On the menu today: As President Biden continues to misstate his own policies, it is a painful sign that the next president must be someone who has enough youth and energy to handle the pressures of the job.
The Wrong Man for a Tough Job
The next president should not be in his seventies . . . or his eighties.
I realize that is age-ist, but the presidency is one of the hardest jobs in the world, and executing the duties of the presidency well requires someone who is in good physical and mental health, ideally with a lot of vigor and an ability to handle off-the-charts stress and a relentless workload.
Joe Biden was not the most verbally or mentally disciplined guy back when he was vice president, and his advancing age is worsening his problems. The president really can’t speak off-script anymore without blurting out something that undermines the case he was trying to make. Republicans may not mind having a president who is so ineffective, but over the long term, it isn’t good for the country to have a commander in chief who can’t handle portions of the job.
A good recent example came on Monday when Biden was discussing gun control, and left the impression that he wants to ban nine-millimeter rounds, the single most popular handgun round in the U.S.:
I sat with a trauma doctor, and I asked him — I said, “What’s the difference? Why are so many people . . .” — and not that many more people were being shot. This is now 20 years ago, or 25 years. I said, “Why are they dying?” And they showed me x-rays. He said, “A .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out, may be able to get it, and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.” So the idea of these high-caliber weapons is of — there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection, hunting.
Nine-millimeter rounds do not blow the lung out of the body, the Second Amendment is not about hunting, and yet Biden decided, off the cuff, to propose an ammunition ban that not even the most ardent gun-control advocates are seriously considering. Roughly 42 percent of all handguns produced from 2010 to 2019 use nine-millimeter rounds. Also note that the Uvalde shooter did not use nine-millimeter rounds.
Passing any change to federal law to address mass shootings will require getting 60 votes in the Senate, which will require ten Republican votes. That is going to be an extremely difficult task in the best of circumstances. Biden going out and deciding, on the spur of the moment, to declare that we would be better off with sweeping bans of ammunition will not make it easier to get those votes.
This is grandpa’s story time, where Biden sort-of, kind-of remembers a conversation from a quarter-century ago and feels the need to share it, regardless of whether or not doing so actually helps achieve his goals.
Back in April, Phil Klein observed that Biden still speaks like a senator — “there is a lot of leeway for engaging in speculation while tossing out various ideas.”
Consider, in just the past few months:
January 19: “What you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”
March 26: “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power.”
April 4: “[Putin] is a war criminal.”
Two days ago, President Biden said the U.S. would not send Ukraine rockets that could reach Russia; later that day, a U.S. official clarified that sending multiple-launch rocket systems — which are capable of reaching Russia — is indeed still under consideration.
Three times, Biden has said that the U.S. would militarily defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, and suggested that the U.S. made a “commitment” to doing so, even though there is no defense treaty ensuring that assistance:
Q: Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan, if it comes to that?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Yes.
Q: You are?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: That’s the commitment we made. That’s the commitment we made.
In each case, the White House staff quickly went out and insisted to the press that the president had meant the opposite of what he just said — that under no scenario would NATO tolerate a minor incursion, that the U.S. was not seeking a regime change in Russia, that Biden was only “speaking from his heart” when he said Putin was a war criminal, and that the U.S. government had not officially concluded that there was evidence of Russian war crimes committed in Ukraine. Biden kept insisting after his Taiwan statements that no U.S. policies have changed, but the U.S. president publicly declaring that the U.S. will militarily defend Taiwan is a change of policy.
On any given day, what Biden says that U.S. policy is and what U.S. policy actually is are no closer than distant cousins.
Everyone in the White House knows Biden’s mouth can’t be trusted; that’s why he hasn’t done a sit-down interview since chatting with NBC’s Lester Holt back on February 10. In that interview, Biden got a bit testy and called Holt a “wise guy” for bringing up Biden’s assertion from last July that inflation would be temporary. (How dare Holt ask Biden about his previous assurances to the public!) Biden’s communications team knows he can burst out with a “that was four days ago! Five days ago!” at any moment.
All of that is the backdrop to this week’s scoop from NBC, which reports that Biden is increasingly irritated with his staff and believes he is being poorly served by them:
Biden is annoyed that he wasn’t alerted sooner about the baby formula shortage and that he got his first briefing in the past month, even though the crisis had long been in the making. (The White House didn’t specify when Biden got his first briefing on the formula shortage.)
Beyond policy, Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.
The reason Republicans have the talking point that Joe Biden is not fully in command of his White House is because Joe Biden is not fully in command of his White House. As Kyle Smith observed, if Biden was really in charge, he could fire anyone he felt was undermining him. Biden rarely does more than one public event per day, he almost never does events at night, he rarely makes public appearances on weekends, and he spends almost every weekend in Delaware.
That NBC report also makes Biden sound like an insufferable whiner:
Biden has vented to aides about not getting credit from Americans or the news media for actions he believes have helped the country, particularly on the economy. . . .
The president has also told aides he doesn’t think enough Democrats go on television to defend him. A particular sore spot is his slumping poll numbers; he’s mystified that his approval rating has dropped to a level approaching that of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
It seems that even usually loyal Democrats are getting tired of having to pretend that everything is going fine:
One of Biden’s prescriptions for his political troubles at the start of the new year was to travel outside Washington more. As he has gotten out in the country, he has also gotten an earful from Democrats about what his administration is — or isn’t — doing.
“People confront him,” said a top Democratic donor who has witnessed such conversations at fundraisers. “All he’s hearing is ‘Why can’t you get anything done?’”
Speaking of septuagenarians who want to be victorious on Election Night in November 2024, Donald Trump is now contending that “something stinks in Georgia” and that Brian Kemp’s victory in the GOP gubernatorial primary is not legitimate. Trump links to a conspiratorial rant by Emerald Robinson. It is the ultimate proof that Trump does not base his claims of election fraud on facts or evidence, but it is his knee-jerk excuse for any election that doesn’t go his way. (Recall that in February 2016, after Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucuses, Trump tweeted, “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong any [sic] why he got more votes than anticipated. Bad!”
The country has real problems, and it will still have real problems on January 20, 2025. This is why the country needs a real president, and not an old man having mood swings and making excuses.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, the president thinks he can persuade you that the economy is doing really well.