How Fast Are Events Moving?

If you want an indication of how fast events are moving, it was just two weeks ago that Real Clear Politics updated its list of "battleground" states by adding Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Virginia, but then, incongruouously, also added Ohio, Florida, and Colorado -- but by now, with new polls sugesting New Jersey, New Mexico, Maine, and even Colorado are in play, they're going to have to update their list again.

As of today, the White House appears to be expecting an ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos to reestablish an impression that Joe is competent and focused, but after a series of July 4 gaffes, it's hard to imagine that he can do this. In an intervieew broadcast yesterday, he appeared to misspeak when he characterized himself as a “Black woman” on a Philadelphia-based radio station.

“By the way I’m proud to be, as I said the first vice president, the first Black woman served with a Black president,” Biden said. “Proud of the first Black woman, the Supreme Court. There’s just so much that we can do because together we, there’s nothing. Look, this is the United States, America.”

According to the New York Post, this wasn't the only gaffe in the interview:

At one point, he made the bizarre claim that he was the “first president that got elected statewide in the state of Delaware, when I was a kid.”

Also yesterday,

President Joe Biden’s team faced another embarrassing episode when the President appeared on live television during Independence Day celebrations with a noticeable stain on his suit. The stain, which many speculated to be either poop or food, quickly became the focal point of the broadcast, overshadowing the patriotic festivities.

The stain is illustrated in the photo at the top of this post. But then there was the main event of the day:

“One last thing, and I used to think when I was a senator, there were always congestion on the highways. There’s no congestion anymore. We go on the highway, there’s no congestion,” Biden said.

“And so what? The way they get me to stop talking, they’ll say, ‘We just shut down all the roads, Mr. President, you’re gonna lose all the votes if you don’t get in. But anyway, I’ll be back out,” he nonsensically added.

And then there's yesterday's story by Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine. Speaking of Washington insiders she'd chatted with since the beginning of this year, she writes,

Their disclosures often followed innocent questions: Have you seen the president lately? How does he seem? Often, they would answer with only silence, their eyes widening cartoonishly, their heads shaking back and forth. Or with disapproving sounds. “Phhhhwwwaahhh.” “Uggghhhhhhhhh.” “Bbbwwhhheeuuw.” Or with a simple, “Not good! Not good!” Or with an accusatory question of their own: “Have you seen him?!”

. . . Saying hello to one Democratic mega donor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say hello to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much worse!”

I don't think the outlook for the Stephanopoulos interview is good. There's an emerging consensus that if Joe isn't fit to be a candidate in November, he really isn't fit to be in office at all, which increases the likelihood that we'll see President Harris -- but this leaves open the question of how much Kamala knew about Joe's condition and how much she enabled or participated in the cover-up. I have a feeling events are going to move quickly.