This morning the Biden campaign called another lid. This time announcing that Joe Biden will be AWOL from now until Thursday night’s debate. And, as they did last time Joe Biden went dark for a week, the reason given is “debate prep.”
But I’m thinking in this case “debate prep” probably means “Hide because LaptopGate is really bad and Joe isn’t equipped to deal with it.”
Or “debate prep” means “Lie low while the media does the work of covering Joe’s wrinkled old ass.”
What “Debate prep” doesn’t mean is “prepare for Thursday’s upcoming debate.”
President Trump will also be at Thursday’s debate, and he spent the weekend hopscotching around the country giving campaign rallies. And he has two rallies lined up in Arizona today.
Which is precisely what a candidate should be doing when the election is two weeks away.
For a normal candidate, calling a 3-day lid fifteen days out from the election is a stupid idea.
But it’s a terrific idea if your candidate is a near-senile, gaffe-prone hot-head with dementia and there’s a growing, campaign-killing scandal brewing.
Besides, Joe’s campaign people know the media will act as his communications team on this. They know their compliant media will attack the messenger (in this case the NY Post)…
…while claiming LaptopGate is “debunked” or “bogus.”
Hell, they might still go with the “Russian disinformation” canard despite the fact that just this morning DNI Ratcliffe put a knife in the heart of that excuse.
In February, in my post “Keeping a tight lid on Hot-Head Joe,” I wrote:
It’s been months now, and still the Biden Campaign hasn’t come up with an effective response for the inevitable Hunter questions. And that is a real head-scratcher to me.
But it certainly explains why they’re keeping a tight lid on this guy.
When their candidate is a hot-head who loses his cool all too easily, can you blame Team Biden for minimizing how many live interviews Joe gives?
Now, I’m old enough to remember how much of a hot-head Joe was back in the late 80s when he first ran for President. The finger-jabbing, the shouting down reporters – this didn’t come on all of sudden over the last year. He’s always had a short fuse.
But this time around, that short fuse has gotten much shorter.
Part of it is the Hunter stuff really gets under his skin.
Again, I wrote that in February.
And in the intervening eight months, Joe’s handlers still have not come up with a way of addressing Bag-Man Hunter’s money-for-influence operation of which Joe Biden was a central participant and beneficiary.
We are two weeks away from the election, and as I said on Saturday, Team Biden is hoping to run out the clock on this scandal by relying on their news media sycophants to do the heavy lifting for them.
This week’s “debate prep” lid just another way they’re running out the clock.
The wild card here is President Trump himself.
While Team Biden can count on the partisan moderator to avoid LaptopGate like the plague, Trump most certainly won’t.
So perhaps this week’s “Debate Prep” actually means “Come up with a way for Joe to diffuse this bombshell scandal during the debate without completely losing his mind.”
I guess we’ll find out on Thursday if they were successful.