Episode description

SERIES 2 EPISODE 203: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:40) BULLETIN: The New York Times has called for a candidate to drop out of the presidential race after his performance in a debate - a debate which has IMPROVED his standing against his opponent in several polls.

No, President Biden is not dropping out. And that wasn't a family oligarchy intervention Sunday at Camp David to tell him to. It was an offing photo shoot.

There are no indications (and let's not fully exhale; we don't know if the impacts might appear long-term) that the debate had any significant impact on the presidential race. CBS-YouGov polling released Sunday says even in the wake of the understandable blunt-force trauma we all went through as we watched, 55% of the Democrats have NO interest in changing horses while after the same debate 54% percent of EVERYBODY says TRUMP should drop out. “I am finishing my second battleground state poll post-debate,” writes the Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, “and both surveys show the same thing: the debate had no effect on the vote choice. The election was extremely close and competitive before the debate, and it is still extremely close and competitive today.” Morning Consult and Data For Progress polled right after the debate, the percentages of those who think Biden should drop out went up like four points, but the Biden-versus-Trump match-up… Biden went UP a point. In Survey USA he went UP THREE points. Translation: yeah, maybe he should drop out but if he doesn’t, I’m still voting for him.

The almost negligible impact on Biden’s poll numbers may be as transitory as whatever it was that impaired the president during the debate, because his health and age is baked-in to the voters’ perception of him. There was nothing before the debate, nothing in his grueling international travels to the G7 and Normandy and elsewhere that was as bad as what he did during the debate. He was clear the day before and the next morning. And there is a plausible and intuitively satisfactory possible explanation for what CAUSES something like that in an 81-year old man. If the President had a cold – and I don’t know about you, but I’ll admit it: I’VE had colds in my life, and his hoarseness, it sounded to me like a cold – if he had a cold, did he take cold medicine? You know, like just Tylenol. Cold medicine.

The Yale School of medicine professor, cardiologist and head of outcomes evaluation at Yale New Haven Hospital Center Dr. Harlan Krumholz wrote a piece for Newsweek: “Biden's symptoms are consistent with someone suffering from temporary drug-induced cognitive impairment. Most people believe common over-the-counter cold medications such as Dayquil, Tylenol, or Advil to be harmless. While generally well tolerated, these medications have well-documented side effects and can cause reduced alertness, diminished attention, poor memory, and reduced reaction time, especially in older individuals. These impairments are transitory but can appear consequential and alarming. Every experienced clinician has seen this effect thousands of times…"

The real illness right now may be in our media. NBC News got the Camp David thing utterly wrong. The Times made fools of its editorial board and top columnists and based on something a staffer wrote there is every reason to suspect that it acted as it did because if Biden were to drop out it would prove the Times wasn't a fatally broken organization that put its thumb on the scale because he wouldn't give them a one-on-one interview.

Regardless: the breaking news is - nothing's broken.

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