Democrat Party Archives - The Naton State

Will Biden Really Share a Stage with Trump?

23 September 202024 September 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

I don’t think he will.

With less than a week to go before the first presidential debate, speculation as to how it will turn out is rising to a fever pitch. This isn’t especially unusual as the debates have been the centrepiece of US campaigns for many decades. What makes this debate unusual is that the conversation isn’t about who might win, it’s all about whether Joe Biden can remain coherent throughout, or whether he’ll even turn up at all.

Although the Biden camp dismisses claims of his cognitive decline as conspiracy theories, the instances of verbal fumbles and garbled, meaningless sentences continue to stack up.

Whilst it’s true that a lack of eloquence alone is not evidence of dementia, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion when the Joe Biden from 2012 is compared with the version we have today. This is especially ironic as one of the early manifestations of Trump Derangement Syndrome was a whispering campaign surrounding the 25^th Amendment and Trump’s mental fitness for office. It’s hard not to feel a frisson of schadenfreude as Biden’s problems pile up.

Any objective observation of Biden’s behaviour must lead to concerns over his mental health. The former Vice President is showing signs of dementia and everybody knows it, especially his campaign staff. Thus, it doesn’t take a tactical genius to figure out that he’ll be extremely vulnerable in a high-pressure debate environment. Why else would expectations about his performance be so low?

US Politics

The Democrats’ New Coke Calamity

7 October 20181 May 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

That angry wailing noise emanating from Washington right now is actually the sound of the slow, painful and undignified death of the Democratic Party and everything it has come to represent in recent years. That’s a pretty bold statement I’ll admit, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that history will remember the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh as the DNC’s very own New Coke moment.

For those who aren’t familiar with the phrase, the New Coke analogy is often mentioned in both business and political circles. It originates from Coca-Cola’s calamitous, damaging and completely unnecessary re-branding exercise in 1985, when one of the strongest and most iconic brands on planet Earth decided to ditch the very formula which had made it into such a global phenomenon in the first place. Predictably, it wasn’t long before the Coca-Cola board and their overpaid marketing people were scratching their heads as to how an indestructible brand was very nearly destroyed. Ironically, the only thing that saved Coca-Cola was reverting to the tried and tested and well-liked recipe of the past. Alas, the New Coke debacle is a political lesson that the DNC seems hell-bent on ignoring.

We are now witnessing Coca-Cola’s once toxic combination of hubris and panic being replicated in today’s marketplace of ideas. It’s this lack of either perspective or principle which has led a seemingly intelligent group of people to throw their considerable weight behind a brazen, desperate and completely unconscionable attempt to defame a thoughtful, decent and boringly honourable man as some kind of serial sex offender.