Your patient in the political emergency room is hemorrhaging support and showing weak vital signs. He is 20 points down on job approval, registering the approval of just 37.3% of registered voters (fivethirtyeight.com 7/12/24). He is down an incredible 44.3 points on the question of whether the country is on the right or wrong track. (RCP average 7/9/24). An unbelievable 85% of registered voters believe he is too old for the job, up from 81% in April (Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos 7/9/24). How would you help this patient?  And what would 

Our best spin doctors are unable to agree if he can recover from this. The ones that have hidden Biden’s deterioration from the public want him to stay in the race, risking a wholesale repudiation from an electorate, a majority of whom are siding with his opponent. His Republican opponent is the weakest nominee in more than 50 years but he is leading in most polls. Virtually all the rest of the political professionals consulted say this patient will not survive long on life-support.

Most won’t say in public what they think in private. They confidentially  tell their colleagues the prognosis is grim, but they do not share this with the family or any of the 81,283,098 people who voted for him last time. It is absolutely catastrophic political malpractice on the part of the Democratic Party and its leadership to hand the country, the Congress and the Supreme Court over to the far right to be systematically dismantled when it can, in fact, recalculate its route.

It is possibly the worse collective decision by a political party in U.S. history. Up until now the winner in that category was choosing Hubert Humphrey as its nominee in 1968. After millions had voted for anti-war candidates the convention rejected a peace plank in the platform. (They were afraid that LBJ would not support the ticket, an unprecedented disaster.). Humphrey was well behind Nixon (by 6%, beyond the margin of error) but they selected him anyway.

This, however, is far worse. Our party has held 50 conventions since we started in 1832. Historically the nominee may well not even be known until the mid-summer gathering. But this time the party aparaticks are continuing to rally behind a decent, honest man, whose legacy as president will be entirely destroyed if his opponent wins. How can they convince anyone that this is the most important election in our lifetime when they apparently do not even believe it themselves?