Would a sports team fire Biden after Thursday night?

He's lucky he isn't in the NBA or NHL after an epic off-night.

Jean Van De Velde

 A professional sports club would not be eating its own soul this weekend like the Democratic Party is. Its bottom lines are drawn with paint and are not erasable. On Friday morning, such a team would have announced that it had “amicably parted ways” with President Joe Biden as it embarks on a “national search.” There would be no room for equivocation.

Coaches have always been the victim of catch-and-release, especially when hell is what they’re catching. That process has gained velocity. Martin St. Louis took over the Montreal Canadiens on Feb. 8, 2022. He has not yet coached them for two and a half seasons. Yet only four NHL coaches have been on the job longer. In a 32-team league, eleven coaches were hired in this calendar year, and that will become 12 when Columbus fills its ejection seat.

There will be eight first-year coaches in the NBA. When last checked, there was still one champion per season, but no one who doesn’t win is safe except for the Spurs’ Gregg Popovich, who is inoculated by five championships. Frank Vogel won a title with the Lakers in 2020 but lasted one season with Phoenix. But nothing matches the impulsiveness of the Detroit Pistons, a bottom-feeder that surprised nobody by losing 68 of 82 games. This was Monty Williams’ first year on the job. He got fired. It will not cause him lasting trauma. He had five years left on that contract, which guaranteed him $78.5 million.

Coaches are fired for myriad reasons. The players are tired of hearing the same voice, although the logical approach would be to obtain different players, and ears. There’s a personality conflict with management. There’s new management, which wants its own coach. There’s a personal transgression, which is why Ime Udoka is coaching the Houston Rockets and missed out on Boston’s world championship.

But, more often than not, coaches are fired because it’s the easiest thing to do, and the people in charge have no idea what else to do. And most clubs violate what is, or should be, the first rule of Coaching Replacement: Don’t get rid of the coach unless you know who your next one will be. College athletic directors, or at least the good ones, have long lists of coaching possibilities in case they have to make a quick decision. The Pistons, for example, did not replace Williams until they hired J.B. Bickerstaff on Sunday. The malpractice is obvious and grotesque, but you can’t fire ownership.

Technically Biden isn’t the coach of the Democratic Party’s political operation. He wasn’t Grady Little leaving Pedro Martinez on the mound, or Brandon Staley blowing a 27-point lead in an NFL playoff game.

This was far worse. How much worse? Biden managed to get caught up in golf trash-talk with Donald Trump, for whom they should play “Hail To The Cheat” whenever he takes the first tee.

Actually Biden became the oratorical equivalent of Jean Van De Velde, knocking adjectives against grandstands and lofting adverbs into creeks. His train of thought was marooned somewhere near East Palestine, Ohio. He was garbled and practically inaudible. His strategists should have asked for closed captioning.

Within five minutes it must have occurred to Trump that his opponent was bleeding uncontrollably. Typically he refused to merely take the win. He tried to run up the score with a remarkable cascade of falsehoods, exaggerations and character assassination that, for some reason, caught Biden unawares. Daniel Dale, the faithful and by now exhausted fact checker, counted 30 blatant lies. Trump became less coherent as the 90 minutes dragged on, and the upcoming polls might not be as kind to him as people think, especially when his comment about immigrants taking “Black jobs” fully resonates.

Claire McCaskill, the former Senator turned MSNBC commentator, claimed that only 30 percent of likely voters watched the debate, which was the first one held between the party nominees before party conventions. MSNBC also stationed four Phoenix voters in front of TVs and asked for instant reaction, and all four said both candidates had sputtered their way off their ballots. They joined the growing “double haters” club that, up to now, had favored Biden, although there is almost nobody outside Wilmington, Del. who thinks Biden looked like he could be the President of a barbershop quartet on Thursday.

So the nation’s pundits, and many of the Democratic donors and opinionators, have decided that Biden should bow out before the convention. This seemed less likely after Biden flew to Raleigh on Friday and frothed up the crowd with a startling pep rally, in which he was sharp and loud and forceful and called Trump a “one-man crime wave.” Where was that line when Biden needed it? It was as if Van De Velde walked off the course after he blew that 3-shot lead on the 72nd hole of that forlorn 1999 British Open, then went to the range and hit 10 perfect drives.

There were Republican bigwigs, remember, who wanted to replace Trump after the Access Hollywood tapes in October of 2016. There were others, in 1984, who weren’t sure President Reagan had either oar in the water after a stumbling debate performance against Walter Mondale. Unless there is a true health problem we don’t know about, Biden isn’t leaving the campaign to Vice President Kamala Harris, who isn’t as popular as Biden. Talk of a wide-open convention is equally far-fetched, because the party will shatter like a chandelier in an earthquake if Biden’s successor is anyone but Harris.

The New York Times continued to punish Biden for refusing to grant its reporters an exclusive interview. Its “editorial board,” which is still operating under the impression that anyone can even find an editorial page, much less read one, ponderously advised Biden to be a good little patriot and drop out. The Times, remember, had no problem with Trump’s staying in the race despite 34 guilty verdicts. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board preferred logic. It wondered why Trump shouldn’t be the horse to drop out.

After a day of bleeding, some Democrats were ready to rejoin the fight. Jimmy Kimmel said that just because Alfred is too old to  tend to Batman’s house, it shouldn’t be turned over to The Joker. Besides, Atlanta’s gong show will be pushed out of the “A” block by upcoming events, like Monday’s Supreme Court ruling on Presidential immunity, and Trump’s choice of a vice-presidential nominee, presumably without the gallows. And there’s only 12 days until we find out if the owner of Mar-A-Lago is headed for another Big House.

But David Plouffe, the mastermind of Barack Obama’s victories, said it best. With Trump at his most uncouth, Biden had a rare chance to take over a Presidential race that will determine whether Americans will retain their system of representative government. He shanked it.

Biden had to hit the abortion issue hard. He turned an abortion question into a reference on “migrant crime,” which eliminated his wheelhouse and activated Trump’s.

He had to link inflation to the bloated salaries and profits of grocery store and oil company CEOs, and he had to show Americans he recognized that prices are nibbling away at the paychecks their new jobs are giving them. He did none of that. Instead, he defensively rattled off a bunch of economic numbers that, while true, don’t provide comfort at checkout.

He had to push Trump’s role in Jan. 6 and he tried. He also allowed Trump to get away with the preposterous lie that Nancy Pelosi somehow had a hand in the terrorism. And even though Biden mentioned that most of Trump’s advisers now oppose him, he didn’t mention the actual threat to Mike Pence’s life.

He had to counter the endless immigration fear-mongering with Trump’s obvious hypocrisy. Trump told Republican House members to ignore the immigration reform provisions that were written by Republican Sen. James Lankford. Trump said if the bill was passed it would deprive him of a campaign issue. Anything Biden tried to say was lost in the gap between his brain and the microphone.

He had to nail Trump on his mishandling of Covid-19 and, again, he tried. He had no answers when Trump claimed there were more Covid deaths in Biden’s years than his own, which was obviously true because Trump inherited no Covid cases, and there had been 26 million such cases in America by the time of Biden’s inauguration. He could have pointed out that Trump had dissolved the pandemic response office that Obama had installed, the one that largely kept Ebola out of the U.S., but he couldn’t cough up that fact either.

When Trump flatly refused to answer certain questions posed by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, Biden could have smiled as he listened to Trump’s ravings and then said, “Translation: He doesn’t know what he’d do about child care.”

Most of all he had to show that Trump is more concerned with the condition of his 5-iron than with the American working family. He could have done it mockingly, with the type of needle that throws off Trump. What does Trump stand for? Nothing, except when the judge comes in and says, “Will the defendant please rise?” He also could have mocked his own struggles with age, and pointed out that Trump isn’t the first charlatan he’d run across. For example, there was Benedict Arnold. 

Too late now. Trump’s people aren’t dumb enough to let him follow through with the September debate, not unless they feel he needs it. Soon there will only be four months separating us from Election Day, and the “bloodbath” that Trump has promised, should he lose. That will be more than a one-man crime wave.

As many have said, Biden’s only real job in the world this year is to beat Trump, the man whose springboard into politics was a TV show that allowed him to say, “You’re fired.” But this isn’t sports, where coaches are replaced like coffee filters. Biden can only be fired by the voters, provided any are left.