President Joe Biden caught a lot of flack on social media after inviting 45 to the oval post-election. Progressives on my feeds couldn’t understand why he would seem to legitimize a scoundrel, a criminal like Trump. How could he? Outrage ensued. Understandable. I wasn’t thrilled about it either. But I responded to someone’s post at the time with this: “I think it’s because he believes we’re going to get through this and he thinks it’s important that America sees how a real president is supposed to behave.” Ben Meiselas asked him about it in an exclusive interview, posted below.
The interview is excellent on multiple levels, one being that Biden snubbed the fickle mainstream media and granted this exclusive interview to Ben Meiselas of MeidasTouch Network, one of the fastest growing progressive media companies that happens to deal in reality. Ben chose excellent questions. Biden gave some answers that will surprise progressives. And he threw in a couple of illuminating stories. Biden is smart but not cynical. That’s hard for the average person to do. His faith in democracy and the American people comes through.
A digression. It was incredibly disappointing to me that my fellow democrats went for the “Biden’s too old and will for sure lose” media narrative. It wouldn’t have worked without democratic help, but that is a post for another day. I will only say here that I believe if we had gotten behind Biden instead of viewing him through republican eyes, the American people would likely have come home and voted for the incumbent president (just like Iowans did for Grassley). I could be wrong. We’ll never know. But the alternative plan didn’t work out either, which we now know. No shot against Kamala Harris who did her best and was really good.
John Stoehr wrote with the greatest clarity on the issues concerning Biden being abandoned by us or what I think of as the democratic party freak out. He mentions ageism, fear, and not thinking it through. I agree with pretty much everything he said on the subject.
Here are links if you are interested.
editorialboard.com/dont-let-one-very-bad-debate-kill-your-confidence-in-biden/
editorialboard.com/so-many-pundits-make-dumping-joe-biden-look-so-very-easy/
In any event, the man who was responsible for democracy living to see another day deserved better than he got from his party. I hope you will take the time to watch this respectful, professional interview by Ben Meiselas. No cliche press corps style gotcha questions for click bait, only authentic questions that I think many of us would ask Joe Biden if we had the chance.
I’ll just leave it here. We are going to miss him when he’s gone. Thank you, Mr. President.
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