Though Joe Biden’s debate performance last week was among the most painful things I’ve ever witnessed, it at least seemed to offer clarity. Suddenly, even many people who love this president realized that his campaign has become untenable. In the debate’s miserable aftermath, there was finally space to acknowledge the obvious: Biden is too old for this. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” James Baldwin wrote. Since then, however, the Biden campaign has quickly moved to squash that reckoning, framing the divide in the Democratic Party as one between naïve, hysterical outsiders and savvy, resolute insiders.

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Persons: Joe Biden’s, Biden, ” James Baldwin, Biden surrogates, ”, MAGA, Quentin Fulks, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Barack Obama’s, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump’s unswerving, “, Trump, Jonathan Capehart Organizations: Democratic, Democratic Party, Obama, MSNBC