Watching our verbally challenged, glaringly corrupt chief executive stumbling around on a speaker’s platform as he tries to recite the sentences prepared by his staff over a teleprompter, one wonders whether Democratic leaders should stick with this presidential candidate.
They probably will — and for good reason. It may be too late to dump stumbling Joe Biden or his ditzy vice president, who checks two boxes for her job being partly black and, more noticeably, female. In Biden’s case, we are dealing with the ultimate Teflon president, a politician who has defied all odds by leading his party to unexpected victories while technically heading an administration that always seems to be in shambles.
Biden will likely enter the 2024 presidential race with campaign funds vastly exceeding those of his opponents. The media will then lend the Democrats unstinting support.
In the face of inflated prices, a deliberately open southern border, a surging crime rate in our cities, and a government smothering us with wokeness, Biden’s party did smashingly well in two elections. In 2022 and 2023, the Democratic Party prevailed in contests it was supposed to lose. Other presidents, including the now media-sanctified Barack Obama, saw their parties falter in off-year elections. But that didn’t happen to Biden. His party surged to senatorial and gubernatorial successes despite Biden’s poor poll numbers, a tanking economy, and a broken southern border. No president in modern times has done so well snatching victories out of the jaws of defeat.
Further, I am not impressed by the argument that Biden was not directly on the ballot in off-year elections, and so, the Democrats could campaign without having him in the picture. Biden and his fellow Democrats did well by pouncing on Donald Trump, although the former president was not running in the off-year elections. The Democrats presented themselves as the preservers of democracy against the supposedly corrupt, authoritarian Trump and his “MAGA Republican” partisans. Biden and his associates persuaded voters that they were combating a fascist threat. They also convinced carefully targeted voters that they were upholding the “reproductive rights of women” against the will Republicans who wish to force women to bear children against their will.
These charges seemed at the time to be thoroughly over the top. But I was wrong. My Republican senatorial candidate, Mehmet Oz, tried to run away from the abortion issue. He was undone by unmarried women who viewed him and other Republicans as male chauvinists. Palpably brain-damaged Democrat John Fetterman, who advocated unlimited abortion rights, won the U.S. Senate race by almost five points, thereby proving that sentience has nothing to do with winning elections anymore.
The determinative factor for elections in heavily populated areas is the leftist power structure. Corporate capitalists, the administrative state, officially disadvantaged minorities, and the corporate press all work together to control our urban vote. Whether Democratic candidates are capable of thinking may matter less than their support for policies that our power brokers seek to implement.
Biden will likely enter the 2024 presidential race with campaign funds vastly exceeding those of his opponents. The media will then lend the Democrats unstinting support. After four judges in Colorado voted to remove Trump from the primary ballot on the entirely unproven grounds that he engaged in “insurrection,” the media spun the story in such a way that a majority of respondents in a national poll expressed support for this bizarre decision. It is one the Supreme Court will likely strike down. Meanwhile, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Democratic judges at all levels will help run interference for their guy.
American Enterprise Institute fellow Marc Thiessen wondered aloud on Fox News recently why Trump was barely leading Biden in the polls if the incumbent is as unpopular as he seems. Thiessen’s implied explanation was that the race seems so close even with a disastrous president because of all the baggage carried by Trump.
The real reason is more complex. The election outcome remains uncertain even with all of Biden’s screwups because the Democrats have so many weapons at their disposal. There won’t be an even playing field in the 2024 election, especially not if Trump is the Republican nominee. The Donald has become the issue around which the Democrats will mobilize. Of course, if the opponent turns out unexpectedly to be Vivek Ramaswamy or Ron DeSantis, then the knives will come out just as predictably.
Nikki Haley may be less of a media target since she represents less of a danger to the swamp. But she, too, could be transformed into a right-wing menace. The media recently piled on her for stressing the role of government in answering a question about the cause of the Civil War. It seems that Haley, in her impromptu response, failed to focus emphatically on the evil of slavery.
Even swamp creatures, we learn, are expected to give politically correct answers to historical questions. Only Democratic candidates are spared such ordeals.
Political commentary and public administration are now so thoroughly parts of our leftist establishment that electoral outcomes seem all but pre-programmed. Republicans must consider that as they lay out a battle plan for this year. Assuming an easy victory because the other side has wrecked the country may be optimism bordering on insanity.