By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 07, 2020
Joe Biden is the apparent Democratic presidential
nominee. After all, he had a seemingly insurmountable lead in delegates going
into the rescheduled August convention in the postponed Democratic primary
race.
Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was
not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.
Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The
multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden
faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to
confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater, and an even worse campaigner. He
often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the
interior of the United States.
The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden.
Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept
retread, a blowhard, and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics
trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic Party.
On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters,
using insults such as “fat,” “damn liar,” and, weirdly, “lying dog-faced pony
soldier.”
Long ago, he spun tall tales about how in his youth he
had taken on a Delaware street gang with a six-foot chain or slammed a bully’s
face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with
tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.
Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even
his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the
shoulders, or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them
minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo
movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of
sexual harassment must be believed.
The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for
supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden’s wheeler-dealer son Hunter,
the more Biden’s own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny
followed from Biden’s boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by
threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian
prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian
company for which Hunter Biden worked.
During the year-long rise, fall, and rise of his
campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally
unable to remember names, places, or dates. Biden would try to speak ex tempore
but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.
The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed
to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent
out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that
his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.
With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed
liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They
would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the
sexual-assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.
At first the media complied — as it always had with
Biden’s troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre
put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental
lapses, and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment,
Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the
nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.
But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at
first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her
accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the
media’s utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.
So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer
worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing
hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden’s increasingly obvious
cognitive decline.
In other words, the media was most certainly not going to
be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.
In the three months before the Democratic National
Convention, Americans will witness some of the strangest political scrambling
in presidential campaign history. Simply put, how does the Democratic Party cut
from its neck an albatross — one who has the most delegates but is likely not
up to serving as president?
And how to do the deed without inciting the moribund
Sanders campaign and his army of Bernie bros?
A host of Democratic donors and operatives would like
Biden to disappear, clearing the way for a replacement such as New York
governor Andrew Cuomo, failed 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, or former first
lady Michelle Obama.
But even if Democrats know why Biden must go, they
haven’t a clue about when or how.
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