From the left: Biden’s Lackluster Campaign
Mirroring President Barack Obama’s trip to Wisconsin in 2012 “after a lousy debate performance,” President Biden flew to Madison last week “with similar hopes for a confidence-renewing moment,” but the rally “raised more questions than it answered,” warns The Nation’s John Nichols.
“Biden spoke to a few hundred party loyalists in a middle-school gymnasium” when he “needed to be making this appeal to a crowd of at least 3,000 or 3,500.”
“But that would have involved taking chances” that his campaign “doesn’t seem to be willing to embrace at this point.”
With Donald Trump “ahead in most polls,” it’s “not enough to campaign carefully.”
So if Joe “is determined to stay in, he and his team have got to wrap their heads around the responsibilities that go with this choice.”
Conservative: Democrats Deserve This Chaos
Democrats’ gaslighting about Biden’s cognitive health “calls into question whether Americans can trust the Democratic Party to lead,” thunders USA Today’s Nicole Russell.
The debate showed Biden “is incoherent and incapable of leading the United States for the next four years.”
Top Democrats have known “for months, if not years, that Biden was in serious decline,” yet “covered up evidence of” it and “attacked anyone who didn’t fall in line. Now they are panicking because their ruse has failed.”
Worse, “Democrats still haven’t been able to resolve a crisis that only gets worse by the day.” The party’s “inability to reach a consensus” is a blazing “dumpster fire.”
Indeed, “whatever happens with Biden in the coming days, the Democratic Party has proved it’s incapable of leading this country for the next four years.”
Liberal: Joe’s Dignified Path Forward
“Senility is part of the human condition, but dignity is usually a choice,” quips The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood.
And Joe Biden’s “dignity-preserving option” now “is to release the delegates and run in an open convention.”
Asking the country to trust him is no longer a credible option, but inviting delegates to judge him against challengers is “the likeliest” path to a second term. He may well lose “badly,” but he’d lose “by invigorating his party” and by “picking a fight instead of dodging one.”
He’d also “avoid the fate of winning and then spending the next few years being publicly monitored for drooling and signs of disorientation.
Dignity is a choice, but not a choice that remains available forever.”
Foreign desk: French Left’s Pyrrhic Victory
“Cue sweat being wiped from political-class brows across Europe,” snarks Spiked’s Tim Black: Left-wing coalition the New Popular Front (NFP) allied with President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition to put Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party in third place in the French elections.
Yet “the RN has still massively increased the number of seats it holds,” by over 50%.
“It is easily the largest single political party in the French assembly.”
And “whatever government that emerges” is sure to “struggle for coherence,” as “the NFP and Ensemble — the two elements of the so-called republican front — despise one another” on every other front.
The RN is now the “expression of working-class disaffection and anger,” with “the NFP largely drawing its own base of support from bourgeois city-dwellers.”
From the right: Let Hamas Lose
“Keeping total victory as the goal puts pressure on Hamas,” argues Commentary’s Seth Mandel.
Just look at “Hamas leaders deciding to drop their demand that any ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Israel contain an up-front IDF concession it will not restart hostilities” — after emails came to light confirming senior terrorists fear the “heavy losses” and “dire conditions” Israel’s counterattack has inflicted.
“Relentless Israeli pressure was key to the first ceasefire-for-hostages agreement.”
The group “became pliable once again when the IDF was on the verge of taking Shifa hospital.”
“The times any deal looked least likely were during moments of paralysis,” like after “US threats to withhold weapons from the IDF.”
“Pressure works.”
“Unfortunately the Biden administration went from pressuring Hamas to pressuring Israel.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board