Let the two incompetent clods at the top of the Democratic Party stay there.
Let the two incompetent clods at the top of the Democratic Party stay there.
T hey doubted you when you had a stutter, as a little boy. They doubted you again when you finished 76th out of 85 in your Syracuse Law School class. They continued to mock and scorn you as a notorious blowhard for nearly 40 years in the Senate. Barack Obama said you could be counted upon to f*** things up, and repeatedly tried to talk you out of running for president.
And you proved them all wrong, Mr. President! You not only won in 2020, you got more votes than any president in the history of the country. After all you’ve been through, you’re not really going to let those pipsqueaks at the New York Times push you around, are you? Somebody put out a hit on you over on Eighth Avenue, resulting in this classic reporter-generated, columnist-seconded pile-on. News flash, Mr. President: You’re the leader of the free world, they’re a bunch of people who write stuff. Stay right where you are. Don’t give an inch. Announce your intent to run for reelection as often as possible. Is another Democrat going to knock out an incumbent president? Unlikely.
The intra-party critiques of you are spectacularly unfair. You were unprepared for the fall of Roe? What were you supposed to do, pick up a bullhorn and go harass Brett Kavanaugh? It’s not your fault President Trump got to put three conservatives on the Supreme Court. If Democrats want to direct their anger at someone, it should be at the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg for stubbornly refusing to give up her seat when a Democrat was president. As for the “stalled legislative agenda,” that’s not your fault either. A 50–50 Senate with two moderates cannot be the launching pad for a new New Deal. Democrats are making you a scapegoat.
All in all, the Biden presidency could have gone much worse for conservatives. I part company with my esteemed friend Rich Lowry when I say: We need Sleepy Joe to stay right where he is. Of course he should run again. As Rich put it, “In an office that requires vigor and forcefulness, he’s mumbly and bleached-out. In a position that makes young men suddenly look much older, he’s already quite aged.”
Fine. At the moment, Biden is doing exactly what I like Democratic presidents to do: nothing. If he gets reelected, he’ll do even more nothing. For the good of the country, Rich says, Biden should decline to run again. But if he does run again, he’ll either lose or spend his second term shuffling around the White House looking lost. In my book, the more nothing he does, the better for the country. A youthful, invigorated Democratic president would try to impose one terrible policy after another on the country.
Joe Biden is an ineffective communicator, and he’s a poor strategist. Nobody wants to follow his lead when his approval rating is at 38 percent, and he threatens to drag the Democratic Party down with him this fall.
He is, in short, an ideal Democratic president. If the Republicans can’t beat him in 2024 — and are dumb enough to re-nominate the guy who lost to him in 2020 — they don’t deserve to win. But if the Republicans can just hold on for a few more weeks, until the fall campaign is likely to make it almost impossible for the Democrats to pass anything, the GOP will then retake the House and thereby neutralize the Democratic Party’s threat to pass some breathtakingly idiotic new bill, blow up the Supreme Court, or otherwise do lasting damage to the country.
So far, although the Democrats did pass an idiotic package of Covid stimulus measures and a breathtakingly oversized infrastructure bill, the damage the party has done is somewhat contained. What they could do if they had someone effective in the White House is too nightmarish to contemplate.
If Biden announces that he won’t run again, it will create a free-for-all for the top job. Vice President Kamala Harris would have a clear path to succession if she weren’t a total disaster, but even the Democrats aren’t necessarily dumb enough to value her identity-politics box-checking so highly that they dismiss her staggering ineptitude. If anything, Harris is even worse at communicating than Biden, who at least seems folksy. Harris combines the smarmy arrogance of an entitled elitist with an amazing ability to get completely lost in the middle of attempting to produce a boilerplate answer to a routine question. Despite months of adoring media coverage, she crashed out of the Democratic primary in 2019 before a single vote was cast, with 3 percent support in polls. Her approval rating is as bad as Biden’s.
Understanding all of this, California’s noisome Governor Gavin Newsom is already presenting himself as the Democrats’ alternative to Biden. He’s much more effective than Biden (or Harris), hence far more dangerous. If there is a wide-open contest for the presidency, he’d have an excellent chance to step into the void.
No thanks. Let the two incompetent clods at the top of the Democratic Party stay there as long as they can.