American voters will not elect Joe Biden on November 5^th.

That’s an important point to remember, so I will restate it. American voters will not elect Joe Biden on November 5^th.  After the first debate on June 27^th, Joe Biden has two choices: 1) step aside and release his delegates; or 2) watch Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025.

Thursday’s debate was not a “bad night” for the President. It was a career-ending disaster. A bad night is when Biden gets a couple facts wrong or when he fails to correct some of Trump’s most egregious lies. A career-ending disaster is when the President is incoherent for 90 minutes.  A career-ending disaster is when you are given two minutes to answer an important question and you only use 38 of the 120 seconds. All the GOP has to do now is take the choice cuts from those 90 minutes (of which there are many) and play them over and over for the next four months.

It was a career-ending night for Biden and it was a campaign-ending night for the Democrats. More than a few Dems running for lower office now face oblivion because so many Independents and Democrats who were leaning toward Biden may just stay home on election day. Who could blame them? The debate’s denouement saw the two men running for President arguing about who had a lower golf handicap. The Republicans love it when their guy blathers about his imaginary golf championships. The Dems, not so much. Neither candidate is eligible for the office, but the GOP is totally committed to their idiot.  For the Dems, Thursday was a wanna-get-away moment.

It is now the week after the debate and I’ve watched the Democratic talking heads who were dispatched to the Sunday and weekday talk shows by the Democratic National Committee, scripts in hand, telling us to move along, nothing to see here. Biden had a bad night, he had a cold, he’s always been a stutterer. They sound like John Belushi begging Carrie Fisher’s forgiveness in The Blues Brothers.

“I ran outta gas…I had a flat tire…I didn’t have enough money for cab fare…my tux didn’t come back from the cleaners…an old friend came in from outta town…someone stole my car…there was an earthquake…a terrible flood…LOCUSTS!”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9Yl5CXvcQ

They say that when you’re alone with Biden in the Oval Office (and boy, would I love a chance to do that), Biden is as sharp as they come; he’s a mixture of JFK, MLK, and FDR in their prime. And how about his sharp performance in North Carolina the next day? He shook his fist and told us to “get back up!” The American public is not going to buy any of this nonsense because we saw what we saw and we heard what we heard, and if any of us didn’t see it, the GOP is going to show it to us in every TV ad through November. The electorate is not going to buy the DNC’s whitewash campaign because we already suspected Biden is at, or close to, dementia. Thursday was just a confirmation. Biden was down in the polls before the debate. So how is it possible that the electorate is even marginally capable of believing Biden is as sharp as a tack after watching the man have a stage-4 mental meltdown on national television?

Among the talking heads to tell me I’m panicking were Nancy Pelosi (84 years old) and Jim Clyburn (83 years old) who the DNC trotted out on CNN. Maybe the strategy was for me to look at their palsies and inarticulation and conclude that Biden by comparison might not be that bad. Certainly, neither of these two octogenarians had anywhere near the logic, the poise, or the reasonable explanations to assuage anyone’s fears.

The Democratic Party’s game plan for this is worse than not working; it is pathetic. Which is sad because it always works when the Republicans do it. Donald Trump has been shoveling horseshit into GOP voters’ ears for 10 years and they believe every word of it. He’s without question the most morally compromised man in politics in my lifetime and yet a large percentage of the Evangelical faiths believe that he was sent here by God. No, seriously. They do. If Biden were the GOP candidate, FOX News would just tell their audience that the debate never happened, you dreamed what you saw, and that Biden actually spent Thursday night doing push-ups on the White House lawn. 70 million GOP voters would believe it because FOX said it. Crisis solved.

As of today, the national media, major donors, and down-ballot Dem candidates are saying that Joe Biden should resign, but, cowards that they are, are mostly saying it in private. The White House and the DNC, hoping that this is a passing media-cycle stomach virus, are telling their base to sit down, shut up, and not panic. The Democratic voting base, especially the ones in the swing states (myself included), are looking online about how to apply for dual citizenship – anywhere. The Biden family meanwhile, retreated to Camp David, to Helm’s Deep in Maryland’s Catoctin woods where the orks can’t reach them and where, if the media has it right, will not convince Joe to go, but rather to boost his confidence (“Maybe you defeated Medicare instead of inflation, Grandpop, but that’s okay, you’ll get ‘em next time”).

The question is, why do so many otherwise intelligent and insightful people fail so miserably when the time comes for them to step down? Of course, it is not an easy decision. It means admitting to yourself that your life’s work has come to its end and you must allow a younger generation to take over. The lime lighted days are over. We see it all the time in public life. Athletes hang around long after their glory years have passed. Once A-list actors take smaller and smaller roles in low budget movies. At least politicians can be tossed unceremoniously onto the scrap heap by their voters if they grow too old to do the job.

Or can they?

This pathetic week in American history got me thinking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the person whom Joe Biden should be channeling for advice. Ginsburg was one of U.S. history’s legal titans, building a body of scholarship and achievement long before she was put on the Supreme Court. Her Supreme Court tenure cemented her position in U.S. history; her erudition will be studied in law schools as long as there are law schools in the United States. She did all this, then….

She didn’t resign. She was 83 years old during Obama’s last year in office. She had had both colon and pancreatic cancer by then and had had a stent placed in her coronary artery. She was still in control of her mental faculties and decided that she would remain on the Court as long as she enjoyed her mental acuity (although, having said that, how would a person who has lost their cognitive faculties be aware of the fact that they lost their cognitive faculties?). Undoubtedly, she assumed that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election which would afford her another four years to resign and be replaced by a qualified jurist. It is reported that she was furious with people who put pressure on her during Obama’s second term to retire. It was her job, her life, and the decision to retire was hers only. She even rebuffed Obama himself, who called Ginsburg to the Oval Office during his last year for a life coaching session.

Ginsberg died from pancreatic cancer at age 87 on September 18, 2020, roughly six weeks before the 2020 election. The Republican Party, still in control of the Presidency and the Senate, affirmed Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ginsburg in 37 days. Justice Barrett is cited even by her political opponents as usually the smartest person in every room she walks into. She was the smartest student, the smartest professor, the smartest lawyer, and the smartest judge. She may very well be the smartest mind on today’s Court.  But Barrett is something else as well. Barrett is a religious ideologue. Her appointment, the last of Donald Trump’s SCOTUS troika (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett), guaranteed that the Supreme Court will be ultra-conservative for at least the next 20 years. Barrett and her conservative colleagues on the Court are methodically undoing all the monuments that Ginsberg spent her life building.

Do I blame Donald Trump for this? No.  Do I blame Mitch McConnell, the Senate leader who orchestrated Barrett’s rapid confirmation? No. Do I blame Barrett herself? No.

Then who is to blame? Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and only Ruth Bader Ginsberg is to blame. She suffered from pride, which early Church leaders cited as the worst and most demonic of the seven deadly sins. A wise and brilliant mind (and Ginsburg was most assuredly a wise and brilliant mind) can easily avoid the character flaws which early Church moralists called the seven deadly sins, except for one: pride. It’s the Achilles Heel that accompanies the high IQ. After a lifetime of being right, you start to think you can never be wrong. Ooops.

Who knows if Ginsburg ever considered the downside of her remaining on the Court after Obama’s second term. One thing is clear. She certainly had no right to stay on. Most of us have a right to decide when to retire. We have that right because, compared to being a Supreme Court Justice, our jobs are just not too consequential. People don’t die if I make a wrong decision. People don’t lose their civil rights if I have a bad day at the office. That is reality. Ginsburg’s job, on the other hand, was a public trust. It wasn’t hers to keep. We gave her that job because we trusted that when the day came for her to step away she would be wise enough to realize it and resign. She failed us. In that one decision to stay on, she compromised a brilliant legacy and helped to condemn the country to decades of a renegade SCOTUS.

Now comes Joe Biden. The stakes now are way higher than Ginsberg’s failure. Reportedly, Joe Biden, his family, and the sycophants who surround him at the White House have convinced each other that the 90-minute mental blackout that Biden suffered last Thursday ain’t no big thing. They tell us that Biden can still beat Trump, who, by the way, did you notice lied a lot at the debate? Trump lied? What? How dare he! Wait ‘til the electorate finds out.

Trump was ahead in the national polls before the debate. More importantly, he was ahead in all six crucial swing states before the debate. Barring some earthshaking event (something more than, say, Trump being convicted of a felony), there is virtually no way that Biden wins Georgia, Arizona, or Nevada. Although Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are closer, Trump would win these states as well if the election were held the day before the debate.

But this is after the debate. So, are things better now for Biden? Did Biden use the debate to reset his campaign? Here’s how much Trump is winning in the six swing States as of July 1st:

Biden’s campaign is being kept alive with a respirator and a feeding tube. And the family is not giving us permission to pull the plug. Wonderful.

Joe Biden and his inner circle think….what? That if the 50 million people who watched the debate ignored what we saw, then, what would we do? Vote for Joe Biden?  No, not according to about two dozen polls. If we all purge what we saw last Thursday, then we’re back to last Wednesday, which is Trump winning at least 5 of the 6 swing states.

It is nothing short of astonishing that this is so difficult for the Democratic worthies to figure out.

I think the psychologists call it groupthink, when a bunch of otherwise intelligent people sitting in a house that’s on fire start to smell smoke, then see their clothes start to singe, but tell each other that everything is okay, simply because they want it to be okay. No one wants to be the first to go against the group and speak his mind. So they burn.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg did not want to spend what she knew were the last few years of her life sitting in her home in D.C. dreaming about her glory years. Instead, she condemned us to a lifetime of Amy Coney Barrett. Joe Biden doesn’t want to admit he’s too old, his career is over, and it’s time to go back to Delaware with his vicious German Shepherd. So he’s going to condemn us to a second Trump term which is probably going to be longer than four years after Donald Trump refuses to leave office in 2028.

Both of these otherwise admirable government servants glibly traded in their legacies for just a few more moments of vanity’s light.  That greatest of the seven deadly sins, hubris, blinded their eyes to the career exit sign that would have ensured them a hero’s place in history.

America gets to pay the price.

John J. Barton