Back on February 24, after President Biden chose not to
do a pre Super Bowl interview,
Bob appeared on this program and set a lot of
people's hair on fire by saying this.
This is emperor's New clothes stuff.
If people aren't familiar with the fairy tale,
the emperor was naked. No one wanted to say it.
A little child was able to say it.
This is common sense stuff.
Of course, there are people who say,
and this is the card they've been playing for a
long time.
Yeah, we kind of know it's true.
But don't say that that will only help Donald Trump.
Well, how feckless are the Democrats if they realize that
this guy could possibly lose to Trump?
Then get somebody else out there.
You don't go into the Super Bowl with a quarterback
who has a dead arm or the seventh game of
the World Series.
If people are more comfortable with me talking
in sports terms, you don't do it.
This is just so obvious.
Bob Costas, were you seeing something then that others were
not seeing,
or is it that you were willing to say it
when others were not?
Yeah, I think it's the latter.
And it only became more overwhelmingly obvious with the debate
performance.
And for those who say the definition of cognitive dissonance
here is,
oh, we're not going to toss him overboard because of
one bad night.
That one atrocious night was simply writ large what could
be seen for years and years that he is in
serious decline.
Nobody should be president when they're 85 or 86,
including the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.
But this guy is clearly in decline at this point.
And part of the job,
leaving aside whether he can do it for the next
four years,
is winning the job. And as you just laid out,
that seems to be nearly impossible at this point.
When they say, and many Democrats are still saying this,
they lay out all the reasons why Donald Trump is
loathsome and a threat to democracy,
an existential threat. And then they say that's why we
have to get behind Joe Biden.
No, that's exactly why Joe Biden must be ushered out.
As I said at that time,
it was so obvious. Said it to Abby Phillip last
year on CNN.
Biden had a chance to be seen by history as
a statesman and a patriot.
He spared the nation a second Trump term.
He could have gone out in a gracious fashion.
Now we can no longer indulge his delusions.
It's a shame. It's a kind of a Shakespearean tragedy,
perhaps with him as King Lear and his wife as
Lady Macbeth.
But that's all secondary now.
Precedent doesn't matter. Oh, he was the he is the
incumbent.
He won all the votes in the primary because he
had no opposition.
These are desperate times and they call for measures that
are appropriate to the circumstances.
Two weeks before the debate was the Hollywood fundraiser.
The Washington Post sort of went inside.
I want to put something on the screen.
Here's what they found about what took place at the
fundraiser.
Some attendees said it was even worse at the smaller
receptions.
Before Biden took the stage,
greeting hundreds of supporters for grip and grin photos,
the president stumbled over small talk and seemed frail,
according to six attendees. For the high level donors there
who were meeting the 81 year old Biden for the
first time,
several said they found his decline
shocking. It makes me wonder if there hadn't been the
debate performance,
Bob, if the debate had taken place in September,
as was initially intended with the Commission on Presidential Debates,
I don't know that we'd be even having this conversation
because all the people at that fundraiser,
Clooney included, weren't speaking until the debate.
Yeah. And, and to me,
and this is for the stick to sports crowd,
this has been so overwhelmingly obvious for so long.
You don't need a degree in public policy from Harvard
to see it and to say it,
if you're willing to say it,
any more than you need a degree from MIT to
say 2 + 2 is 4.
And it makes you wonder whether we've been gas lit
by the Democrats,
the Republicans major in gaslighting everybody with Trump as their
standard bearer.
But this had to have been obvious to people surrounding
the president,
people who observed the president.
Wouldn't it have been an act of patriotism,
if that's not too overblown a word in this case,
to lay that out before the American public?
You know, look,
Trump is a very vulnerable candidate
against Hillary Clinton who clearly was qualified but had some
baggage and may have run a bad campaign.
She was hamstrung a bit about going after the personal
flaws to be kind of Donald Trump for reasons we
need not
list here. And here we have Joe Biden,
who cannot say, as any other candidate could say,
let's roll the tape on all of Trump's unhinged
rallies where he seems to be a blithering buffoon,
because then all the Republicans do is turn it around
on all the gaps and missteps and times when Biden
seems to be wandering around in a fog.
In sports, if your opponent has an obvious vulnerability,
you you devise a strategy to exploit that vulnerability.
Hey, this guy's wide open for a left hook.
But wait a minute, The guy can't.
You're our guy. Can't throw a left hook.
That's where we are.
Give me the 32nd response to those who are watching
and saying,
didn't you see him last night in Detroit,
fiery and on top of his game?
You would say what?
It doesn't change the basic calculus.
It doesn't change it. You know,
again, it's a shame. Biden's a decent man.
We don't want to see it play out this way.
We want to be respectful if we can.
But this has the feeling of somebody handing a participation
trophy to a kid at a soccer match just because
he didn't fall down.
The bar is set so low that people applaud when
he doesn't remind us yet again of how at this
point he is not qualified to campaign and clearly is
not qualified to finish four more years as president.