If You Needed Proof The Lizard People Are Nervous

I've mentioned here several times Nate Silver's advice to the Biden campaign last Febsruary

Biden can still win. But he's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him.

The single biggest problem Silver saw is Biden's age, and the campaign needed to do something:

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

His solution to the problem was a careful balance of appearances that would maximize Joe's ability to look mentally sharp while minimizing the risk that he would self-destruct in yet another gaffe. I can't help thinking of those books that tell you how to beat the odds playing the slots in Vegas, which boil down to saying just get lucky. Two months after Silver gave his advice, all we can point to is Uncle Bosey.

It's starting to look as though last week's polls showing Trump widening his lead were a wake-up call to the lizard people, in other words, the big-money Democrat oligarchs, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and so forth. If the Biden campaign was taking some version of Nate Silver lite, it's now backed off from even that, according to NBC:

As President Joe Biden ramps up his re-election effort, his campaign is also scaling back how much he says on the trail, part of a larger new strategy to hone a sharper message he’ll take into the general election, according to Biden aides.

. . . The approach also has the appearance of a strategy aimed at minimizing the potential for Biden to make mistakes in a razor-close election. Some of Biden’s verbal missteps have occurred when he’s talking at length, veers off the prepared text or answers a reporter’s question when that wasn’t part of the plan.

. . . Some of Biden’s advisers have been pushing for him to go even further in attempts to sharpen his public appearances. They’ve argued for the president to replace prepared campaign remarks entirely, in favor of less scripted retail stops and punchier, digital content where he speaks directly to the camera.

The implication in the story is that this change in strategy has already been under way:

The president has in recent weeks made notable efforts at brevity, in both official and campaign events. Biden’s remarks this past week on the campus protests over the war in the Gaza Strip were just four minutes long. His high-profile speech on abortion rights in Florida last week was just 14 minutes long. And his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner lasted just 10 minutes — half as long as the year before.

I assume this is part of the line they're giving the lizard people, or the lizard people's reps, when they call -- don't worry, we're on top of it. Uncle Bosey was two weeks ago. But the problem is that the emperor is the emperor:

Still, the effort appears to be a work in progress. At an infrastructure event in North Carolina on Thursday, Biden often deviated from the script in the teleprompter to add some political flourishes and spoke for more than 20 minutes.

Current and former Biden officials have long noted that the president sees value in delivering longer speeches, citing his interest in communicating comprehensively with Americans on policy matters. And aides said in the weeks ahead Biden will, at strategic moments, deliver some longer, issue-specific speeches aimed at drawing a contrast with his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump. Most recently he gave an economic policy speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that lasted about a half-hour.

Except that the economic policy speech in Scranton was the one where he talked about Uncle Bosey and giving the dirty pictures that ladies sent him to the Secret Service. And even if you cut that stuff out, you're still going to get the slurring, the hypercorrection, the random pauses, the mumbling, and the malapropisms. And they want him in smaller venues in large part because they don't want the constant visuals of the big guy wandering off the stage or shaking hands with people who aren't there.

But smaller-form events are of little help. The scene below, at a coffee store in Emmaus, PA, shows Joe closely convoyed by handlers and Secret Service, his manner, insofar as anyone can see it, wooden and detached:

Notice how the line from both Nate Silver in February and NBC now is that it's going to be a "close race" or "razor thin". But this is whistling past the graveyard, these efforts to portray the emperor as mentally sharp and in charge haven't been working, even though his handlers have been fully aware of the situation all along -- indeed, at least since 2020, although Obama and his people likely knew the score well before then. My money is still on the likelihood that after this year's election, there will be leaks from insiders that the problem all along was Joe's alcohol consumption, and this was never anything new.

But the lizard people are clearly getting nervous.