Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born November 20, 1942, almost 82 years ago. And while his body is in fair shape for a man his age, his political career was assassinated on July 21, 2024, not by Republicans, but by his ostensible allies in the “liberal” media and the Democratic Party itself. His presidency has not yet lasted four years.
On Sunday, President Biden officially announced that while he is serving the rest of his term, he will not continue to campaign and is asking his primary delegates to support Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party nomination for president. On Wednesday 8 PM he gave a short speech from the Oval Office stating: “I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition.”
As I have said more than once, I think the reason Biden ran for re-election in the first place (and held off this long despite his unpopularity) is the suspicion that Harris would be even more unpopular.
The reason that we have been in this horrible situation with the 2024 election, with a rematch of two candidates that no one wanted to see run the first time, is because of the truly horrible truth of the Republican Party: Donald Trump really is the best candidate they have for president. Because he is a sinner and a joker, he is the best candidate to push a theocratic agenda compared to the sincere fanatics who would otherwise be running in his absence. We all know Trump isn’t sincere about anything, so (it’s assumed) he isn’t going to be serious about Project 2025, either.
Conversely, Joe Biden, the other old, politically incorrect white guy, was thought to be the best choice to sell a Democratic Party that is still associated with DEI, Palestine protestors and Defund the Police, even though most mainstream Democrats don’t believe in such initiatives. The problem is that that June debate really killed him. Everyone knew that Joe was old, but some people saw that and thought, “Wow, I knew he was old, but this is ‘should we put Dad in a home?’ old.” I think overall he has shown himself to be lucid, but not consistently enough, and not without even more flubs, such as mixing up his running mate with Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy with Russian President Putin. And then of course there’s this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vpIF65ISZU
I had thought that as with a whole bunch of candidates, including Barack Obama in 2012 and the now Senator John Fetterman in 2022, that one bad debate was not and should not have been enough to pronounce final judgment on the Biden campaign. And it didn’t. Most polls after the debate showed Biden at least holding his own, even if he was a couple points down in some instances, but certainly not by so much of a margin that it ended the race. What took Biden down was the campaign from within, as Democratic Party insiders and the Washington media – same thing, really – spread rumors about Biden’s lack of support even as big money donors openly declared they were withholding contributions. Meanwhile bigwigs like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and even Barack Obama were non-commital in public even as they were pressuring Biden to drop out behind the scenes, and letting their contacts in the press know all of this even as they refused to say so on camera. The threat being that if Biden didn’t drop out, those people and others like Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries would speak out openly this week. And that sort of no-confidence gesturing did a lot more to kill Biden’s polls and position than the Trump debate itself. So while at one point after the debate Congressional insiders said the push against Biden was dead, and he was continuing to gain public support at rallies, the impression among the Inner Party was that his continued presence at the top of the ticket was only going to endanger their own priorities.
Like, didja notice how the Democratic insiders only started renewing their push for Biden to quit once he announced his idea of reforming the Supreme Court?
But then, a good definition of irony is Adam Schiff publicly saying that Biden needed to step down, then sending me a fundraiser email saying that Trump doesn’t want to unite the country.
If nothing else, this disloyalty is at least a contrast to an alleged political party that could watch Trump get convicted of sexual assault and fraud and become that much more loyal the more unsavory he got. The Democrats do seem to be individuals and not a hive mind. They are in fact so individualist that they are willing to throw away such political planning as they have.
The other angle being that Trump and his pet party have invested their campaign money and their dwindling reserves of intellect and creativity in bashing Joe Biden as Trump’s inevitable opponent: “Sleepy Joe, Crooked Joe, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden… if I say Hunter Biden enough times, Michael Keaton will show up and save the day with his magical ghost powers.”
Now at least they can’t do that. The spanner has been thrown into the works. And it’s obviously made Trump and his servants mad, with House Speaker Mike Johnson telling the press that it would be “unlawful” to replace Biden. Says the guy who supported January 6.
This change also means that in the two-party race, Donald Trump is now the only candidate who can be credibly accused of being too old and senile to do the job. Presumably the press will be just as obsessed with that issue as they were when Biden was running.
Which leads to the separate but very much related issue that the “liberal” media are nobody’s friends. This is something that I would like to detail at another time, but right now it’s not as important. Suffice to say here that they did everything they could to shift the course of Biden’s decision, and now that they’ve successfully couped a president their own self-importance will swell even further and make them even more insufferable than they already are.
And it goes without saying that this only confirms the Democratic Party is simultaneously feckless and untrustworthy and for all its preening demonstrations of altruism, it was, is and always will be primarily concerned with preserving its privileges in the system, and if doing the right thing gets in the way of that, they get the right thing out of the way.
But they’re NOT Project 2025. Which Trump is now committed to even if he actually knows better.
And likewise, I am even less a fan of Kamala Harris than I am of Joe Biden, but compared to Trump, Harris looks like fucking Eisenhower.
In any case, in the short span of time since Joe’s announcement, polls of Kamala Harris against Trump are no worse than Trump’s polls against Biden, with one notable poll showing Harris ahead of Trump, 42 to 38 percent with Robert Kennedy Jr. getting 8 percent. Without Kennedy included the poll showed Harris up by only 2, 44 to 42 percent. (So at least in this poll, Kennedy is taking votes away from Trump. Something to think about if you were only supporting RFK to spoil the Democrats.) The race is still close, especially in Electoral College terms. But until now, all other things were equal and a lot of people thought it was going to be the same two old white guys running again, and now you have the potential of a female president, with Black and Indian roots at that. The Democratic base is energized now, probably more than they would be if Biden had won that debate.
In Wednesday’s speech, President Biden reviewed what he is continuing to do and what he has done: “I’ll continue to lower costs for hard-working families, grow our economy. I’ll keep defending our personal freedoms and our civil rights, from the right to vote to the right to choose. … I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world. We’ll keep rallying a coalition of proud nations to stop Putin from taking over Ukraine and doing more damage. We’ll keep NATO stronger, and I’ll make it more powerful and more united than at any time in all of our history. I’ll keep doing the same for allies in the Pacific.
“You know, when I came to office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably surpass the United States. That’s not the case anymore. And I’m going to keep working to end the war in Gaza, bring home all the hostages and bring peace and security to the Middle East and end this war… You know, we’ve come so far since my inauguration. On that day, I told you as I stood in that winter — we stood in a winter of peril and a winter of possibilities, peril and possibilities. We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in the century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War, but we came together as Americans, and we got through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous and more secure. Today, we have the strongest economy in the world, creating nearly 16 million new jobs — a record. Wages are up, inflation continues to come down, the racial wealth gap is the lowest it’s been in 20 years.”
Coming from his career politician background, serving as US Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, then serving eight years as Vice President under President Barack Obama, using his Senate connections to negotiate crucial budget bills and presenting a foreign policy perspective that was otherwise lacking, Joe Biden had every reason to be proud of his life in public service even before becoming President. He had famously decided not to run in 2015 in the wake of his son Beau’s death, and was considered only one of several contenders to run against Trump in 2020, with the press focusing on his personal behavior and the scandals of his son Hunter. But Biden’s Party connections paid off again, with the support of Congressman Jim Clyburn helping him win the South Carolina primary and gaining him the momentum he needed for the Super Tuesday primaries to cinch the nomination.
Biden had promised to correct many of the mistakes from Trump’s time in office, and did so. But he made mistakes – notably collapsing our position in Afghanistan before a troop withdrawal – and is blamed for inflation, although many other factors are involved. He believed in 2020 that he was the only candidate who had the position and reputation to beat Trump, and he was right then. He still believed he was the only candidate who could beat him this year, but just as President Obama was often too passive in dealing with both foreign and Republican threats, Biden did not properly acknowledge that his challenger, the former incumbent, was a criminal who was a threat to national security, starting even before Biden’s inauguration, when on January 6, 2021 he incited a mob to break into the Capitol and kill his own Vice President when Mike Pence wouldn’t change the results of the Electoral College vote for him. Because Biden and his even more timid Attorney General, Merrick Garland, did not act to investigate and prosecute Trump until about the midpoint of his presidency, this gave Trump’s various allies in government and the courts the ability to delay judgments until after the election, when depending on the result, they will not matter. Because of this, Biden and the Democrats did what everyone has always done: They normalized Trump. They made him seem like a legitimate candidate, and having been made equal to the current president, the fact that the current president is also old, slow and forgetful seems to matter more because he’s the old, slow and forgetful guy who’s in office now.
Several times on Wednesday, Biden used words like “America is at an inflection point” and that the election is about choosing “the course of America’s future.” He used the old Benjamin Franklin quote about the Constitutional Convention where Ben was asked if the new government was a republic or monarchy, and Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” He held on to his campaign because he thought that it was the only thing stopping Trump from taking over, and when his own Party made it clear they would not support him anymore, he realized that the main thing that would allow Trump to take over is to keep going the way we have been. His decision was called “selfless”, “heroic” and all those things by Washington insiders because such sacrifice is completely alien to themselves, so they know how hard the decision must have been for him. But he quit the race for the same reason he ran in the first place: Because Trump must be stopped.
You cannot say that Joe Biden didn’t do everything he could to make that happen.