The Outsider Perspective Issue 400

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the Florida man who spent Independence Day on the water, getting alligators to open his beer from the boat. It feels like a real-life version of the old Bud Light commercials, “Real Men of Genius.” Florida Man remains the most resourceful of all rednecks.

I want to thank you again for sharing, liking, and subscribing to videos as I upload them to YouTube. It’s a fun venture that has taught me a lot of new skills. Check The Horse Race on YouTube.

This week, Joe Biden held his “big boy” press conference, during which he actually took questions from reporters. It was the first time he’d done that since October/November 2023. Did it change anything? Well, it depends on who you ask in Congress. We’ll get into that and far more—links to follow.

Quick Hits: 

• There are many facets to the Biden story. One of the underreported aspects is campaign funding. The Biden campaign is bleeding campaign donors, particularly the largest ones. Major donors are trying to flex some power over the Democratic Party by cutting off money from Biden. If this keeps up and Biden’s expenditures remain elevated, he could face a critical cash shortfall as the peak of campaign season hits.
• We’re hearing more and more stories about how the White House has edited and lied about conducting interviews with local media. This week, a Milwaukee radio station agreed to edit an interview with Joe Biden to remove things the White House deemed as bad answers by Biden.
• Noah Pollack tweeted, “One of the single most incredible things about Biden is that he really does view himself on foreign policy as a combination of Metternich, Bismark, and Cardinal Richelieu, not as a guy who screws up everything he touches.” The men mentioned here form the backbone of Henry Kissinger’s seminal work, “Diplomacy.” Noah is dead on accurate with this observation. Biden shares this conceit with Obama and, to a lesser extent, Hillary Clinton. The Obama/Biden orbit believes they are the grand masters of the universe when it comes to foreign policy and that hubris has cratered things worse than anything else.

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Where you can find me this week 

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Horse Race Ep. 005: Schumer Open To Biden LEAVING | Latest July Polls Show Strong Trump Lead

Biden’s Scripted Questions Reveals Media’s Role In Conspiracy – Conservative Institute

Democratic Party’s Impasse: To Kick Biden Or Not? – Conservative Institute

July Polling Is Clear – It’s Trump’s Race To Lose – Conservative Institute

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It’s 3 AM – Do You Know Where Your President Is?

In the middle of the week, a very funny line from Democrats started emerging over Biden: Is that your final answer? On Monday, the White House went on a full media blitz. Biden released a letter to all Democrats and went on Morning Joe on MSNBC. Biden dared Democrats to go to war with him over the nomination.

That effort worked through Tuesday. Then, Wednesday morning, Nancy Pelosi ripped the bandaid off, suggesting Biden could still step aside. The New York Times gave the best summary of this:

Anger has not worked. Fear has not worked. Panic has not worked. Bluntness has not worked. Sadness has not worked. Concern has not worked.

Elected Democrats and donors have been all over the emotional map this week as they scrutinize the state of President Biden’s viability as a candidate against former President Donald J. Trump, trying everything from directly pleading with him to drop out of the race to freaking out in silence. All of it has only gotten Mr. Biden’s Irish up, as he would say, igniting a stubbornness that is as key to his political brand as resilience.

But on Wednesday, Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker — and one of the few elected Democrats whose opinion the President actually cares about — tried another tack: She telegraphed not panic but respect, in hopes of appealing to the Joe Biden who has taken a breath and stepped aside in the past — not the Joe Biden who is currently staring down his party, daring Democrats to try to force him away from an office he spent decades pursuing.

“He’s beloved, he is respected, and people want him to make that decision, not me,” Ms. Pelosi said on “Morning Joe,” the President’s favorite news show. “I want him to do whatever he decides to do, and that’s the way it is.”

Multiple Senators and Representatives who were undecided about Biden started repeating that line to reporters: “We want Biden to do whatever he decides to do.”

It’s a confusing line because Biden had just finished saying, “I’m staying in the race.“ And on Thursday evening, Biden repeated that line about continuing to run for the Presidency.

The media then built up the press conference at the NATO event for Biden. The White House referred to it as a “Big Boy“press conference, which triggered an onslaught of memes. In the lead-up to the presser, Biden referred to Ukrainian President Zelenskky as “President Putin.“  And during the first question of the press conference, Biden referred to “Vice President Trump.“

After that, Biden largely settled into the questions and answers, using a list of reporters from the White House staff to call on. The questions he got were mostly a waste of time; after multiple think pieces of an “angered press,“ none of the beat reporters was interested in asking the hard questions, and Biden avoided anyone who would ask anything tough.

The problem for Democrats: Biden likely did just enough to stay on the ticket. However, the two significant slip-ups will define this speech in the public’s mind. It was the worst possible outcome for Democrats. Jonathan Swan reported in The New York Times live blog:

People close to Trump are thrilled about Biden’s solid enough performance. It was strong enough, they perceive/hope, to keep his candidacy alive. They foresee a landslide with Biden as their opponent and would rather not have anything happen to introduce risk, change or uncertainty. The status quo is their clear preference, even if they hardly fear Kamala Harris.

I agree with the Trump team’s assessment of the race. It’s how I’m reading it, too. If Trump could cancel the convention, he probably would at this point. Just air the Democratic Convention live and all the moaning and groaning. I hope Donald Trump continues having fun playing golf.

Biden’s performance wasn’t enough to stem the tide of Democrats demanding he step aside. Now, 17 Democratic members of Congress, including Vermont Senator Peter Welch, are asking Biden to step aside. CBS News reports that more defections are coming. Politico adds that none of the issues doubters have are gone.

I have no idea where this goes. Biden has done enough to stay in, but Thursday was the first time I felt he could step aside.

Here’s why: A deep power struggle was laid bare in the Democratic Party. Hilariously enough, George Clooney’s op-ed in the New York Times brought everything to light. That op-ed deeply angered the Biden White House.

As soon as Clooney’s column went live, the White House attacked it (watch Jake Tapper’s reaction on CNN when the White House claims Biden has more stamina than George Clooney). More telling, though, was the next day on MSNBC’s Morning Joe — Joe Biden’s favorite political show.

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reported that the Clooney op-ed was a sign that Barack Obama was behind the effort to remove Biden from the ticket. I say “reported“ on purpose; they’re repeating exactly what the Biden administration believes.

Later, CNN and Politico ran stories about how Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi were working together to navigate Biden’s collapse.

Here’s an even deeper irony to that: Biden is blaming all of this on Obama now, and Biden’s plan for survival is to wrap himself in the cloak of the Congressional Black Caucus and dare white liberals (and Obama) to oppose him. The White House has already hinted that no Black congressional members have sided against Biden. Benjy Sarlin deemed it “mutually assured destruction.“ Take Biden down? He destroys you, too.

In terms of pure power politics, Biden made an impressive flanking move. He is using Democratic sensibilities against them. It’s a game of chicken, and Biden isn’t blinking (yet).

Biden has more sit-down interviews scheduled for next week. He’s still fighting to keep his ship afloat, and Democrats are continuing to jump overboard. I continue to think one large bombshell looms over this story: a medical diagnosis. That’s the nuclear bomb that hasn’t exploded.

I noted a story this week that raised a red flag. NBC News’ show “Top Story with Tom Llamas“ had Dr. Tom Pitts, a board-certified neurologist, on to discuss Biden’s health. Here was the Mediaite headline: “Parkinson’s Doctor Tells NBC Biden Has ‘Classic Features‘ of Disease: ‘I Could Have Diagnosed Him From Across the Mall'”

Watch that clip if you can; it’s remarkable. Pitts said:

“I see him 20 times a day in clinic,“ Pitts said of Biden. “It’s ironic because he has the classic features of neurodegeneration, word-finding difficulties, and that’s not, oh, I couldn’t find the word, that’s from degeneration of the word retrieval area.”

Pitts also said he’s a Democrat, but the symptoms were apparent. That’s a red flag for two reasons. First, this is NBC News, and they had an expert on to claim Biden straight up has Parkinson’s Disease.

Second, that decision is not an accident. As a lawyer, journalists shop for experts the same way lawyers do in litigation. You put the expert witness on the stand who says what you need to win the case. You blast the other side’s expert witness. The same is true of TV. NBC News is airing doctors who say Biden has Parkinson’s Disease – that is a specific editorial decision.

Compare this to Morning Joe. They had Dr. Vin Gupta on to talk about Biden’s health. He dutifully did his job and appeared on TV in scrubs to say Biden was in fine health. Here’s the difference. Pitts is an expert in Parkinson’s. Gupta is a pulmonologist who rose to MSNBC fame in 2020 over the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of these men is a literal expert in the disease in question. The other is not. On Biden’s favorite show, the press rolls out a doctor who says what Biden wants. They’re throwing the actual experts on Parkinson’s Disease in other places.

At this point, I think you have to work under the presumption the White House is lying about everything related to Biden. And you have to work on the belief that there’s a diagnosis of something pertaining to Biden. The White House never lets Biden’s doctor talk to the press. To cap things off, Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, is a business associate cutting deals with the Biden family on various ventures.

There’s been plenty of smoke surrounding Parkinson’s. Does that mean there is something? I have no idea. But suppose it comes out that the White House has purposely hidden this medical diagnosis. In that case, it will severely weaken the President. Do Democrats look to pull a pin on that specific grenade if they get it? That’s also unclear.

Barring that, Democrats are stuck. If Biden refuses, the only way to remove him is through brute force at the convention. The 25th Amendment won’t save them. Democrats could pivot and try to say the delegates aren’t bound to Biden, but I don’t know if they have the evidence to pull that off just yet.

If Democrats try to sway delegates away from Biden, they will need a medical diagnosis to do that, in my opinion. That would be a drastic decision, and delegates – handpicked by Biden – would need a powerful case to switch.

Does Barack Obama try to jump on this grenade? He could go full bare-knuckles and demand Biden step down. That would really lay bare the power dynamics at play. I doubt that happens for a variety of reasons. But Democrats are getting desperate. Releasing health records on Biden remains one of the only sure-fire strikes I think Democrats have – things get grim after that.

I say grim, but I don’t mean for me. I mean for Democrats. John Podhoretz captured my vantage point perfectly in Commentary (read the whole thing; it’s hilarious):

The agony here is all on one side. And it’s not my side. It’s being experienced by people who have spent the past eight years bathing luxuriantly in their own self-infatuated sense of their political virtue as demonstrated by their fixated hatred on all things Trump. That fixation either prevented them from seeing or kept them from admitting or gave them the permission structure for lying about the severity of Joe Biden’s condition. Now they are finding themselves in the choppiest political-emotional waters anyone has experienced in politics since the Republican New Hampshire primary in 2016 began to make it clear to non-revolutionary conservatives that our ideas had been supplanted and our understanding of the political rules was outdated. The people who are suffering today actually thought themselves immune from the self-doubts and sense of despair that gripped people like…me.

I was speaking to a friend, a very serious Catholic, who confessed (sorry) that he was enjoying the spectacle so much he felt guilty for his schadenfreude. I asked him whether this was because he thought his emotion did not befit a Christian. He said yes. I said, well, I don’t have that particular problem. I haven’t had this good a time in years. I hope there are another couple of polls to give Biden hope. That will keep all this going, and keep me entertained. Not much good can come out of any of this, so, just as the doctor told the young Alvy Singer when Alvy said he was depressed because the universe was expanding, “we might enjoy ourselves while we can, hah?”

Watch the NYT Editorial Board, Politico, Axios, and NBC News for clues on what happens next. Democrats are leaking more misery to the press than the Titanic taking on water.

Thirty-eight days to the Democratic Convention.