INTERVIEW: Of Handicaps and Handicaps

By Reuvain Borchardt

Liz Mair, a conservative political strategist and commentator, spoke with Hamodia on Friday about the presidential debate.

Mair has done communications for the Republican National Committee, and for elected officials and political candidates including Carly Fiorina, Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, and Roy Blunt. She is currently working on U.K. elections with the Conservative Party.

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Going into last night, the big thing everyone wanted to see was about Biden’s cognitive abilities. I think it’s pretty near unanimous that he did not do well.

What tells you it was so bad is the fact that you actually have a lot of hardened Democrats, including people in the Obama administration who worked with him, know him well, people like David Plouffe, who were saying that Biden and Trump have an actual age difference of three years but it seemed like 30.

That’s really bad. 

It appears that a lot of senior Democrats who aren’t necessarily in the Biden orbit, but maybe come out of a more Obama world or Clinton world or Schumer world or other places, are literally to the point where they’re actually considering whether he should resign from the presidency. 

He managed to confuse Trump and Putin three times in the same sentence. He suggested that he went to the D-Day commemorations and talked to dead people. 

Trump might have been speaking for all the viewers when he said of Biden at one point, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, but I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

That was probably Trump’s best line of the night, especially because he didn’t deliver it as a really mean jab. He just said what everybody was thinking, probably including Biden himself.

Biden also, at least from what I heard, seemed to suggest that Beau died in the Iraq War, which he didn’t, obviously.

Michael Isikoff, an investigative journalist, tweeted today, “If anybody is vindicated this morning, it’s Robert Hur,” the prosecutor who looked into Biden in the documents case and tried to warn us about Biden’s cognitive condition. And I just kept thinking about that Beau comment. Yes, Hur was trying to do everybody a favor, and instead he just got attacked. 

I will also say, as somebody who’s watched a lot of Trump footage, it is interesting to me to watch how much Trump also has declined since 2020 and, of course, 2016. The problem is Biden has basically set the bar so low in terms of what anybody is supposed to consider passable for being president that Trump just had to lightly step across it, and he managed the feat, whereas Biden couldn’t. 

The bottom line, I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, neither of these people should be within a mile of the White House. 

But if you look at how people responded to this, pretty much only the most hardened Democratic partisans said that they thought Biden won. And I don’t even think he got all of those, because it looks like only 35% of people who watched the debate thought he won. 

If you continued watching CNN immediately after the debate, they had this panel discussion, and it seemed not a single one of the nine panel members didn’t think it was a disaster for Biden.

I didn’t see that panel; I was on another interview. But watching CNN this morning, I thought it was really interesting. CNN host Bakari Sellers was doing his absolute best to try to spin this, but all of the CNN morning anchors were pushing back really hard on everything Bakari was saying, and in a way that to me felt very personal and visceral. The general impression there was that the anchors thought they were getting something marginally better than what they got, and they were also just as shocked and appalled as the rest of the population.

I know we talk a lot about media bias, and I’m not saying there isn’t some media bias, but I actually think a lot of these guys try to do a reasonably fair and objective job. But it speaks to the fact that it was so bad that even the people who were supposed to be on TV leaving their personal emotion out of responses to this were sort of half-angry, half-mocking Bakari as he was sitting there trying to defend it.

So where do the Democrats go from here?

I don’t know what they do about this. We’re obviously in completely uncharted territory with this presidential race in about 16 different ways. And, personally, it’s hard for me to believe that anything could be worse than Democrats continuing with this nomination.

Everybody’s going to talk today about if it would be better if Biden stood down and Kamala Harris were the nominee. It’s hard for me to believe that I’m saying this, but yes, I think it would be.

Do I think she’s really up to doing the job? No. But part of me today is wondering, if he resigned on Monday and she took the reins, maybe by the time we got to Election Day, she would have, like, learned on the job, and who knows? But I feel like it’s got to be better than this. 

Gavin Newsom’s got to be better than this. JB Pritzker, pretty much anybody you can pull out of a hat has got to be better than this, and I don’t know what they’re going to do about it. I think it probably comes down to Jill Biden recognizing what everybody else is saying and how bad this is for her husband’s legacy and her whole family’s legacy, and moving in to stop the bleeding. But if she doesn’t, I don’t know if there’s a way of rectifying this.

I mean, there is obviously a mechanism. The people who actually vote as part of the Democratic National Convention in the Democratic National Committee can move in and take this all away from him. 

If I were Obama world right now, I would be going completely mental, because everything that they have done that has been trying to have Biden succeed as a way of carrying on even one iota of Obama’s legacy is getting scuppered, too. 

You said you think Trump has mentally declined since 2016 and 2020?

Oh, for sure. Though he’s always had a tendency towards rambling and covering up an inability to engage in any detail by just using superlatives.

A great example of that last night was he got asked a climate change question. Of course, he didn’t answer it; that’s fine. But when he finally got back to talking about clean air and clean water, he confused CO₂ with H₂O. Clearly, he’s not totally compos mentis, either. 

He turned part of the debate into a discussion about golf handicaps and how the fact that he plays a good golf game proves that he’s got the mental acuity to do the job. He’s not with the plot either. 

The only major difference is there is a three-year gap, and it shows. Also, where Biden sort of forgets what he’s saying and lets a sentence trail off, which leaves these big gaps, and then the moderator’s going, “You’ve got 45 more seconds, is there anything you want to add to that?” Trump doesn’t trail off, he takes what for you or me would be like 17 or 18 completely separate sentences, runs them all together, essentially makes the same point throughout and just throws out whatever numbers. Like he said last night that under Biden, 18 million people have crossed the border. Obviously a lot of people have crossed the border, but not even the most hardcore immigration restrictionists believe it’s 18 million people. He says stuff like this all the time. People dismiss it as him just lying or engaging in the superlative and maximizing everything. But it’s also a sign of mental decline — you get to a point where you can’t remember the number so you make something up.

And when you watch both of them walk on stage, neither of them is walking like if you had J.D. Vance and Kamala Harris walk on stage. They’d walk like normal humans. Neither Trump nor Biden is walking like a normal human at this point.

Nonetheless, Biden seemed so old and so bad that Trump came out as the winner of the debate, whereas if you had him debating Gavin Newsom, I think everybody would be like, “Oh my G-d, Trump is old, senile and totally crazy.” But this is what Democrats did, so, not my party, not my problem, to some degree.

Trump definitely seemed more restrained last night than usual. You’re attributing it to a mental decline. Is it not possible that he just learned from the 2020 debate not to interrupt? Then again, his mic was off while Biden was speaking, so maybe that helped him in that regard. 

I think the mics helped him. He had a couple of moments where you could see he started looking really angry. Obviously, his people worked really hard with him to try to prevent him from doing that, because when he does that look, the response from the viewers is total revulsion. So I’m not going to say he didn’t do anything that he should have done to perform in the debate, but the mics helped him.

I think the debate rules hurt both of them insofar as I actually think both of them would have done way better having an audience. Clearly, when Biden gets upset about something, he starts performing better. Like when he got mad at Trump, you could see his face got a little bit rosy and his performance improved. I’m not saying it improved to the point of being passable, but it did improve. I think if you’d had an audience there, Biden would have had more of that kind of emotion-triggered response, and clearly, for Trump, he feeds off the crowd.

I’m baffled by what both major parties and the campaigns are doing with the candidates. I don’t know who thought that this particular debate format was a good idea. 

I will say that as a viewer, I thought it was marginally better in that they kept it moving and we didn’t have a situation we sometimes have with other debates, where it’s supposed to last 90 minutes but runs overtime because there’s so much interrupting or talking over. Last night when we got to closing statements, part of me was like, “Thank G-d, it’s over, I can stop feeling like shooting myself in the head.” But also, I was like, “Oh, this actually was 90 minutes as they said it would be!”

If Biden were to drop out, whom do the Democrats have if not Harris? I don’t get the feeling that they’re very excited about the possibility of Harris.

They’re not. I don’t think they’re excited about any of the options that are in front of them right now, to be fair. It’s really a selection of very bad things, and nobody has any blueprint for what we’re dealing with.

If you have somebody step in this late, it is not a given that all the money Biden has raised automatically transfers across to another Democratic candidate. And Trump has been outraising Biden recently anyway. So if you’re going to do this, what you ideally want is to swap somebody in who basically can get on the phone in a day and raise millions, tens of millions of dollars. 

Hillary Clinton? Michelle Obama?

No. I think you’re looking at one of two people: JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, is exceptionally personally wealthy. He’s been doing a lot of work on various councils, and he is a surrogate for Biden, and probably prepping for this moment. If you subbed in JB Pritzker, he would probably end up spending quite a lot of his own money to compete, but he does have quite a lot of money to spend. I don’t think it would be my recommended option, but it is an option that doesn’t look completely insane. The other option that doesn’t look completely insane is Gavin Newsom. He doesn’t have the personal wealth that Pritzker does, but Newsom does have the ability to get on the phone and in a very short period of time raise all the money that you would need to actually do this. 

A lot of other people are talking about how, ideally, at this point, if Democrats are going to sub people out, what they’d like to do is sub in a Gretchen Whitmer/Raphael Warnock ticket. I totally get that in terms of the appeal. And if you put them on a debate stage, I think Gretchen Whitmer would completely clean Donald Trump’s clock and then everybody would say Trump does seem old and senile. But thinking about the money component, that’s not as safe a bet as going the other routes. 

The flip side of that is I have Democratic friends who have been saying for weeks that if they can get Biden to drop out and sub somebody else in who is going to perform, like Whitmer/Warnock would on a ticket, there will be a way to get the money in. I don’t know. I don’t do fundraising, and I’m not a Democrat, so it’s really hard for me to say that. But I do think in terms of visuals, that if you have Trump debating either Newsom or Whitmer, Trump looks real bad. Newsom is so far left it’s really hard for me to conceive of how anybody who’s a swing voter who remotely thinks about political philosophy is particularly moved by that. But very few people actually vote on philosophy or ideology. 

Final question: Will Biden still be in the race by the time this interview is published on Wednesday?

I think he probably is. But I hope he’s not

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rborchardt@hamodia.com

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This interview first appeared in Hamodia Prime magazine.