My podcast partner Joe Klein made a smart point the other day about this coming week: The major political event will not be Super Tuesday as it usually is in a presidential election year. The main event, he said, will be President Biden’s State of the Union address or “Super Thursday”.
The reasons for this are obvious. The president is hounded by polls that show him trailing former president Trump nationally and in most if not all of the so-called “battleground states”; the Big Seven that will decide the outcome in the Electoral College. More drastically, he’s hounded by the fact that 86 (!) percent of the nation’s electorate think he’s “too old to serve another term as president.”
We’ve never seen numbers like that. Ever.
“Super Thursday” offers Biden the opportunity to allay concerns about his age, at least somewhat. And there is reason for Team Biden to think the State of the Union address will allay those concerns, somewhat. Perhaps the most important reason is this: what Mark Halperin calls the Dominant Media want it to be successful and will do what it can to describe the speech as a “Comeback Kid” moment.
We’ll see. If it bombs, if Biden’s “age issue” is amplified by his performance Thursday night, then you can expect the level of panic in Democratic Party and Dominant Media circles to reach DEFCON 3. You can also expect at least some (more senior) party leaders to come forward and suggest the president consider not seeking re-election. You’ll know we’ve reached DEFCON 2 when those same party leaders come forward and demand the president not seek re-election.
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