DON'T YOU QUIT!

If the Cretin News Network Baby-Kissing Competition two weeks ago was the bottom of the campaign to date, President Biden conclusively demonstrated with his speech last night in Detroit that the Baby-Kissing Competition was a one-off “bad night.” This speech was the top, the definition of a “barn burner.”

The speech was give at a rally at a high school gymnasium in Detroit. Biden walked on stage to audience chants of “Don’t you quit!”

In the speech, President Biden pitched his plan for the first 100 days of a second term with a Democratic Congress:

Restore Roe v. Wade.

Eliminate medical debt by having the government buy up such debt and cancel it.

Raise the minimum wage.

Protect workers’ right to organize.

Ban assault weapons.

Continue to “keep leading the world” on clean energy and addressing climate change.

Sign into law the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would end voter suppression, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would protect voter rights and election systems, as well as end partisan gerrymandering.

Biden reminded the audience that he was the first president to walk a picket line, because “when labor does well, everybody does well.”

“When Trump comes here to tell you how great he is for the auto industry, remember this: when Trump was president we lost 86,000 jobs in unions. I created 275,000 auto jobs in America. In fact, what’s been true in the auto industry is true all over America: since I became president, we created nearly 16 million new jobs nationwide, 390,000 of those jobs right here in Michigan. We’ve created 800,000 manufacturing jobs nationwide, including 24,000 in Michigan.”

Forcefully contrasting his own record with Trump, who he called “a loser,” Biden said, “Donald Trump is the only president in American history, other than Herbert Hoover, who lost more jobs than he had when he came in. That’s why I call him Donald ‘Herbert Hoover’ Trump.”

Biden also brought up Project 2025, the policy plan written by the Heritage Foundation on how to install a right wing dictatorship in the first 180 days Trump is in office.

Pointing out the calls in the document to criminalize the shipment of abortion medication, deny contraceptive coverage, make cuts to Medicare, and eliminate the Department of Education, he went on to say, “Project 2025 is the biggest attack on our system of government and our personal freedom that has ever been proposed to this country. We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not a joke. It’s time for us to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV. Another four years of Donald Trump is deadly serious. Deadly serious.”

He ended with a joke about his age, saying “I know I look 40”, telling the crowd that “with age comes wisdom. I know how to tell the truth, I know right from wrong, and I know I have demonstrated how to do this job.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called the speech “the best performance Biden’s given since the State of the Union”.

What was the response of the “Democratic elites” to the speech?

The New York Times reported that so long as Biden remains the nominee, major donors will put on hold “roughly $90 million in pledged donations”.

Let’s remember that among the Masters of the Universe, aka the “Major Donors” of the Democratic Party are the financial geniuses who keep funding the artistic antics written by, directed by, and starring George Clooney (“The Monuments Men” anyone? How about “Leatherheads”?), master of all those “Nespresso” ads.

Despite the Press Corpse, there was good news for Biden yesterday: polls show him improving since the Atlanta Baby Kissing Competition, and that there was no great loss in support after that - other than among the collection of clucks in Washington who remind us that Mark Twain’s 1873 observation: “Consider a congressman, then consider an idiot. Bah! I repeat myself!” is still true.

The NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Friday shows Biden leads Trump 50%-48% in a head-to-head matchup.

Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the dean of the Congressional Black caucus, told NBC that Biden “sometimes mangles words and phrases but all of that is almost natural for people who grew up stuttering. He has one of the best minds that I have ever been around … and so I would hope that we would focus on the substance of this man … and how he has run this country.

Asked by the reporter “Is this the same Joe Biden that we saw four years ago?”, Clyburn said: “No! I’m not the same Jim Clyburn that I was four years ago and in ten days I’ll be 84. But I’m a bit wiser than I was before … It’s biblical. When I became a man I put away childish things. Joe Biden has put away childish things because he has become a man. His opponent is still a child.”

Charlie Pierce said of Biden’s press conference on Thursday: “I was wavering. I admit it. But I’m not anymore. That was a president onstage on Thursday. But I’ve watched the dynamic of the past two weeks play out time and again. It chased Bill Clinton for eight years and it chased Al Gore for eight months. Clinton survived, barely, and Gore lost an election to trivia and some really horseshit reporting from the campaign press, which, in combination with the Florida Hijack, gave us the previous Republican Worst President Ever.”

According to The Clinton Rules, which the D.C. Press Corpse has followed ever since the Lewinsky “scandal,” once The Story is birthed, no matter which set of ratfuckers or bad reporters are its midwives, The Story must be kept alive. There will always be another document, another “issue,” another set of questions leading to Clouds and Shadows over the politician in question.

What continues to piss me off is that this time there are dozens of Democratic political geniuses (looking at you, Axelrod and Plouffe) and Masters of the Universe who continue to push their bullshit regardless of what President Biden does, none of whom seem to have any idea what they want beyond forcing the incumbent president off the ticket.

And this morning the 538.com forecast has Biden winning 51 to Trump’s 48.

President Biden's full speech in Detroit

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