Can we all agree, Joe Biden is no Bill Clinton, and he’s also no Barack Obama?
Yes, the 79-year-old, half-century swamp dweller is every bit as leftist and spineless as the aforementioned pols and seems to sway with the political winds just as the they did in times of upheaval during their tenures. But whereas Clinton and Obama both made impressive comebacks after nationwide voter revolts against them, Joe Biden will establish a new losing trend liberals will find difficult to break. It’s hard to rebound from major electoral drubbings; it’ll be near impossible for the current White House occupant to do it. Biden basically begged for a do-over in his State of the Union address the other night. He didn’t so much as ask for a proverbial mulligan (golf term, right?) or an automatic first down after a GOP personal foul penalty -- or even an instant replay after a bang-bang play at first base -- but it’s clear that the struggling president wants people to think about his time in office in a new way. Senile Joe wants you to open up your minds, people! Looks can deceive, right? You might be paying five bucks a gallon in some parts of the United States today, but there’s no energy crisis, no 1970’s style gas lines around the city block or crazy oil sheiks threatening to shut off their oil rigs to spite us… so we’re good, aren’t we? The Biden administration doesn’t even need a second chance, because they didn’t screw up opportunity number one. It’s all an illusion in your mind, fools! The unemployment rate is back to the full-employment level, so everyone’s working and smiling and singing and playing their harmonicas in their spare time.
Happy days are here again! Just switch off your negative-o-meter and welcome in the good vibes. You can do it, man! In order to have swallowed Biden’s SOTU as written and delivered, everyone else is hopelessly wrong but senile Joe, Jen Psaki and the rest of the Biden spinmeisters. Democrats are all correct that the country is really doing hunky-dory and the responsibility for whatever is going wrong in the world -- which is pretty much everything -- belongs with someone else. This certainly includes the false (according to them) impression that the economy is doing poorly -- economic growth is booming, higher than under Trump! Biden conceded that inflation is a problem, but once things return to normal after COVID recedes, everyone will just forget about all the lockdowns and mandates and government checks and Democrat pontificating and liberal demagoguery and fearmongering and excessive health fright and the riots of 2020, etc. But they’ll never forget about January 6, 2021, because that was Trump’s and his Republican supporters’ fault! We’ll punish those insurrectionists, won’t we?
Above it all on Tuesday night, you couldn’t help but feel Biden is a goner, his ship has left port and all is lost without hope of rescue. Senile Joe is like the H.M.S. Titanic moments after it hit the iceberg. The ship’s crew understood the vessel would sink; it was just a question of when. As would be expected, not all Democrats believe the disaster is preordained. In a piece titled, “Relax, Democrats, Biden’s Presidency Isn’t Screwed”, liberal opinion writer John F. Harris argued that Biden is primed for a return to glory. Harris is either the most optimistic man in blue America or he’s completely delusional. He wrote at Politico the other day:
“Here is one place Biden and his anxious party might start: By remembering that the modern presidency offers its occupants nearly inexhaustible capacity for political revival. While Biden faces a growing roster of doubts and doubters — including within his own party — his two immediate Democratic predecessors offer vivid examples showing that the tools for him to reverse perceptions and regain control of his presidency are within his grasp.
“Biden’s, Obama’s, and Clinton’s troubles in the opening phase of their presidencies are all different in detail. But they share a common dynamic — progressives with an ambitious agenda who faced a uniformly hostile and remorseless partisan opposition, and were widely perceived in the opening phase of their tenures as being in over their heads...
“Biden is not the agile political performer of either Clinton, or Obama, or Trump. But he is easily their equal and possibly their superior in terms of understanding the day-to-day practical burdens and aspirations of the voters he needs. Tuesday night’s State of the Union address [was] a well-timed reminder: Biden holds an office with unmatched power to command attention and tell a story, every day, about who he is and what he is trying to achieve for the country.”
Hmpf. Well then, Joe ain’t a very good storyteller. He can barely read a teleprompter. It looked as though he didn’t even rehearse the reading of the text.
It’s all fairies and unicorns in Democrats’ world, isn’t it? The pundits’ reaction to Biden’s speech was fairly predictable. I flipped around to liberal cable channels after he left the podium and the commentary was eminently predictable, namely that Biden “hit a homerun” and this speech was the springboard he had to have to turn the opinion tide and get his floundering presidency back to the glory days of campaign 2020.
Who knows, their dreams might’ve come true if every voter in America actually listened to the speech and no one had paid attention to current events in the past fourteen months. Assuming people could just return to their pre-Biden presidency impressions of the old doofus as a healer and great bipartisan magician who would fix the universe, the speech might’ve even worked.
The chattering class’s gushing praise was characteristic of the way big government-types view Biden -- that he’s a man of the people who understands the average American and his common-man-upbringing special empathy qualities would inevitably lead to his political revival. Harris even alluded to Biden’s “superior understanding” of people in his final paragraph above. These know-it-alls appear to suggest Biden’s generous use of colloquial language and terms like “man”, “jack” and “here’s the deal” when speaking without a written script help make the 79-year old relatable.
It's all bogus. Elitists like Harris forget that prior to Obama dragging Joe’s deadweight political carcass along in 2008, Biden was a washed-up has-been who could only win elections in a blue state that wouldn’t vote for a true conservative Republican if he or she was the last of their kind on planet earth.
Biden didn’t take the Democrat nomination two years ago because party voters loved him. Senile Joe prevailed because he wasn’t Bernie Sanders, and his handlers made a credible argument that he would attract the necessary independent votes to beat Donald Trump. This, and fairly significant vote shenanigans did the trick.
In his piece, Harris added that there were four things both Clinton and Obama did to get back on their feet after being bludgeoned by the voters in the 1994 and 2010 midterm elections. They are: Let people see you grow in office; Embrace divided government; Start campaigning now; and, Find the moral center. The Politico writer acknowledged that Biden is quite a bit older than Bill and Barack were at their crisis points, but the rest of the hard work would be achievable with a switch in focus.
This is wishful thinking on a massive scale. Harris didn’t mention it, but both Clinton and Obama benefited from the media’s total change in focus once Republicans took power in the House. In 1995, for example, Newt Gingrich and his hungry band of GOPers kept their promise to work on the provisions of the Contract with America, but the establishment soon got them bogged down with issues like federal school lunches, etc.
Republicans discovered just how hard it was to actually trim (or even reduce the growth rate of) a longstanding federal welfare program, much less eliminate it. Once Democrats had successfully branded Gingrich and the Republicans as heartless demons who wanted to hurt the poor rather than reform the budget, Big Bubba Bill started smelling like a rose again. Then, when the ’96 election rolled around, Republicans couldn’t find a more “alive” candidate than Bob Dole to challenge Clinton. The result wasn’t close.
In Obama’s case, after the GOP swept Nancy Pelosi out of the Speaker’s chair the first time in 2010, the establishment media began assaulting the Tea Party movement and the boat rocking conservative House members who were elected to assist in repealing Obamacare. Like two decades before, the media portrayed Republicans as heartless cheapskates who simply wouldn’t make every program an entitlement in the United States.
There was a racial element to the Obama defense too, remember? As the first African-American president, anyone who opposed Obama’s agenda did so because he or she was a racist!
Obama was able to mount a comeback and win reelection partially because Republicans nominated a pathetically weak candidate opposite him in 2012. It was 1996 all over again.
One way or another, Joe Biden doesn’t figure to get much poll bounce from his typical-for-Joe performance at the State of the Union Address the other night. The numbers aren’t good for Democrats because Biden and party congressional leaders overestimated their popularity after the 2020 election. American voters aren’t stupid; they’ll figure out who needs to go and when.
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