Joe Biden 2020 campaign megathread v3 (pg 45 - mass-dropout aftermath)

[GeneralMacArthur]

Joe Biden wants to end prison profiteering.One of his top fundraisers is a major player in Prison healthcare
Another blatant lie to earn progressive street cred.

 Is simply anyone who runs a for-profit organization that's in any way connected to prisons a "prison profiteer"?

You know, I really don’t know how to respond to this high density post without getting banned. How do you respond to someone who answered his own question?

You could try engaging respectfully and laying out an easy-to-understand case for why you're right and I'm wrong.  That's just my suggestion though.

Here's another one for you.  A couple years ago the internet was obsessed with "The Whole Shabang" potato chips, which are made by a company that sells food to prisons.  Apparently the chips are really delicious and unique and after prisoners get out, they still try to order them wholesale directly from the manufacturer.

Now, I'm pretty sure that company isn't a non-profit; after all, why would they be?  They invented a recipe for some delicious, low-cost chips and earned a contract to supply to prisons.  This is America, you deserve to reap your reward for succeeding in making something that benefits people.

According to this definition, though, they're just as much "prison profiteers" as this Biden fundraiser guy.  Of course, Biden's plan was to stop for-profit prisons, not for-profit corporations in the prison supply chain market, which makes the headline ludicrous in the first place.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The idea that imprisonment is in itself morally unjust is a fringe belief that candidates like Biden are never going to embrace.

Companies that provide vital services to the prison population are doing nothing wrong as long as they do the job well and fairly. It's a world apart from using prison labor or running private prisons.

I can't wait for this primary season to be over and silly season with it.

At this point, the primary season feels like a neverending loop of the extreme left inventing these purity tests wholecloth and seeing if they stick, so they can use them to smear the liberal candidates.

"Providing for-profit health care to prisons is evil" doesn't feel like it will stick the same way "raising money in a wine cave makes you corrupt" has.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The coal miners learning to code thing is easily the dumbest thing he’s said all year. We’ll see if any of the savvier campaigns pick up on it.

I don't agree.

The Democrats have to tell coal workers that they'll lose their jobs and be re-trained.  It's a bullet they simply have to bite.  You can't lie your way out of it.  The only reason Trump can lie his way around it is by saying "f*** the environment, we're keeping coal" (coal workers have been shedding jobs anyway).

So how do you phrase it?  Biden's phrasing doesn't seem particularly bad at all.  "If you can do X you can damn sure do Y" makes it sound complementary of coal workers, like you guys are so tough and smart you're definitely up to this challenge.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The coal miners learning to code thing is easily the dumbest thing he’s said all year. We’ll see if any of the savvier campaigns pick up on it.

I don't agree.

The Democrats have to tell coal workers that they'll lose their jobs and be re-trained.  It's a bullet they simply have to bite.  You can't lie your way out of it.  The only reason Trump can lie his way around it is by saying "f*** the environment, we're keeping coal" (coal workers have been shedding jobs anyway).

So how do you phrase it?  Biden's phrasing doesn't seem particularly bad at all.  "If you can do X you can damn sure do Y" makes it sound complementary of coal workers, like you guys are so tough and smart you're definitely up to this challenge.

Or better yet, just give these miners workers' comp for life.  Re-train those who are willing and able to code, or work in the green energy sector, or whatever, but at the same time recognize that expecting an entire sect of workers in one industry to simply transition to a completely different one is just plain unrealistic.

To my knowledge, there is no candidate bold enough to propose that.  Yang's UBI probably comes closest.

Wait, remind me, what's Sanders' plan for the millions of people who would be put out of work by eliminating the health insurance sector under M4A?

The Democratic Party has been saying we need to retrain and transition coal miners for over a decade now.  This isn't some novel Joe Biden position.  The number of coal miners has declined 40% since 2010.  There are five times as many workers in the solar energy industry as there are in the coal industry.

What's the Republican Party's plan for this?  The top five coal mining companies in the United States all filed for bankruptcy in the last five years.  Murray Energy just filed in October!  Coal workers are gonna lose their jobs no matter what.  Biden's position is to give them job training programs to transition to new careers.  What's Trump's position?  To chant "WE LOVE COAL" at his rallies and then do nothing?  What are the other Democratic candidates' positions?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Even if he is, the progressive demand that you endorse 100% of the views and activities of 100% of your donors, or else you're a hypocrite, is just ridiculous.  I donated to Biden and there are several positions I don't agree with him on.  The Intercept could write an article saying "Joe Biden wants a two-state solution in Israel, but one of his top donors, GeneralMacArthur, wants Israel to occupy Palestine."

Comparing small donors to big donors is absurd and you know it.

FEC regulations stipulate that nobody can donate more than $2800.

How do you know I haven't donated $2800?

And since the next thing you'll say is "This guy was a bundler", how do you know I haven't texted my friends and told them to donate to Biden?

These are all things that are well within the power of the average citizen if you really care and think your money will make a difference.

At any rate, you're missing the point.  Biden has millions of donors and plenty of them are responsible for more money flowing into his campaign than this one guy, whom The Intercept falsely asserts disagrees with Biden on this one minor part of his campaign platform.  What a scandal!

[GeneralMacArthur]

His "successful" bus tour was most memorable for the town hall in which he freaked out on an obese man, challenging him to both an IQ test and a push-up contest.

This is only true in the national media.  In Iowa, it got a lot more coverage, as well as on-the-ground impact.

[GeneralMacArthur]

It's really telling that the leftists only have one line:  "Biden voted for the Iraq War."

They tried the same thing in 2016.  "Clinton voted for the Iraq War."  As if that's a debate-stopper and no one who voted for the Iraq War could have any other foreign policy views worth hearing.

It's super-insulting, not only because it assumes voters are dumb, but because it's a total mis-representation of history.  The AUMF was what allowed Bush to go into Iraq.  The Iraq War vote itself wasn't really a case of "if you vote no you can stop the war."  It was more of a show vote where the Bush administration argued that getting congressional approval for the war might force Saddam to surrender, or at least help secure a broader international coalition, either of which would help save American lives.  Since it was guaranteed to pass, some member of congress chose to use it as an opportunity to voice their disapproval of the war.  But their NO vote was meaningless virtue signaling.

By the way I thought it was insulting in 2008 when Obama did it to Clinton as well.  "So-and-so voted for the Iraq War" is a cheap-shot candidates keep using as a shield to avoid having a real foreign policy debate.  It's been 17 years now and it's time to grow up.  Most Sanders supporters were still in diapers when the Iraq War vote happened.

[GeneralMacArthur]

It's really telling that the leftists only have one line:  "Biden voted for the Iraq War."

They tried the same thing in 2016.  "Clinton voted for the Iraq War."  As if that's a debate-stopper and no one who voted for the Iraq War could have any other foreign policy views worth hearing.

It's super-insulting, not only because it assumes voters are dumb, but because it's a total mis-representation of history.  The AUMF was what allowed Bush to go into Iraq.  The Iraq War vote itself wasn't really a case of "if you vote no you can stop the war."  It was more of a show vote where the Bush administration argued that getting congressional approval for the war might force Saddam to surrender, or at least help secure a broader international coalition, either of which would help save American lives.  Since it was guaranteed to pass, some member of congress chose to use it as an opportunity to voice their disapproval of the war.  But their NO vote was meaningless virtue signaling.

By the way I thought it was insulting in 2008 when Obama did it to Clinton as well.  "So-and-so voted for the Iraq War" is a cheap-shot candidates keep using as a shield to avoid having a real foreign policy debate.  It's been 17 years now and it's time to grow up.  Most Sanders supporters were still in diapers when the Iraq War vote happened.

Your put more thought into your response than Biden does on how he voted in the Senate regarding foreign policy. Rofl

Bro, he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

If anyone is looking for more details on why Biden's record is awful, I would be happy to hear another candidate make a serious, point-by-point take-down of Biden's hilarious plan to partition Iraq. No one could take his supposed foreign policy bona fides seriously after listening to that.

I too thought that plan was totally hairbrained.  Unified Iraq isn't looking so stable these days, though, so it's not like we had many good options.

[GeneralMacArthur]

It's really telling that the leftists only have one line:  "Biden voted for the Iraq War."

They tried the same thing in 2016.  "Clinton voted for the Iraq War."  As if that's a debate-stopper and no one who voted for the Iraq War could have any other foreign policy views worth hearing.

It's super-insulting, not only because it assumes voters are dumb, but because it's a total mis-representation of history.  The AUMF was what allowed Bush to go into Iraq.  The Iraq War vote itself wasn't really a case of "if you vote no you can stop the war."  It was more of a show vote where the Bush administration argued that getting congressional approval for the war might force Saddam to surrender, or at least help secure a broader international coalition, either of which would help save American lives.  Since it was guaranteed to pass, some member of congress chose to use it as an opportunity to voice their disapproval of the war.  But their NO vote was meaningless virtue signaling.

By the way I thought it was insulting in 2008 when Obama did it to Clinton as well.  "So-and-so voted for the Iraq War" is a cheap-shot candidates keep using as a shield to avoid having a real foreign policy debate.  It's been 17 years now and it's time to grow up.  Most Sanders supporters were still in diapers when the Iraq War vote happened.

Your put more thought into your response than Biden does on how he voted in the Senate regarding foreign policy. Rofl

Bro, he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

So what? Does that make him an all knowing sage with wisdom none of us can comprehend? Biden is just your standard no frills no principles politician. Hardly something to be surprised about. Washington is full of people like him. Just a gray supine bunch of people that no one will remember that all blend in with one another. No different than the businessman in the movie American Psycho comparing business cards.

Oh yeah, I'm sure they made him chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then he never put a second of thought into any of it.

https://www.cfr.org/election2020/candidate-tracker/joe-biden

I mean, totally clueless.  Clearly this is a man who has no idea what he's talking about.

I may not know a damn thing else about foreign policy, but I had the good sense, unlike my good friend Joe, to vote against the biggest disaster in American history, the Iraq War.  HURR DURR THAT ALL THAT MATTERS

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yes....because history is not filled with examples of people in positions of power or intellect who were considered experts who weren't wrong about anything. Who can remember back in the 60s when the "best and the brightest" were put in charge of the Vietnam War and stunningly succeeded in defeating the Viet Cong. Who can remember back in the early 90s when big brain economists promised us that free trade agreements like NAFTA would not lead to manufacturing job losses?

The fact that a person is in a position of power or assumed expertise does not make them them some wise all knowing safe you fool. As a matter of fact, most experts are as dumb as people off the street.

I'm not arguing that he was "successful" (that's not even really a thing in that position), but you said

Your put more thought into your response than Biden does on how he voted in the Senate regarding foreign policy. Rofl

This flies in the face of all evidence and you have no reason to believe this other than wanting it to be true.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I don't know if anyone fell for the Sanders campaign's lie that Biden wanted to cut social security, but he was actually doing a mocking impression of Paul Ryan when he said the words the Sanders campaign quoted out of context:

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2020/jan/09/bernie-sanders/did-biden-laud-paul-ryan-proposal-cut-social-secur/

Our ruling
A Sanders campaign newsletter said, "In 2018, Biden lauded Paul Ryan for proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare."

That stems from a speech Biden gave in 2018 in which he spoke about Ryan. Biden appeared to be mocking Ryan, not praising him.

The Sanders campaign omitted what Biden said next: the importance of protecting Social Security and Medicare and to change the tax code, which he said benefitted the mega rich. Overall, the point of Biden’s speech was to criticize tax cuts for the rich and call for more help to the middle class.

The Sanders campaign plucked out part of what Biden said but omitted the full context of his comments.

We rate this statement False.

This kind of brazenly-misleading out-of-context quote would get a thread locked or a user banned according to the moderation rules here on the Atlas forum, but I'm sure it's just fine for Bernie Sanders and David Sirota to pull.

[GeneralMacArthur]

oh god do we have to do this again


A) It was official USA, EU, and NATO policy to want the prosecutor fired.  Biden did not make this decision.
B) The prosecutor Biden wanted fired was known for not pursuing corruption cases.
C) In fact, dropping the case against Zlochevsky (owner of Burisma) was one of the examples of why he was a corrupt prosecutor.
D) The case against Zlochevsky was dropped years before Hunter Biden was involved in Burisma.
E) The actual corruption was committed even before that.  Years and years before Hunter Biden was involved.
F) The corruption in question?  Zlochevsky was using his official position in the Ukrainian government to award favorable contracts to companies he owned.  This isn't corruption that Biden would have had any involvement with, or even knowledge of.
G) Zlochevsky held his position as Minister of Energy and Natural Resources (which he was using to award energy contracts to himself) from 2010-2012.  Hunter Biden was not hired by Burisma until 2014.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Biden campaigned on raising the retirement age in 2007. He served in the Obama administration as it chased after a futile grand bargain with Mitch McConnell for years. He suggested means-testing just a few years ago, IIRC in the speech that the Sanders' newsletter was quoting.

The attack is dishonest, but it's not as if Biden doesn't have an eyebrow-raising record on Social Security.

The retirement age should be raised.  This is the only way to ensure SS remains solvent so we don't have to make cuts.

We already raised the retirement age once, in the 1980s.  It was a gradual increase (as it should be), in fact we are still going through the shift to this day.  It's not until 2025 that the shift to 67 will be complete.  See https://www.ssa.gov/planners/retire/agereduction.html

It's common knowledge that social security is insolvent.  If it maintains its current level of funding, with an expanding pool, we will eventually be forced to make cuts or raise taxes.  If we shrink the pool by raising the full retirement age gradually over time from 67 to 70, we avoid having to make cuts.  These are really your only options -- cut benefits, raise taxes, or raise the retirement age.

Paul Ryan wants to cut benefits.  Joe Biden wanted to raise the retirement age.  Those are two opposite sides of the issue, not the same.

Bernie Sanders, FWIW, wants to raise taxes so much that he can expand social security benefits and put more people in the program.

[GeneralMacArthur]

oh god do we have to do this again


A) It was official USA, EU, and NATO policy to want the prosecutor fired.  Biden did not make this decision.
B) The prosecutor Biden wanted fired was known for not pursuing corruption cases.
C) In fact, dropping the case against Zlochevsky (owner of Burisma) was one of the examples of why he was a corrupt prosecutor.
D) The case against Zlochevsky was dropped years before Hunter Biden was involved in Burisma.
E) The actual corruption was committed even before that.  Years and years before Hunter Biden was involved.
F) The corruption in question?  Zlochevsky was using his official position in the Ukrainian government to award favorable contracts to companies he owned.  This isn't corruption that Biden would have had any involvement with, or even knowledge of.
G) Zlochevsky held his position as Minister of Energy and Natural Resources (which he was using to award energy contracts to himself) from 2010-2012.  Hunter Biden was not hired by Burisma until 2014.

There is a treasure trove of memos contradicting many of your assumptions.  In fact, U.S. officials have already admitted that they disseminated false information about the Prosecutor, which is evidenced in one of the memos I posted in my last post.  Hunter Biden was brought in weeks after Joe Biden was tasked with overseeing Ukrainian relations.  In fact, a former Obama Administration Assistant U.S. Attorney from New York was able to get the case dismissed in January 2015.  The attorney John Buretta was hired by Blue Star, and Joe Biden had served the board.  Blue star negotiated the Burisma settlement in January 2017, which is 10 months after Shokin was fired.  Blue star paid off Ukrainian officials for help with the Prosecutor's office. 

There's so much evidence.  Your entire narrative is complete garbage.  There's even a memo that details Biden meeting with Ukrainian officials days before the prosecutor is fired.  It's beautiful. 

The 7 facts I posted aren't assumptions.  These are facts.  None of what you posted has anything to do with the 7 facts I posted.  It's all a bunch of conspiracy-theory garbage and insinuations that you copy+pasted from John Solomon.

Also, the link you're leaning so heavily on (you posted it twice and acted like they were two different links) is the infamous "Shokin Testimony" which Giuliani loves to trot out on Fox News.   This testimony has already been proven to be riddled with big fat lies, and many of the "credible sources" it cites are internet blogs that quote or paraphrase John Solomon.  The whole thing is a big ring of BS.

Even The Intercept, no friend of Joe Biden, wrote a detailed take-down of the Shokin testimony you love.  I post it here so y'all can see that I'm not just pulling this information from mainstream/establishment sources.  Everyone, even on the far left, knows this testimony is a lie.  https://theintercept.com/2019/10/17/ukrainian-oligarch-helping-trump-smear-biden-evade-u-s-corruption-charges/

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://johnsolomonreports.com/hunter-bidens-ukraine-gas-firm-pressed-obama-administration-to-end-corruption-allegations-memos-show/

Dude.  You're linking John Solomon.

Just stop.

The UK started looking into Burisma as early as 2010, but they opened up a case around the same time Biden joined the board in the spring of 2014.  Ukraine opened up the investigation in August 2014, which lasted until January 2017.  The media previously reported that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government after the case against Burisma had ended, but only the UK case had ended.  In February, the owner's property was seized by Slokin, and Hunter was about to be question over Burisma.  Then in March, the prosecutor is fired.  

You're parroting talking points from Devin Nunes, which were given Four Pinocchios by the Washington Post.  I'm sure you'll ignore this because WaPo is corrupt deep state media, unlike the totally trustworthy JohnSolomonReports.com.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/04/gop-tries-connect-dots-biden-ukraine-comes-up-short/

[GeneralMacArthur]

The retirement age should be raised.  This is the only way to ensure SS remains solvent so we don't have to make cuts.

This is nonsense.

The annual reports put out by the SSA's Board of Trustees consistently show only a modest gap in funding over the next 75 years. A 2% increase in the payroll tax would be enough to cover the difference, and policymakers could cover all of it by raising the payroll tax cap rather than shaking down poor workers for more.

We already raised the retirement age once, in the 1980s.  It was a gradual increase (as it should be), in fact we are still going through the shift to this day.  It's not until 2025 that the shift to 67 will be complete.

I'm aware of the increase. It is one of the greatest betrayals of the American public in this country's history.

It's common knowledge that social security is insolvent.

This is only the consensus among paranoid financial columnists providing grist for financial planning wheeler-dealers and small government extremists.

If it maintains its current level of funding, with an expanding pool, we will eventually be forced to make cuts or raise taxes.  If we shrink the pool by raising the full retirement age gradually over time from 67 to 70, we avoid having to make cuts.  These are really your only options -- cut benefits, raise taxes, or raise the retirement age.

Paul Ryan wants to cut benefits.  Joe Biden wanted to raise the retirement age.  Those are two opposite sides of the issue, not the same.

Raising the retirement age is a cut in benefits and implying otherwise is more dishonest than anything that the Sanders campaign has said. Not everyone has a career that allows them to spend their sixties cooling their heels in an office while an underpaid intern does their work for them!

All of this will hit a generation that has less savings, less wealth, worse employer-sponsored retirement plans, and fewer children. They will have less resources than ever to fall back on. And they're not likely to have longer lifespans than the typical retiree today. In fact, for those in the bottom half, there's a good chance that the average lifespan will fall.

Bernie Sanders, FWIW, wants to raise taxes so much that he can expand social security benefits and put more people in the program.

That's better than the guy who wants to rob working class retirees of their golden years.

I am certainly not an expert on Social Security projections.  I recall this report from the SSA about a decade ago being talked about, but don't know if anything has changed since to make it more solvent:

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html

Regardless, raising the retirement age by three years by 2070 is not "robbing working class retirees of their golden years", that's just meaningless hyperbole.  Nor is it accurate to characterize a reduction of the pool as a "cut in benefits" since the benefits remain the same; only my children (who will probably live at least three years longer than me) will have to wait three more years to get them.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I am certainly not an expert on Social Security projections.  I recall this report from the SSA about a decade ago being talked about, but don't know if anything has changed since to make it more solvent:

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html

Regardless, raising the retirement age by three years by 2070 is not "robbing working class retirees of their golden years", that's just meaningless hyperbole.  Nor is it accurate to characterize a reduction of the pool as a "cut in benefits" since the benefits remain the same; only my children (who will probably live at least three years longer than me) will have to wait three more years to get them.

There were some much more dire concerns about long-term solvency immediately after the recession, but the SSA's projections haven't been nearly as ugly as mid-brow pop economics coverage suggests for as long as I have followed them. Set against reduced public expenses for education and childcare, the math is not so dire.

If you don't appreciate my account, maybe  this 2017 report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service would be more to your taste:

In response to rising life expectancy, some commonly discussed Social Security reform proposals involve increasing the retirement age. Yet these proposals would affect low earners disproportionately(i.e.,reductions in their lifetime Social Security benefits would be considerably larger than for high earners). Congress may be interested in policy proposals that mitigate the uneven effects of increasing the retirement age and protect the interests of lower-earning, shorter-lived workers.

We don't need to keep discussing this here, but I hope that the people on Joe Biden's policy team are familiar with this report.

Agreed.  If Social Security is now solvent then I see no need to lower the retirement age, and would hope/assume that a Biden administration would be well-informed enough to not make policy decisions based on outdated concerns.

[GeneralMacArthur]

LOL dude.  Yeah, I'm sure it's a huge revelation that you, scrappy internet sleuth, were able to dig up a report by John Solomon from two months ago when this whole story broke.  Of course if John Solomon had incriminating evidence about Hunter Biden, the conservative media would just ignore it, and it would take Hollywood from Atlas Forum to bring attention to it.

I took a look at your article and it's just a listing of snippets of meetings and correspondences, along with 100 links, with no apparent rhyme or reason or cohesive narrative to any of it.  How about you pick one memo.  Pick the one that you think is most incriminating, the most shocking memo that the mainstream media refuses to talk about.  Give us the primary source, ideally a direct link to a PDF of the memo along with the context for it.  Then we can actually take a look instead of you just copy and pasting stuff from Solomon's article.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Biden/Duckworth FTW

[GeneralMacArthur]

I read the entire interview and, in fact, the Biden pitch is "if you like your private insurance, you can keep it, and if your employer gets rid of it, you are guaranteed cheap and high-quality insurance from the public option, and if you can't afford that, you get a tax break so it's free"

But taking quotes out of context is a lot more fun than responsible civic engagement.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Captain Sullenberger has an op-ed in the NYT today defending Biden on the subject of his speech impediment.

http://archive.is/4D1SV

That would be the speech impediment that the maroon and green avatars on here (notably, not so much the blue avatars) gleefully mocked him for earlier this year, declaring that he was retarded, his brain was melting, it was time for him to "be put down", etc.

A speech disorder is a lot easier to treat than a character defect. You become a true leader, not because of how you speak, but because of what you have to say — and the challenges you have overcome to help others.

Powerful words.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Captain Sullenberger has an op-ed in the NYT today defending Biden on the subject of his speech impediment.

http://archive.is/4D1SV

That would be the speech impediment that the maroon and green avatars on here (notably, not so much the blue avatars) gleefully mocked him for earlier this year, declaring that he was retarded, his brain was melting, it was time for him to "be put down", etc.

A speech disorder is a lot easier to treat than a character defect. You become a true leader, not because of how you speak, but because of what you have to say — and the challenges you have overcome to help others.

Powerful words.

In all fairness, the quality of Biden's speeches and other verbal presentations has notably decreased.

Yeah I agree.  I wonder how much of that has to do with all the restrictions he's under now that he's running for president.  Often when I watch him speak or read his words, it feels like his advisors told him a bunch of things that he can't say, and he's constantly stopping himself just in the nick of time.  It's hard enough focusing on speaking clearly without also having all that going through your head.

Just a conjecture, of course.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Captain Sullenberger has an op-ed in the NYT today defending Biden on the subject of his speech impediment.

http://archive.is/4D1SV

That would be the speech impediment that the maroon and green avatars on here (notably, not so much the blue avatars) gleefully mocked him for earlier this year, declaring that he was retarded, his brain was melting, it was time for him to "be put down", etc.

A speech disorder is a lot easier to treat than a character defect. You become a true leader, not because of how you speak, but because of what you have to say — and the challenges you have overcome to help others.

Powerful words.

In all fairness, the quality of Biden's speeches and other verbal presentations has notably decreased.

Yeah I agree.  I wonder how much of that has to do with all the restrictions he's under now that he's running for president.  Often when I watch him speak or read his words, it feels like his advisors told him a bunch of things that he can't say, and he's constantly stopping himself just in the nick of time.  It's hard enough focusing on speaking clearly without also having all that going through your head.

Just a conjecture, of course.

I hope this is true. That would explain his near-constant use of the word "infact" to essentially stall while trying to think of what to say. And for what it is worth, Biden has always been better and still is very good with more intimate venues-- interviews, small town halls and the like. Ultimately, I just hope his advisors let him be in his element more, because, even despite his difficulties in communicating, he can come across as authentic, which additionally would play on a stage with Trump IMO. IDK, just some thoughts.

So random personal fact, I actually coach public speaking, and these are the sorts of things I pick up on immediately.

Every politician has "stall phrases" that they slip in when they're trying to put their thoughts together.
 And when you watch these politicians speak often enough, it doesn't take long to pick them out.  Just like how Elizabeth Warren always starts her tougher answers with a long "So......" and if she still wants to stall, "let's talk about [subject]"

At the start of his campaign, and in his first few debates, Biden's stall phrase was "the fact of the matter is."  Then in his third debate, I want to say, whichever one had people saying he looked a lot sharper, I noticed that he'd switched it to just "in fact" which is about two seconds faster.  And it was immediately obvious that his aides had picked up on this and told him "if you're going to stall, just say 'in fact', don't say 'the fact of the matter is' because you just sound goofy saying it over and over and over"

Stutterers, of course, are notorious for using a variety of stall phrases, because they have to not only form the words in their head before they say them, but consciously use a variety of vocal tricks to make sure the words come out properly.

If you go watch Biden deliver prepared remarks, or do his stump speech, he's far more lucid and confident.  Here's the most recent YouTube video I could find:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnYjK_djFfw

[GeneralMacArthur]

Wow, I am actually stricken by the contrast between Biden on the debate stage and him at this particular rally. Every bit as lucid as any of the other candidates. Maybe it was just a good day for him, who knows. Gives me some hope he can overcome some of his issues debating in time for Trump.

No, every Biden event is like this.  I've watched a bunch of them.  Not by choice so much as because people keep taking quotes from his events out of context, and I have to go dig up the live stream replay to find what was actually said.  Remember when Biden was accused of forgetting when MLK died and saying no women protested the Vietnam War?  Out-of-context quotes from these events.

If you skip ahead to 55:30, that's when the questions start, and you can see that it's not just when he's reciting his stump speech (which, like Trump in 2016, is more of a grab-bag of ever-changing monologues than a single speech like Warren/Sanders) that he's lucid.  He can also think on his feet and answer questions.  And his answers are exceptionally detailed and intelligent, far more so than you could ever imagine from any of the other candidates except for perhaps Buttigieg.

This is part of why the campaign has been so frustrating for me.  The Biden that people see in the media and on stage is pretty divorced from the real Joe.  Those debate stages, with thirty-second snippets where you constantly have to speak extemporaneously and Biden's #1 goal is to avoid making any slip-ups, are the worst possible venue for him.  But that's all most people see.  His interviews on TV have been fantastic but haven't received much coverage.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Wow, I am actually stricken by the contrast between Biden on the debate stage and him at this particular rally. Every bit as lucid as any of the other candidates. Maybe it was just a good day for him, who knows. Gives me some hope he can overcome some of his issues debating in time for Trump.

No, every Biden event is like this.  I've watched a bunch of them.  Not by choice so much as because people keep taking quotes from his events out of context, and I have to go dig up the live stream replay to find what was actually said.  Remember when Biden was accused of forgetting when MLK died and saying no women protested the Vietnam War?  Out-of-context quotes from these events.

If you skip ahead to 55:30, that's when the questions start, and you can see that it's not just when he's reciting his stump speech (which, like Trump in 2016, is more of a grab-bag of ever-changing monologues than a single speech like Warren/Sanders) that he's lucid.  He can also think on his feet and answer questions.  And his answers are exceptionally detailed and intelligent, far more so than you could ever imagine from any of the other candidates except for perhaps Buttigieg.

This is part of why the campaign has been so frustrating for me.  The Biden that people see in the media and on stage is pretty divorced from the real Joe.  Those debate stages, with thirty-second snippets where you constantly have to speak extemporaneously and Biden's #1 goal is to avoid making any slip-ups, are the worst possible venue for him.  But that's all most people see.  His interviews on TV have been fantastic but haven't received much coverage.

I would be interested to see how he did in the 2008 primary debates-- similar circumstances to today in terms of the amount of people on the stage, though of course, he was not a frontrunner.

He's more lucid in those, although still very stuttery, but those debates were also very different.  They were a lot more relaxed and respectful, and Biden was polling at 1% so he was in a much freer position.