On the menu: We all have a big week ahead — Super Tuesday, the State of the Union Address (yawn), and who knows what else the news cycle will throw at us. For more than a year now, the White House and Biden campaign team have been able to brush off, ignore, downplay, and dismiss bad polling, but this weekend’s latest survey from the New York Times feels like a heavy straw on the back of a weakening camel. Biden and his allies have lost the argument about whether he’s too old to be president. Meanwhile, a continuing debate about whether the actions of Russia under Vladimir Putin represent nascent empire-building.
Three-Quarters of Voters Think Biden Is Too Old to Be President
Every two weeks or so, a major poll of the likely general-election presidential matchup comes out, and it smacks Democrats across the face like a wet flounder.* The latest from the New York Times/Siena College survey indicates that 75 percent of registered voters think Joe Biden “is just too old to be an effective president.” For those wondering, 42 percent said the same about Donald Trump.
For the last three years, many Democrats have argued that Biden is not too old to be president. They have lost that argument about as thoroughly as any party has lost a high-stakes argument in recent memory. That Times survey found that 61 percent of Biden voters from 2020 think he is now too old to be president.
The approach of the Biden team to nervous Democrats has been to insist that no one should worry, and that the American people will change their minds by Election Day 2024. Month after month, they insist Biden is fine. The “he’s so energetic when you can’t see him” spin was the target of the opening sketch of Saturday Night Live this weekend. Back on February 19, Nate Silver, exhausted from the implausible spin, effectively dared the Biden campaign to put up or shut up and start doing more frequent interviews with tougher questioners.
As you noticed, Biden did nothing of the sort. Last week, he taped an interview with late-night comedy host Seth Meyers, and described a cease-fire proposal that, as far as anyone can tell, does not exist.
I yawned a moment ago about the State of the Union address, but maybe this week, the stakes really will be higher. Biden doesn’t do big rallies anymore, and his campaign openly admits they’re relying more on visits to ice-cream shops that are closed to reporters, with footage shared on TikTok and other social-media platforms, as their primary voter-outreach strategy. (I will remind you that Biden himself signed the legislation banning TikTok from all government devices. The headline in the Chinese government’s state-run media: “Biden campaign joining TikTok proves ‘US national security threat’ rhetoric nonsense.”)
Did anything from Biden’s appearance at the border catch your eye? How about his visit to East Palestine, Ohio, a year after the Norfolk Southern train wreck? His allies are talking up reasons for him to skip the debates.
Last night 60 Minutes did a report on the crisis at the border. Raul Ortiz, who served as the chief of U.S. Border Patrol under Biden from August 2021 through May 2023, said he has never had a conversation with Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. He added that the Biden administration sent mixed messages to migrants.
The Democrats have pushed all their chips to the middle of the table and bet that they will win an election with a candidate who can barely campaign. Since January 31, there have been 21 national surveys of a general-election matchup between Biden and Trump. Trump led in 18 of them, two were ties, and one had Biden ahead.
Our Luther Ray Abel concludes:
Whatever people feel about Trump the man, they’re inclined to dislike him less because at least things seemed better under his watch (discomposed as it may have been). People like Biden well enough . . . they just don’t like him as president.
On That Allegedly Hard-to-See Russian Imperialism . . .
A lot of Ukraine-aid critics will call you a warmonger and go home. Credit my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty for listening to the counterarguments and laying out how he sees the issue with clarity, detail, and directness.
MBD is clear, detailed, direct . . . and still wrong. He assures us that Putin doesn’t really intend to conquer all of Ukraine, because “taking all of Ukraine’s territory is a fool’s errand for Russia. It would be an attempt to swallow a porcupine. He has never sent enough manpower over to pacify the whole of Ukraine.”
Eh, when the invasion began, Putin sent Russian forces south through Belarus, through the Dnipro Reservoir toward Kyiv, all along their shared border, west through Donetsk, up through the Crimean Peninsula, and along the southern shore east of Odesa. Russian forces were advancing on the country from three directions, and the only reason the Russians weren’t attacking from the West was because Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova were to the West.
Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief Ukraine correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, has published a new book, Our Enemies Will Vanish, covering the first year of the war. He writes:
The morning of February 24 [2022], the voenkors [Russian military media commentators and bloggers] — many of whom added a “Z,” which had been adopted as a symbol of the Russian invasion, to their handles — were euphoric. Kharkiv had already fallen, they wrote, and Odesa was mere hours away. By the day’s end, the Ukrainian state would be no more. A meme circulated describing the mock timetable of the Russian-Ukrainian war; it foresaw an invasion after breakfast, a Russian military parade on Kyiv’s Khreshchatyk after lunch, and celebratory fireworks after dinner.
That sure looks and sounds like a hunger to conquer most, if not all, of Ukraine. If Putin was or is willing to leave a rump state around Lviv, are we supposed to give him some points for being reasonable or something? What, does he get a cookie?
Michael writes, “I take Russian power seriously, but I have never seen it gathering Hitlerian momentum to blast through all of Ukraine and then challenge NATO.” What would you need to see to conclude that Putin wants to reacquire control over Poland and the Baltic states?
- Back in November, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said, “We will treat it (Poland) precisely as a historical enemy. If there is no hope for reconciliation with the enemy, Russia should have only one and a very tough attitude regarding its fate. History has more than once delivered a merciless verdict to the presumptuous Poles: no matter how ambitious the revanchist plans may be, their collapse could lead to the death of Polish statehood in its entirety.”
- Last month, Medvedev said, “That is why it is so important to achieve all the goals of the special military operation. To push back the borders that threaten our country as far as possible, even if they are the borders of Poland.”
- Putin claimed on January 16 that Latvia and other Baltic states are “throwing [ethnic] Russian people” out of their countries and that this situation “directly affects [Russia’s] security.”
- After the invasion started, NATO member Lithuania started blocking Belarussian access to ports in Kaliningrad, that little bit of Russian territory stuck between Lithuania and Poland. Back in October, a Belarussian national-security official responded, “We have every reason to use the force of arms to break through a corridor that is vital for us.”
Do these guys seem like they’re cool with the current borders? No, the Russian army does not appear set to charge into the Fulda Gap anytime soon, but why does it seem so unthinkable that if Russia emerges victorious in Ukraine, it won’t try some “Salami Tactics” against the Baltics or Poland or some other NATO member? If Americans aren’t willing to send additional arms to the Ukrainians, why should Putin think any Americans are willing to die to preserve the territorial integrity of far-off allies?
I know, I know; Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov recently declared, “Russia has no intention of attacking any other country in Eastern Europe.” Of course, a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, Lavrov told the world and personally assured British foreign secretary Liz Truss that Russia had no plans to invade Ukraine. Six days before the full-scale Russian invasion began, Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu assured Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that the Russian army was just conducting a training exercise.
(These guys are such shameless liars that two weeks after the invasion started, Lavrov was still insisting that Russia had not attacked Ukraine.)
Just a few days after assuring us that Russia did not plan on invading any other country in Eastern Europe, Lavrov warned that the Moldovan government was “following in the footsteps of the Kyiv regime.” Just how are we supposed to interpret the Russian government declaring that a non-NATO country adjacent to Ukraine is following the path set by a country they’re invading?
“The regime that has settled in [the Moldovan capital of] Chisinau and that follows in the footsteps of the Kyiv regime,” Lavrov said, as translated by Gerashchenko. “Cancelling everything Russian, discriminating against the Russian language in all spheres, and, together with the Ukrainians, also organizing serious economic pressure on Transnistria.”
Michael writes, “If you don’t want Russian problems spilling over into NATO territory, why are you so anxious to be geographic bunkmates?”
First, you’re going to have a hard time finding anybody who thinks Ukraine should join NATO today, or anytime soon. The question of whether Ukraine should join NATO can only be resolved after the war ends, when there’s a mutually agreed clear border between Russia and Ukraine. But when the question of Ukrainian membership in NATO arises, the answer should come from the NATO member countries and the Ukrainians. Vladimir Putin doesn’t get a veto just because he’s in the neighborhood and carries some grudges from the Cold War.
Second, look at a map, my friend. NATO is “geographic bunkmates” with Russia already, it’s just a question of how we’re going to respond to their actions when our neighbor’s problems spill into our yard. Before the war, Russia shared a border with NATO members Estonia and Latvia and had a tiny stretch of shared border with Norway, up near the very top of Europe. If you want to throw in Russia’s vassal state Belarus — you know, that country that allowed Russian forces to attack Ukraine from its soil — then you can say Lithuania and Poland share a border, too. Turkey’s just across the Black Sea. And now that Finland’s in NATO, there’s another 832 miles of border with Russia.
“I see no Russian empire-building here,” MBD concludes.
In 2008, Russia invaded and occupied 20 percent of Georgia’s territory. In the spring of 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, and started sending the “little green men” into Donetsk and Luhansk. In 2015, Russia made a major military mobilization into Syria, turning the Assad regime into a client state. Then in 2022, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, and now we’ve got the saber-rattling over Transnistria, where Russia has helped create a hostile mini-state out of a narrow stretch along the Moldovan-Ukrainian border.
Pal, what do you need to see to conclude some Russian empire-building is going on under Putin? How many countries does the Russian military need to invade before you catch a whiff of imperialism?
*As opposed to, you know, a dry flounder.
ADDENDA: Thanks to Jessica Rosenthal for having me on The Fox News Rundown podcast.
In case you missed it, Friday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast featured an unplanned digression into the acting career of G. Gordon Liddy. I think Greg and I are pretty good at talking about the day’s news, but we really excel at random memories of guest stars on Miami Vice.