By Rich Lowry
Friday, May 09, 2025
In case anyone was wondering, Joe Biden is every bit as
unimpressive out of office as he was in it.
The man who shuffled offstage last year in the middle of
the play — an absurdist tragicomedy plagued by poor reviews and weak attendance
— has shuffled back onto it.
His mini-rehabilitation tour in the media is, in
accustomed Biden fashion, doing more to undermine his case for himself than
buttress it. He’s not particularly cogent and feels like a dusty artifact that
was, until accidentally discovered, forgotten in the basement of the
Smithsonian somewhere.
It is Biden’s burden to explain why he thought he could
run for president again in 2024 and only reconsidered when the hour was late
and a revolt of his party gave him no choice.
The former president can’t say the truth, which is that
he selfishly put aside every consideration except his own grasping desire to
cling to power. And so, he has to prevaricate and rationalize.
According to Biden, he was a victim of his own prowess.
He told the BBC that he was “so successful on our agenda” that it only made
sense to keep his foot on the accelerator. “It was hard to say now I’m going to
stop,” he said. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk
away.”
It is true that Biden spent an ungodly amount of money,
but a $7 trillion federal budget didn’t make him any younger or more capable of
serving.
Believing your own press releases is bad, but believing a
tight coterie of family and aides that has no incentive to be honest with you
is even worse. Biden did the latter.
When asked by the BBC if he should have dropped out
sooner, he insisted, “I don’t think it would’ve mattered. We left at a time
when we had a good candidate. She was fully funded.”
This is willfully clueless. If Biden had said he wouldn’t
run again in good order in 2023, Democratic voters would have had a chance to
have their say about who would be the party’s nominee via the primaries;
instead, the democratic process was short-circuited. When Biden says he left
“when we had a good candidate,” what he means is that he left when the late
date meant there was no alternative to going with Kamala Harris.
Biden can pretend that the compressed time frame for the
Harris campaign didn’t make a difference because her coffers were flooded with
cash, but her aides disagree.
At the end of the day, Biden is left the unpalatable
choice of either blaming himself — his own poor governance and lack of
self-awareness — for the Democratic defeat in 2024, or blaming the inadequacies
of his replacement, which is awkward since he picked her as his VP.
The right answer is both and all of the above, but on The
View, Biden took the convenient and predictable way out by blaming sexism
and racism for Harris’s loss. Never mind that the signature ad of the campaign
wasn’t about Harris being a woman, but about her being unwilling to protect
women from males competing against them in sports, and that Trump’s winning
coalition in 2024 was more multiracial than in 2016.
One reason that Democrats have lost touch with much of
the electorate, by the way, is that they assume so many of their fellow
Americans are inherently racist and sexist.
Biden’s final delusion is his contention that he could
have won if he’d stayed in the race. It’s doubtful, though, that his abysmal
job-approval rating was survivable, and it certainly wasn’t when paired with
the deep and pervasive public concern about his decline, so sadly evident
throughout his presidency and especially during his debate with Donald Trump.
That’s why Democrats, finally and when they had no other
alternative, dumped him. His media appearances serve only to emphasize how they
unquestionably made the right call.
No comments:
Post a Comment