Old Man Yells at Cloud

Y ou know you’re about as useful as an anvil on a life raft when a prominent member of your own party won’t come out when you visit her state to talk about the issue closest to her heart. Why did Stacey Abrams suddenly discover she had other commitments when President Biden went down to Atlanta to yammer and squawk about the made-up threat of voter suppression? Did her nephew have a hockey game or something? Ordinarily, you’d guess that a sucking chest wound wouldn’t have stopped Abrams from banging a voting-rights gong beside Biden. Instead, “Sorry, Mr. Leader of the Free World, Ms. Abrams has a scheduling conflict.”

Abrams was wise to stay away; on the same day that the entire state of Georgia was in a state of rapture following the Bulldogs’ National Championship win the night before, Biden shuffled in like the character in Encanto who has a rain cloud over her head, to tell everyone they’re living in 1963 and the Klan is about to ride through whipping everyone with rusty chains if they go near a voting booth in November. The more Biden coughed and shouted and sputtered, the more America went “Huh?” and pictured the president screaming the exact same balderdash at the nearest CNN-spewing monitor while wearing a tattered bathrobe and scruffy slippers at a Sunset Acres facility in Wilmington.

What on earth was the old man shouting about this time? Voter suppression? Voter subversion? Voting in Georgia is easier now than it was ten years ago, much less in 1963. It has more early voting than Delaware. Its electioneering policies forbidding the buying of voters with Happy Meals and Dr Peppers are so not-Jim-Crow that New York and New Jersey have the same rules.

The big news in the speech is that Biden wants to nuke the filibuster he backed throughout his career, up to as recently as six months ago when he warned, “You will throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.” Doing so would also likely cost several vulnerable Democrats their seats in that body, which is why Mark Kelly and Maggie Hassan are starting to act like they’re clay pigeons who have just been invited to a shooting party. “I support changing the Senate rules,” said Biden, “WHICHEVER WAY THEY NEED TO BE CHANGED TO PREVENT A MINORITY OF SENATORS from blocking action on voting rights. Cough.” Yeah, but Mr. President, maybe consider that the reason this monumentally dumb idea is dead is that “YOUR OWN PARTY DOESN’T BACK YOU.” Also, there’s no constitutional provision that says CONGRESS SHALL DEFER TO THE PRESIDENT WHENEVER HE SHOUTS.

It seems clear enough that Biden’s is going to be the second straight presidency destroyed by Twitter; Biden actually thinks that the activist obsessions of political alcoholics on social media are an important indicator of where the country is heading. Poll after poll shows that Americans rate the economy, inflation, the ongoing Covid crisis, and (the void of) leadership as their main issues of concern, and the alleged end of democracy and the voter-rights crisis are down there in the lint trap of issues alongside “Do something about the entry fees at the national parks.”

“That’s not hyperbole,” Biden thundered, as he offered one ludicrous chunk of overstatement after another. “Will we choose democracy or autocracy?” he asked, as though the issue in Georgia is a czarist movement rather than an ID requirement for absentee voting. “I’m TIRED OF BEING QUIET!” he shouted, slapping the lectern, making everyone sigh who voted for him on a “maybe he’ll restore calm” theory. Reeling off names from the Civil Rights Hall of Fame, he added, “I’m so damn old, I was there as well!”

Unless “there” means “the Sixties,” this was meaningless tosh, because he sure wasn’t among the Freedom Riders, nor at Selma. “Ya think I’m kiddin,’ man seems like yesterday, the first time I got arrested.” So our Pop-Pop of the Potomac is under the impression he was arrested more than once in civil-rights protests? Somebody should refresh him with the truth. He was AWOL from the civil-rights battles and was still bragging about earning the blessing of George Wallace as late as 1987. Good thing Biden’s reputation as a liar is one of the best-established facts in Washington, or people might have started to wonder whether maybe Joe had lost a step.

“The next few days,” the president claimed, “when these bills come to a vote will mark a turning point in our nation’s history.” No, they won’t. Because nothing will happen. “Nothing happened that day” doesn’t make for a very scintillating chapter in the big book of History. Voters don’t care about Jim Crow 2.0 because they know it isn’t happening. Bare shelves, on the other hand, they notice. Biden has been around politics a pretty long time, but he still doesn’t grasp that when it comes to achieving salience in the voters’ minds, real problems tend to beat fake problems.