Chum in the Water

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.