This is a Gut Check Moment for Democrats

Trump Must Be Stopped, How Do We Get There From Here?

Last night’s debate was a debacle. I tried to explain the reasons why it was different from other “bad debate performances” and what to do about it in a new article for The New Republic. I hope you pause a moment here to click the link and give it a read.

As you read it, you will see that I think it is a gut check moment for Democrats. The stakes are infinitely higher than in other debates. November could mark the last free and fair election in American history. A Trump win would lead to dismantling of our alliances, victories for our enemies and great peril for the world in the years ahead. Trump has found a way, as he did last night, to be presented by the media as a business-as-usual politician rather than as a felon-rapist-fraudster-traitor.

And last night deep questions were raised about whether Joe Biden, a man and a president for whom I have the utmost admiration, was the person to stop him. (I wrote another article on the debate and how it would be viewed around the world at The Daily Beast.

This is not just my view nor is it simply the hot-take fueled view of the chattering classes. I, like many other people I know, was inundated with emails and texts from very senior Democrats expressing not panic but despair, a sense that if things proceeded as last night’s debate did, that Trump would win.