If the Democrats, led by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, can’t beat a guy who refers to fictional characters like they’re real, America is even more jacked up than we think.
ABOVE PHOTO: President Joe Biden speaks at the 115th NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas, July 16, 2024. Democrats at the highest levels are making a critical push for Biden to reconsider his election bid. Former President Barack Obama has privately expressed concerns to Democrats about Biden’s candidacy. And Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi privately warned Biden that Democrats could lose the ability to seize control in the House if he didn’t step away from the race. Biden says he’s not dropping out believing he’s best to beat the Republican Trump.
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
By Denise Clay-Murray
When I was in the hospital a few years ago, SUN Managing Editor Teresa Emerson gave me an assignment: review the Tyler Perry series “For Better or Worse.”
I watched the episodes they had sent us to check out as I lay in a hospital bed with equipment strapped to me and a pic line transmitting medication throughout my system. Because I was expected to tell folks what I thought, I had to pay attention to what was going on.
I assessed that this would be 90 minutes — I’d watched three 30-minute episodes — of my life that I’d never get back. The writing was bad, the acting was bad, hell, even the MAKEUP was bad!
Since then, I’ve tried really hard to avoid things that feel like massive time wasters whenever possible. As you get older and realize you don’t have as much time as you used to, you get really picky about how you spend it.
Unfortunately, the life I lead requires that I have to entertain some time wasters. Like, for example, the 90 minutes I’ll never get back that was former President Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
Now, I could get into why this felt like a speech from one of his rallies. Or how he just rambled incoherently about everything from his recent shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, to firing the president and the rank and file of the United Auto Workers union to the strength of Hannibal Lecter. Or the “hammer” motion he made when talking about former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that alluded to her husband Paul’s beating with a hammer in October 2022.
But instead, I’ll say that if the Democratic Party really thinks that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris can’t create a messaging campaign to retain the White House over this clown and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and Quentin Fulks, principal campaign manager for the Biden/Harris campaign, needs to fire everybody.
Every. Damn. Body.
If your messaging apparatus can’t work with the material that Trump and the rest of the Republican Party gave you this week to come up with a campaign that gets the job of retaining the White House done, I don’t know what to tell you.
Over the last three weeks, voters have been bombarded with stories calling on President Biden to step down — and to allow his vice president to be stepped over — because of the president’s performance in the June 27 presidential debate. He’s old, they say. He can’t speak well, they say.
The president’s stutter notwithstanding, if you can look me in the face and tell me that the stream of consciousness we sat through for 90 minutes Thursday night is somehow better, I’m going to connect you with some of Philly’s local playwrights. You’re a better actor than you probably thought.
Right now, there’s an effort by big-ticket Democratic donors to starve the party of money in an attempt to get Biden out because, thanks to the self-fulfilling prophecy that tanking your nominee becomes, his poll numbers are down in battleground states.
But no matter how often the media asks him, President Biden has said he’s not stepping down. He’s not mulling it over. He’s not considering it. He’s not looking for a way to leave so that you can screw over his vice president. He’s staying in the race.
(On some level, Biden is learning what it feels like to be a woman in corporate America. He’s told people what he’s going to do. He’s said it more than once. He’s emphasized it in a variety of ways. And folks have decided that they’re not going to listen. Hopefully, he’ll address this if he gets a second term.)
As I said, if you can’t combat the last few weeks with a combination of Trump’s nomination speech, the return to the 1800s that is Project 2025, and many of the speeches from the RNC, you need to find a new line of work.
Because if you can’t make lemonade out of this bushel of lemons, I don’t know what to tell you.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, The Philadelphia Sunday SUN, the author’s organization, committee or other group or individual.
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