Democrats Should Be Very, Very Nervous
If doddering Joe Biden is your party’s best hope, your party might be in deep trouble.
So, let me get this straight.
After a year of campaigning, discussion, and debate among the Democrats, as of early February the party had decided Joe Biden was the favorite for its presidential nomination: He led in 19 of the 21 national polls taken before the Iowa caucuses. Then people started to vote, and it turned out they didn’t like Biden at all. He finished fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada. As of last week, the Democrats had decided to be an openly socialist party: Bernie Sanders led 20 consecutive national polls after Iowa, half of them by double digits. And then, this week, Democrats decided not to be socialist after all: They just gave Biden, the doddering avatar of the party establishment, a resounding Super Tuesday victory.
Maybe the Democrats really have no actual policy except beating Donald Trump. Biden and Sanders haven’t been saying anything new this year. (Though it’s possible voters were unaware that Sanders was so extreme he would — in 2020! —go as far as publicly defending Fidel Castro’s Cuba in both a 60 Minutes segment and the South Carolina debate). The thing that has changed twice is voting momentum and its attendant publicity. Sanders rocketed up in the polls when he looked like a winner, and Biden surpassed him after building momentum from a blowout win in South Carolina. Mike Bloomberg looked like a loser from the moment Elizabeth Warren tenderized him in the Las Vegas debate, and today dropped out after spending $500 million to win American Samoa.
Voting on perceived electability has left the Dems in a strange place, though. Joe Biden? Really? We know Joe Biden. He was in the Senate for 36 years. He ran for president in 1988, and again in 2008, before serving two terms as Barack Obama’s vice president. There is no precedent for a career politician’s reaching the top after such an extended period in the national spotlight. He doesn’t inspire the kind of passion that Obama did and Bernie Sanders does. His appeal seems to rest almost completely on name recognition and his association with Obama. Despite heroic efforts by the media to absolve Biden of any wrongdoing when the Ukraine scandal revealed he’d allowed family members to use his name to rake in huge amounts of money from foreign entities, recent polls put his unfavorable ratings at between 44 and 52 percent.
Yes, Biden beats Trump regularly in head-to-head polls, but you can ask Hillary Clinton about how much beating Trump in early polls is worth. In just the past ten days, he has claimed half the population of the country died of gunshot wounds, forgotten what office he is running for, asked voters to support him on “Super Thursday,” and offered this précis of our nation’s founding principle: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by — you know, you know, the thing.”
TO BE FAIR, NEITHER CAN HE: VIDEO: Students bored by Joe Biden, can’t name his accomplishments.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Joe Biden is No Moderate.
HEH: A short list of Biden backers who declared Trump mentally unfit for office. “There’s something especially egregious about declaring Trump intellectually incapable of governing while supporting the candidacy of a man who often forgets where he is and the office for which he’s running. In the spirit of the time we find ourselves living in, let’s name and shame the worst offenders.”
DON’T GET COCKY: Joe Biden is ‘completely unelectable,’ says ‘Bond King’ Jeffrey Gundlach.
WHATEVER THE DEMOCRATS HAVE ON MITT ROMNEY, IT MUST BE AWFULLY GOOD. Romney could block subpoena in Hunter Biden probe.