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President Joe Biden held a live press conference Thursday night to stem the bleeding his candidacy has suffered since his abysmal performance in his debate with Donald Trump on June 27th. Unfortunately, while he didn’t embarrass himself at the press conference, he didn’t erase the image of a feeble old candidate, either. Perhaps more importantly, it didn’t stop the growing chorus of Democrats who are asking for a new candidate. Now that the press conference is in the rear-view mirror, where do Democrats go from here?
WOR White House correspondent Jon Decker attended the press conference. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to describe the dilemma Biden’s performance creates for Democrats as the convention in Chicago in August inches closer.
“He’s essentially playing a game of chicken,” Decker said to Berman and Riedel. “He said this essentially on Monday in that letter he sent to Democrats- ‘You want to take me down, let’s go at it. I have the pledged delegates, I have what’s necessary to be the nominee, you can’t knock me off this pedestal’. He just essentially said it a different way at the press conference yesterday, and he’s right. The only person- the only person- that can move Joe Biden out of his position as the presumptive nominee is Joe Biden, and there are very few people who can dissuade him from what he believes he earned… even though there’s a drip-drip-drip, Democrat after Democrat, day after day, coming forward and saying they want to see someone else as the Democratic nominee.”
One person who doesn’t want to see a new Democrat nominee is Donald Trump. Decker laid out Republican expectations in the wake of the press conference. “They’ve been preparing for this rematch for quite some time. It changes things if it’s a different standard bearer for the Democrats, like a Kamala Harris. They could pivot, but they’ve been preparing for Joe Biden as their opponent for months, if not years… If you’re looking for a home run from Joe Biden, you didn’t get it. Maybe he got a single, but that’s not enough. That’s not enough in terms of moving the needle and making this a real competitive race against Donald Trump, which it does not look like it’s going to be right now.”
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