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Whither Biden and the Democrats?
What are these people going to do?
Forget the Vice President’s peculiar peccadilloes vis a vis touching and sniffing and (allegedly) forcing himself on women. There’s an easy way around that: the Democratic press can simply ignore it, knowing full well that the Republicans have a glass houses problem when it comes to sexual misadventure and so can’t throw many stones.
The real problem is that Mr. Biden is pretty clearly mentally incompetent; not merely to be a good President, he’s always been that, but even to successfully compete for the office.
I think it is extraordinarily doubtful that this man, who now seems unable to utter a diagrammable sentence of more than three words with or without a teleprompter, can take part in any debate that doesn’t immediately make his growing mental disability obvious even to his supporters. The current epidemic provides him a convenient excuse to hide from the cameras, but that can’t last indefinitely. When he eventually surfaces, the contrast in energy, coherence, and focus between him and President Trump will be glaringly evident.
It seems to me that long before November one of two things has to happen: either Vice President Biden must be gently escorted from the stage, probably with a modest acknowledgment on his part that his failing health leaves him no longer up to the task or he has to strategically choose a running mate with the explicit understanding that the running mate, and not Joe Biden, will be the de facto President.
I don’t know if that last is possible, politically speaking. But I don’t think this is something the Democrats can do with a knowing wink; I think they have to make it very clear that the ticket on the ballot is printed upside-down, and that Biden will relinquish the top position as soon as practical once assuming office. Because if that isn’t widely understood and acknowledged, the charge that the Democrats are knowingly running a mental incompetent for the highest office will stick, and that’s not a good look.
It seems likely to me that Biden will step down before November, probably well before. That brings up the Bernie problem: if he’s still sorta kinda in the running, how bad will the collateral damage be if someone other than everyone’s favorite unreconstructed communist gets the nod?
My own thinking is that someone perceived as popular and charismatic and suitably identitarian will be pulled in, Michelle Obama being the obvious and extraordinarily unpleasant pick. That’s my personal nightmare scenario, that we’ll get an awful person with high name recognition but an essentially opaque past, who will then enjoy a campaign season honeymoon and hagiography that will last as long as the press can sustain it, while the Republican opposition is savaged with ever more unhinged ferocity by a deeply and now openly corrupt press.
Not that I’ve called an election right in the last ten years, of course.
Published in Elections
Biden’s inept efforts to lie over a four-decade period has actually been used as part of the effort to portray him as wacky-but-lovable Uncle Joe. Unlike, say, Bill Clinton, he’s been so bad at doing it when he’s been in the national spotlight, he’s been framed as the comedy relief of the U.S. Senate, prior to his foibles playing Throtlebottom for eight years to Barack Obama’s God-King in the media.
If he was a slightly better liar, but not a good one, his career probably would have been cut short long before now, even with favorable pro-Democrat media support. But he’s lived off his “too bumbling to be harmful” reputation, which has helped cover for his nasty side, as with the debate against Paul Ryan (which if I were team Trump, I’d study going forward into September, in case Joe still is the nominee by then).
Great. So you just bring back the Dems of the 1970s-80s, and we’ll be fine.
I’ll wait.
Or not.
Look for more “sandwich” stories:
One waitress sandwich on stale white bread – hold the mayo . . .
Henry, I’ve always considered you one of the most honest and sensible Trump apologists, but I really think you’re whistling past the graveyard with this post. I think I was the first person on Ricochet to compare Biden to Grandpa Simpson, so my argument isn’t with that characterization – I just think Trump has finally broken the camel’s back with his stream of consciousness inanities and narcissism ever to recover. Biden could have a debate performance like Reagan’s first outing against Mondale, and it won’t make much of a difference. These briefings have made the scales fall from people’s eyes about the very stable genius. Trump won seniors in Florida by 17 points in 2016, now he is down 10 points with the same group. I see the same here in North Carolina; in 2016 Trump won while the Republican Governor was sacked for a Democrat – this time Thom Tillis is toast and very likely the Republican Senate, our only hope is that Susan Collins never groveled or turned quisling as so many of her colleagues.
If Biden picks Klobuchar we are going to see the blow out Gary and I have been warning about for three and a half years.
Last I saw (today) the President’s polls were up, rather than down. Not that we can trust polls.
I’m hardly surprised that he’s polling poorly among seniors: most of them have just lost a lot of money in a crashing stock market, and the nation is battling a disease that prefers to kill people over 80. They’ve got to be feeling insecure and desperate. That’s hardly a time for a rational political calculus, and I won’t expect it from them until things settle down.
I don’t think Trump has done anything in these briefings that’s likely to change anyone’s mind: his most ardent admirers will continue to think he walks on water, most Republicans will continue to support him with varying degrees of distaste, most Democrats will continue to loathe him, and that peculiar small breed known as never-Trump conservatives will continue in their in my opinion irrational obsession.
Assuming Biden remains the candidate long enough to actually reach a debate with President Trump, I think pro-Trump people will be pleased with the results. But let’s wait and see, shall we?
Nah. Let’s decide now.
If you insist.
Rock, Paper, Scissors; or we can arm wrestle for it. Your call.