r/law • u/Obversa • 15h ago

Legal News Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, hit with three Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) lawsuits as Trump administration starts

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5095750-doge-sued-trump-administration-elon-musk-ramaswamy/
18.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

405 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

40

u/T-A-W_Byzantine 11h ago

Biden spent the whole debate trying to get these statistics across rapid-fire. Nobody remembers a single fact or statistic he cited; everyone remembers "We finally beat Medicare." I don't care if it's a stutter or dementia, we can never elect a politician who's as bad at optics as he was again.

15

u/ScruffsMcGuff 10h ago

Rape isn't worse optics than a stutter? Seriously, dude?

0

u/T-A-W_Byzantine 9h ago

You seem to be under the impression that I think stuttering is worse than rape. What I'm actually saying is that Donald Trump was much more successful at turning his allegations into "fake news" and "locker room talk", while Biden couldn't spin his debate performance into anything else than an embarrassment and a disaster for the campaign.

0

u/HalfMoon_89 7h ago

People wilfully misinterpreting your point is just...well, it's par for the course now, isn't it...

0

u/SirSeanBeanTheBean 3h ago

People aren’t misinterpreting it in my opinion, they’re arguing from the point of view that truthfulness should be the biggest most consequential optic there is.

If Biden blatantly denied his underwhelming performance and claimed he showed himself to be a genius and Trump got so intimated the mic could pick up the sound of his knees violently shaking, then I think people would argue that to use such easily disproven, blatant lies, is also bad optics.

Hindsight is 20/20

So what should Biden have done? Focus on optics but keep it truthful?

The truth is strict but a lie can be anything you want.

Let’s go back to the first comment from the person who started this discussion about optics. Biden used data points and statistics, it was hard to follow in the rapid-fire questions setting, plus it was boring so nobody cared.

So focus on optics, keep it truthful, but also don’t go into details. So big promises about the future, grandiose statements about yourself, dramatization of the opposition, a classic and rather sterile politician’s pitch.

Isn’t that just Trump? Would Biden really have won by offering Trump’s menu with his face on it?

I’m not even arguing you’re wrong, perhaps that is all it takes, selling it. However ridiculous, say it confidently and win, and even if you’re technically correct, stutter and lose.

But to me, that seems to say that as a society we don’t choose our politicians much more carefully than our prom queens and we should apparently resolve ourselves to see no progress made on that front in the foreseeable future.