Joe Biden’s Presidency Is Sinking Responsibility for the public failure of this government lies with the Democratic Party. By Daniel Henninger
It’s time to board a sinking ship— Joe Biden’s presidency.
The New York Times reported that its poll with Siena College finds 64% of Democrats, not even waiting for the midterm election results, want their candidate in 2024 to be someone other than the president. That famous Democratic youth vote? Under 30, they’re down on Joe at a 94% rate.
Below this thin ice is the measured sentiment that more than 7 in 10 Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.
With the probably pointless caveat that things can change in politics, this means Mr. Biden is effectively a lame-duck president. If he runs, there will be a primary challenge, as there was in 1980 for Jimmy Carter.
Two Democratic governors, California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker, are already circling. RootsAction, a group aligned with Bernie Sanders, is planning a #DontRunJoe campaign. When Mr. Biden visited Cleveland last week to tout his economic accomplishments, the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate, Rep. Tim Ryan, and its candidate for governor, Nan Whaley, said scheduling conflicts prevented them from joining him.
What’s left? The blame game, of course. Despite a bad reputation, the blame game is a useful therapeutic for parties that are loath even to admit there’s a problem. Britain’s Conservatives just worked the blame game through to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s resignation.
Mr. Biden’s personal fall will help Republicans in the midterm elections, but a U.S. presidency with the public’s confidence so fully withdrawn this early in a four-year term is very bad for the country. Hard as it is to believe, politics still has a higher purpose.
For this mess, I blame the Democrats, not—as many of them have put it—Mr. Biden’s alleged unwillingness to “fight.”
To be blunt: The reason most Americans don’t want Mr. Biden to run is that it’s clear by now that he has cognitive problems unacceptable in a person responsible for conducting the presidential office.
Since Inauguration Day, every public statement he has made to the American people, large or small, has been written by someone else for him to read by rote from a teleprompter. His off-the-cuff followups are painful.
Mr. Biden’s condition didn’t begin on Inauguration Day. Those around him knew there was a problem, but the needs of the party prevailed. Concerned that a progressive such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren couldn’t win the general election, the Democrats fashioned a faux moderate candidacy out of Mr. Biden.
The ploy worked. A slim majority of the country preferred Mr. Biden over Donald Trump.
As they say in politics, you do what you gotta do. That said, a responsible party leadership would have hedged this clear national risk by nominating a strong vice-presidential candidate able to step in if necessary, say, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
But by the summer of 2020, the Democrats were in the grip of compulsive wokeness and decided the running mate had to be a black woman. The one with national prominence at that moment was Sen. Kamala Harris. But Democratic voters themselves had already concluded in the presidential primaries she wasn’t ready for high office.
As to invoking the 25th Amendment on presidential incapacitation, the last thing the U.S. needs—with Russia, China and Iran also circling with the vultures—is a destructive succession crisis.
Even at this low ebb, a more respectable political performance by this government should have been possible. Whose fault is that, Mr. Biden’s or his party’s?
Following the pullout from Afghanistan, which Mr. Biden owns, the administration abandoned its election mandate for healing moderation and went left.
Bowing to demands from the Sanders-Warren progressives, the administration put in motion a New-Deal-like spending plan that included four major new entitlement programs: federalized prekindergarten and child care, an expanded child tax credit, paid family and medical leave, and two free years of community college.
With the Senate divided 50-50, Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona resolutely opposed the legislation. Mr. Manchin warned his party repeatedly that the new spending would produce inflation and that expunging fossil fuels would be a mistake.
The whole of the Democratic Party, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, chose to blow by all these red flags. Inflation is today 9.1%, not least because of the party consensus—actually a mania—to abolish fossil-fuel production.
Unembarrassed gall may be the mother’s milk of politics, but it’s more than too much to see the Democrats who gave the country Joe Biden and designed the policies that collapsed beneath him knifing their own creation. Et tu, Bernie?
Yes, blind ambition brought Mr. Biden into the presidency. But his inadequacies have little do with the new story line that he’s failing because he won’t “fight.” Which means he won’t bellow into a bullhorn on a street corner like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To his credit, Mr. Biden retains some vestige of respect for the dignity of his office. The party that is abandoning him should look in the mirror.
Comments are closed.
