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| Biden and Obama, PHOTO, SHAWN THEW, SHUTTERSTOCK |
Change will not come
if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been
waiting for – Barack Obama campaign speech, 2008
Unable to make a difficult and effective decision concerning
President Joe Biden’s future in the Democrat Party – is he in or out as a
presidential contender? -- time quickly is running out for Democrats who hope
to shape the future of their party.
It’s pretty obvious at this point in the 2024 campaign for
the presidency and so called downstream political offices that Democrats across
the board intend to make former President Donald Trump a pivot point in their state
and national campaigns. We know this because Democrats, including the seven
members of Connecticut’s All-Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation, have told
us so in countless media availabilities and press interviews.
Some Republicans have said that Democrats are clinging to
this campaign strategy so fiercely because they wish to shape a winning campaign
narrative that will not focus on Biden’s domestic and foreign policy blunders.
Asked to provide instances of the blunders, Republicans have
pointed to Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suppurating
southern U.S. border that has flooded New York City and other large Democrat
cities across the nation with unprocessed illegal border jumpers from multiple
nations, not all of them friendly to the United States, a declaration of war on
the internal combustion engine, an upended debate between Biden and Trump in
which Biden appeared befuddled and damaged, and other undefended political
blunders.
Republicans charge that Biden is the victim of some as yet undisclosed
mental dysfunction, permanent and obvious. Democrats answer that Biden simply
had a bad night during the first mano a
mano debate of the 2014 campaign season. Not to worry, he has since
recovered, and now appears to be in fighting form.
Republicans respond, no – and provide dozens of instances demonstrating
the truth of the reliable adage that nothing improves with age. Character
defects simply become more defective as time, like a steam roller, passes over
its prostrate victims. Medical problem become more pronounced after one has
entered one’s eighth decade in this veil of tears.
Democrats respond that “Trump the Terrible” is full of rancid
hyperbole. Trump furthermore is a threat to “the democracy” as understood by
Democrats and the editorial board of the New York Times.
The national media has only just begun to shove its
political plowshare into the 2024 campaign political muck. Most recently, the
media has discovered that a charge disputed by beleaguered Biden spokeswoman Karine
Jean-Pierre – that a doctor specializing in neurological symptoms has several
times visited the White House – is, in fact, holy writ. A lie, Mark Twain and
others tell us, travels half way around the world while the truth is still
putting its boots on.
A few hours ago, Fox News reported, “New York Times
columnist Ezra Klein appeared on The Bulwark Podcast Tuesday and revealed what
‘top Democrats’ have told him off the record as they panic over whether they
should support or abandon President Biden on their ticket.”
Top Democrats confessed to Klein that they did not believe
Trump represented a “threat to democracy.”
“I think you have to at some point say,” Klein told Bulwark
podcast host Tim Miller, “whatever these Democrats are saying in public,
they're more resigned and more willing to just be the resistance to a Trump
presidency than a lot of their public-facing rhetoric would suggest."
The much respected Cook Political Report has changed its
projections. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada
are now “lean Republican” rather than “toss up” states. And the Cook Report has changed New Hampshire,
Minnesota and Nebraska’s second district from “likely Democrat” to “lean
Democrat.”
Joe Scarborough of “Morning Joe,” once solidly Republican
and now as solidly neo-progressive Democrat, recently spilled the beans on a
conspiracy among respected Democrats to persuade a stubborn and entrenched
Biden to quit office.
“What’s going on behind the scenes,” Scarborough confided,
“is the Biden campaign and many Democratic officials do believe that Barack
Obama is quietly working behind the scenes to orchestrate this. And if Joe
Biden believes that, that’s not going to get him out of the race any faster.
Any time David Axelrod attacks him, David Axelrod ensures that Joe Biden will
dig himself in another day. Any time the pod bros say something nasty about Joe
Biden, which they have repeatedly said nasty things about Joe Biden, before the
debate, after the debate. Every time they do that, he digs in a little bit
further.”
The once too tolerant press corps is becoming increasingly
restive. Brett Baier of Fox News puts it
this way: “When a press corps gets that engaged, that angry, that frustrated it
is essentially chum in the water.”
Those who attribute the recent media anti-Biden frenzy as a
sign the journalists have at long last recovered from a neo-progressive
Babylonian captivity may be mistaken. The nation’s journalists are as committed
as ever they have been to Obama’s call to action as agents of revolutionary
change, now seriously threatened by the resurgence of Trump the Felon. Biden,
they have discovered, is an imperfect ideological vessel, a doddering,
inarticulate plagiarist.
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