately boring dumbshow, listless late-Soviet political theater meant to lull you and me — and most of its actual participants, for that matter — into believing that Trump 2.0 is nothing more than what it says on the box.

By the time of the Reagan Administration the Republicans had learned to turn their televised RNC convention into a slickly produced four-day pep rally, with every campaign button polished brightly and every balloon falling according to script. By contrast, the Dem conventions always seemed a bit disheveled. But I take it this RNC convention was nothing like the old ones.

And then there was Trump’s acceptance speech. I have read there really was supposed to be a plan for Trump to make a “unity” speech and not even mention Joe Biden. He started off well enough, but he couldn’t keep it up. He is what he is. Paul Waldman:

The speech in its written form was what any sane person would have expected: some vague, nakedly insincere words about unity up top, followed by the red-meat speech Trump had always intended to give. But rather than anything resembling a traditional convention speech in form and structure, this was a Trump rally speech, familiar to anyone who has watched one on TV — and an unusually dull one at that. 

Here’s how it works: His aides load a prepared text in the teleprompter, and Trump uses it as a scaffold on which he hangs rambling digressions, familiar jokes, bizarre preoccupations, and commentary on the written words themselves (“So true, so true”). He speaks a few of the written lines, then wanders off like Mr. Magoo, then returns to speak a few more of the lines, and wanders off again. 

It’s hard to overstate how strange it was that Trump used this extraordinary opportunity, with tens of millions of Americans watching, to offer little more than the umpteenth version of the rally speech he has delivered hundreds of times. Did he say to himself, “Oh, I’ve gotta use the Hannibal Lecter joke, that one kills”? Well he did. We didn’t get the riff about sharks and electric boats, but he did describe a fictional event in which he supposedly visited a shipyard in Wisconsin and on the spot redesigned naval destroyers to make the bow more pointy.

This one is also worth reading all the way through. Waldman gets to the marrow of Trump’s appeal through the use of the German word herrenvolk, “master race,” a term the Nazis liked a lot. And he said what Trump is promising is a a herrenvolk democracy, or one in which only one specific ethnic group (guess who?) is allowed to vote and hold office.

Screw your ideals and principles; the true America is in the blood of the people — or at least some people. 

This is why Donald Trump won 62 percent of the votes of rural whites in 2016 and 71 percent in 2020, despite having done precisely nothing in those four years to improve the quality of their lives. This is why he won nearly two-thirds of the votes of whites without college degrees in both elections. You may feel that the economy or the culture has left you behind, Trump and Vance tell them, but you are the realest and truest Americans. It’s in the blood. 

And the rest of you? We’ll allow you to be here, but only on “our terms.” For now.

David Brooks, of all people, said this of Trump’s acceptance speech: “The part after the assassination-attempt story was one of the truly awful and self-indulgent political performances of our time. My brain has been bludgeoned into soporific exhaustion.”

David Frum, the Atlantic:

At the climax of the Republican National Convention last night, former President Donald Trump’s nomination-acceptance speech was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller.

Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy “to conclude”—and then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers.

I thought this was interesting:

The republican national convention cast a bright light on the party of Trump’s weaknesses: its extremism, its cultishness, its lack of welcome to the majority of Americans. The central idea implicit in the vice-presidential nominee’s speech was the superior Americanness of those with seven generations of ancestors buried in U.S. ground over those whose ancestors are buried in other places. The central idea in the presidential nominee’s speech was “me, me, me, me, me” for more than an hour and a half.

Here Frum is just a tad off. Speaking as someone who has more than seven generations of ancesters buried in U.S. ground, I am very aware that Trump himself and a lot of his minions — Stephen Miller, for example — are only second generation or so. I also note that most Black Americans also have many generations of ancestors buried in U.S. soil, never mind native Americans. And Trump has always seemed weirdly unconnected to American history and culture. Norms, like why it’s important to visit veteran cemeteries, have to be explained to him. And I bet he couldn’t recognize the tunes of “My Darling Clementine” or “She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain.” It’s like he’s from Mars. No, the real criteria are not about how long your family has been here, but whether you are White and male.

Trump really ought to be beatable. His record as president (which Frum accurately reviews) was actually dismal. Biden’s is much better. But you can’t tell that to many Americans, because they have so bought into the Trump mystique and so hammered with propaganda about the failures of Biden that if you tell them the truth, they think you are crazy, or just lying.

Regarding the Biden drama, trying to follow it too closely will give you whiplash. The Conventional Wisdom changes by the hour. He’s getting out! No, he’s staying in! And right now Biden’s staunchest defender is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She and Bernie Sanders are standing by their man. The so-called centrists in the Dem party are in meltdown mode and pretty much resigned that Trump will get another term.

The whole country has lost its bleeping mind. I see that the Dump Biden Hysteria is back with a vengeance. Republicans, meanwhile, feel invincible. And through all this, the polls don’t seem to be budging.

I missed this yesterday — How J.D. Vance Won Over Donald Trump. A lot of the Right really didn’t want J.D. Vance. “It was uncertain down to the final hours, with a frantic lobbying effort until the last possible moment by anti-Vance forces, including Rupert Murdoch and his allies, with some of it playing out in public.”

So what made the difference?

When word got back to Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago that Mr. Trump might be wavering on Mr. Vance, he intervened. Mr. Carlson, who was visiting Australia on a speaking tour, phoned Mr. Trump and delivered an apocalyptic warning, according to two people briefed on their conversation. He told Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio could not be trusted — that he would work against him and would try to lead America into nuclear war. Mr. Carlson, who declined to comment for this article, told Mr. Trump that Mr. Burgum could not be trusted, either.

Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neocon” as his V.P. — an abbreviation for Republicans who favor using U.S. power to implant democracy abroad — then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neocon” as his V.P. — an abbreviation for Republicans who favor using U.S. power to implant democracy abroad — then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.

I may be misjudging Tucker, but I suspect he’s not really stupid enough to believe that. But he knows Trump is stupid enough to belive that. Strange that I seem to remember Tucker being all rah-rah about the neocons back during the Bush II Administration.

Vance has pretty much re-made himself into undistilled MAGA, so exactly what he adds to the ticket but More of the Same is hard to say.

Stormy Weather

I’d heard this elsewhere, but The Atlantic has an article by Zoë Schlanger that says Project 2025 calls for mostly dissolving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You know, the people who collect weather data and tell us when hurricanes are coming and such.

NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. The proposals roughly amount to two main avenues of attack. First, it suggests that the NWS should eliminate its public-facing forecasts, focus on data gathering, and otherwise “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which the authors of the plan imply will improve, not limit, forecasts for all Americans. Then, NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.

NOAA is expecting an especially bad hurricane season this year, so this could become a campaign issue. I’d say this idea is nuts, except that it sets up a situation in which weather reports can become a valuable commodity that will make somebody a lot of money.

Did I mention the whole country has lost its bleeping mind? I believe I did.

Loose Cannon has fired. She just dismissed the documents case, on the grounds that Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel somehow violated the Constitution. I’m reasonably sure it didn’t, and since (as I understand it) no jury had been selected, double jeopardy doesn’t apply. Jack Smith can appeal. This will be viewed as a victory for Trump in the short term, however. Coverage in Washington Post here. More later as it happens.

Vance is the New Pence

I was horrified to learn the RNC convention is starting. In my head it was next week. Oh, well. I promise I will avoid watching any of it.

Several news outlets have now announced that annoying twerp J.D. Vance will be Trump’s running mate.

On Not Being Pathetic

Please, please read this Josh Marshall post, titled On Not Being Pathetic. I agree with it 100 percent. Apparently a portion of the Democratic Party and Dem-friendly “pundits” have decided since the Saturday shooting that they aren’t going to be able to replace Biden, so they are resigned to losing the presidency.  Josh Marshall calls out Jonathan Chait in particular; Chait has been pushing hard for Biden to be replaced, and now apparently he’s decided Trump is going to win, and we might as well just get used to it. But he’s not the only one. Here’s Josh Marshall:

The folks talking to the Capitol Hill sheets didn’t say, we’re dropping the swap Biden idea. They apparently said, well, we’re giving up on presidential race altogether. That is just the kind of toxic loserdom that makes me see red every time. Can’t stand it. I’m agnostic on the replace Biden thing. If the big party players want to do it then do it. And if not then Biden’s the candidate. I go back and forth on which option I think has the better shot at success. What I’m hearing now is that these ringleaders are just going to take a pass on the whole race or have their contribution be giving demoralizing quotes to Politico if they can’t get their way. The truth is we don’t have any time for whining. If members of Congress want to replace Biden on the ticket, they can. They need to get together and do it. If not, then drop the idea and move on. But again there is just no damn time for whining.

The replace Biden effort was slowing down before Saturday, Josh said, mostly because “it was hitting a lot more resistance from regular voters than the people pushing it anticipated.” As I wrote earlier this week, there simply wasn’t a significant shift in the polling. My take is if there really was significant concern that Biden was impaired and not just having a bad night, the party should have acted already and gotten the switch over with. The longer this drags out, the harder it’s going to be for Biden to reassure voters he’s still capable. But apparently not everyone in Washington was all that concerned. So here we are.

And now that Trump managed to survive getting his ear nicked he’s being hailed in even mainstream media as some kind of great man; a man of destiny; a new Napoleon, or something. It’s really sickening. Someone on social media today was praising Trump for “rising up” after being shot, while President Biden sometimes has trouble walking. I never saw him have trouble walking, but apparently there’s a video. I responded that one of our greatest presidents couldn’t walk at all because of polio, and that superior ambulatory skills have nothing to do with the job. But I’m ready to go find a quiet spot in the woods someplace and just scream for an hour or so. This has to be the worst election year ever.

Update: Shots were fired at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. Trump appears to have been grazed near his ear, but he doesn’t seem to be seriously injured. There are no reports anyone else was shot. The shooter is, reportedly “down.”

Updates: One attendee was killed, and another seriously injured. Trump will be okay, according to all reports. Also the shooter is dead. The story now is that he was shooting from a rooftop outside the security perimeter. I’m surprised the Secret Service could get to him so quickly.

***

You may have seen some of this yesterday. Here’s the complete video of Biden’s rally in Detroit last night. Do watch at least some of it if you haven’t seen it already. They should just run bits of this rally as Biden campaign ads.

Bernie Sanders has an op ed in the New York Times endorsing Joe Biden for president. It has struck me that the MSNBC evening hosts have been supportive of Biden, even while cautiously holding a door open to the possibility of replacement. I’m sure there are exceptions, but from what I’ve seen the progressive wing is either behind Biden or sitting out the argument. Most of the naysayers appear to be centrists. One can understand how Democrats running for re-election in red and swing states are nervous about whether Biden on the top of the ticket will help or hurt them. And it’s the Usual Weenies at the New York Times and centrist pundits like Jonathan Chait who seem most certain Biden has to go.

I say anyone who is certain how Biden will do, or not, against Trump in November is blowing smoke. We are in new territory here. Old patterns may not fit. A lot can still happen that could push the contest in any direction. And now even People magazine is running articles on Project 2025 and tying it to Trump. Some awareness of it seems to be breaking through, finally.

With everything else going on I hadn’t realized that large parts of Houston lost power a few days ago, and lots of people are still waiting to get it back. Hurricane Beryl swept through on Monday, and 2.2 million people in Houston lost power. As far as I can tell, it’s still out for a few hundred thousand households. So no air conditioning. In Texas. In July. I understand people are sleeping in their cars. So far, only three heat-related deaths have been reported. I won’t be surprised if that number goes up.

And the power company’s tracking system failed and could not pinpoint where power was out. Houstonians figured out they could check where power might be by looking at their Whataburger apps, which showed which Whataburgers were in operation and which weren’t.

A lot of people do have backup generators, but they were having a hard time getting gas to power their generators. Solar panels with backup batteries, people. This should be a no-brainer in Texas. The solar panel industry people insist that the panels will survive hurricane force winds.

Note that this is the third time this year there has been a significant power outage in Houston. Hurricane season hasn’t peaked yet. So when will Texans get mad enough to vote in new politicians who will overhaul the energy system? Seems to me there’s no need for anyone to mess with Texas, since it does such a good job of screwing itself.

We seem to be back at square one. Currently Conventional Wisdom says that somebody is about to take Joe Biden aside and tell him to step down. So who knows? I caught a bit of the press conference he held yesterday and enjoyed hearing President Biden speak intelligently about foreign policy, as opposed to Trump, who says NATO is dead. And lately Trump seems to think Hannibal Lechter is a real person.

I’m seeing news stories saying that the polls aren’t significantly different from what they were before the debate. Here’s one:

538’s average of the presidential race includes a few dozen polls fielded entirely after the June 27 debate. Most show a modest gain for former President Donald Trump over Biden, and the average has correspondingly increased from about a dead heat on debate day to a lead of around two points for Trump as of July 11 at noon Eastern.

Observers and operatives, as they are wont to do, have made hay of this.

The article goes on to say that this is a marginal difference, not a steep one. And an ABC News / Washington Post poll that came out this week says the race is tied, or at least the difference is within the margin of error. The numbers say that a substantial number of people who would prefer Biden drop out are still going to vote for him if he doesn’t.

This is from NPR, today: “The race for the presidency remains statistically tied despite President Biden’s dismal debate performance two weeks ago, a new national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.” And Ed Kilgore writes at New York magazine, “Biden v. Trump Polls: Joe’s Support Is Slipping, But Not Crashing.”

So whatever you want to call this conflagration over the debate performance, it appears it really hasn’t created a groundswell of support for Trump. But it does make the Electoral College map a bit iffy for Biden. And it’s caused a real problem with Biden’s Super PAC donors.

So, I’m back to having no idea what the party will do.

A Weenie for the Ages

File this one under “what we’re up against.” U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin’s 6th District this week trotted out all his Mommy issues for all to see.

In a speech on the House floor Thursday, Representative Glenn Grothman railed against government programs such as subsidized childcare, calling out President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” as taking “the purpose out of the man’s life, because now you have a basket of goodies for the mom.”

Grothman went further in his misogynist rant, blaming the “breakdown of the family” on “people like Angela Davis, well-known Communist, people like the feminists who were so important in the 1960s” and somehow coupling them with the U.S. government in the 1960s. 

“So I hope the press corps picks up on this, and I hope Republican and Democrat leadership put together some sort of plan for January, in which we work our way back to where America was in the 1960s,” Grothman added.

Wow, Angela Davis. I hadn’t thought about her in years. Yeah, so I guess that there never used to be such a thing as poverty or irresponsible men or any of that until the government passed laws that, what, made men irrelevant? That’s not exactly what I remember. But where do these specimens come from? Well, okay, his district is just north of Madison and Milwaukee. I’m guessing more Holsteins live there than people. Maybe he needs more contact with human women so he doesn’t mistake us for cows.

Update: Rudy Has a Bad Day

A judge has dismissed Rudy’s bankruptcy case.

A judge threw out Rudy Giuliani ’s bankruptcy case on Friday, slamming the former New York City mayor as a “recalcitrant debtor” who thumbed his nose at the process while seeking to shield himself from a $148 million defamation judgment and other debts.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane criticized Giuliani for repeated “uncooperative conduct,” self-dealing, and a lack of transparency. The judge cited failures to comply with court orders, failure to disclose sources of income, and his apparent unwillingness to hire an accountant to go over his books.

“Such a failure is a clear red flag,” Lane wrote.

Dismissing the case ends his pursuit of bankruptcy protection, but it doesn’t absolve him of his debts. His creditors can now pursue other legal remedies to recoup at least some of the money they’re owed, such as getting a court order to seize his apartments and other assets.

I’m going to go out on a tentative limb and predict that Joe Biden will remain the nominee, assuming there are no new public malfunctions. Here are some of the tea leaves I’ve seen over the past several hours:

The Congressional Black Caucus is staying with Biden.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave Biden a ringing endorsement yesterday.

Today a report in Axios says the anti-Biden rebellion in Congress is crumbling. It hasn’t completely crumbled, but it appears to be a minority that isn’t getting anywhere.

Some contrairian evidence:

Bill Kristol thinks Biden should get out of the race. Bill Kristol is always wrong.

James Carville thinks Biden should be pushed out. Carville hasn’t been worth listening to for a couple of decades, IMO.

The New York Times editorial board thinks Biden is toast. See above about Kristol and Carville. The Times editorial board isn’t always wrong, but it has terrible political instincts, IMO.

What pushed me over the line, so to speak, is going to sound a little weird. Politico reports that a “top Democratic pollster” that I confess I’ve never heard of —  Bendixen & Amandi? — has a poll out showing Biden dropping considerably behind Trump. But against a hypothetical Kamala Harris candidacy, Harris beats Trump. But guess who would really beat Trump like a prizefighter if she got in the race now? Hillary Clinton.

Sure she would. I’m guessing HRC even now is waiting for the call asking her to come and save the party and the nation. A call I hope she never gets. This poll is nuts. And the opportunists have arrived.

When Trump heard about this poll he threw a fit, as you can imagine.

What could tilt the equation the other way? I’d be worried if Bill Kristol changes his mind, for one thing. Seriously, I can think of a couple of people whose opinions weigh more than most, and those people are Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Barack Obama has already said “bad debate nights happen.” Pelosi has been a bit more on the fence. But if either of those came out and said that Biden should drop out, that would seriously change the direction of conventional wisdom. And, of course, President Biden absolutely cannot afford any more bad debate nights or any more episodes of being publicly frail.

Othewise, I’m predicting that by this time next week most of the Democratic Party will be prepared to stand with Biden. I don’t expect everyone to fall in line that quickly, but most will. Not that my predictions pan out all the time, either. For what it’s worth.

What a surreal time this is. We still have no idea how the Democratic Party is going to move forward in the presidential race. The party seems to be splitting between a “we need a new candidate” faction and a “let’s rally around Joe” faction.  And I have no idea what they should do. See also David Kurtz, What An Utterly Surreal Week In American Politics.

The best news over the weekend is from France. Polls had predicted that the far right National Rally party would take control of the government in a “snap” vote, but it failed. It came in third after two other coalitions, one very left-wing and the other of center-left Maronists. The coalition-building saved France. People put aside differences and united to freeze out the Right. How this will work in governing going forward is likely to be messy, I understand, but at least the neo-Vichy faction will have little to say about anything.

Joyce Vance mentioned France in her column yesterday.

Recent polls aren’t as good for Joe Biden as he might have wanted them to be and there are a lot of people on social media suggesting a Trump victory is inevitable. Of course, we know that’s not the case. Polls are mixed, and people pushing a certain narrative don’t always have pure motives and often aren’t who they pretend to be online. November is a long way out. Polls ahead of the snap election in France showing a quick, easy victory for Le Pen and the far right got it completely wrong. And as the Angry Staffer account tweeted this morning, “Polls don’t vote.”

This is a good motto for us to adopt. Polls don’t vote. People do. So this week, make sure you register if you aren’t already. If you have registered, check online at one of the sites like iwillvote.com to make sure you stay registered, have a plan to vote in November, and make sure your ballot gets counted. Make it your business to encourage your friends and your family to do the same. It’s very simple: We can’t win if we don’t vote.

All is not yet lost. A lot can happen between now and November.  And here, again, we might take a lesson from France. Josh Marshall:

There’s also some real extent to which numerous Le Pen/RN candidates were revealed as racists, scoundrels, wife beaters (Frenchified Trumpers basically) and that hurt them some too. Not that this is terribly surprising. But Marine Le Pen has managed over the last decade a significant rebranding of the party her father founded. Kinder gentler racist nationalists basically, with less Vichy nostalgia and tchotchkes. But reporting over the last few weeks showed that lots of the candidates were totally the old team under a thin patina of gold paint.

Many voters appaently have amnesia about how awful Trump was a POTUS, and how awful he is as a human being generally. They need to be reminded. A lot.

One other recent development is that the details of the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project appear to be finally breaking through to the general U.S. public. And the public doesn’t like it. Trump, of course, claims he never heard of it and knows nothing about it but thinks it’s ridiculous even though he knows nothing about it. And apparently the Trump campaign is telling the RNC to back off of calling for a national abortion ban, even though that’s what Republicans will do as soon as they get enough control of the government. All I know is, if the public is going to learn more about what is planned, the Dems and supporters need to take out a whole lot of television advertising explaining it. News media won’t do it.