By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
Two-thirds of Americans think Joe Biden is
doing a poor job in office. The other third is selling meth to Hunter. The
trajectory is decidedly southerly, and this has not escaped the notice of
leftier Democrats who weren’t all that excited about the old man in the first
place.
I don’t think that I would have much in common
politically with RootsAction, the progressive group that has just made a splash
with its new campaign to convince Joe Biden not to run for reelection in 2024.
But I do admire progressives’ willingness to take on their party’s president.
That’s a sign of good political health — rare on the left.
“A president is not his party’s king,” the RootsAction
statement says, “and he has no automatic right to renomination. Joe Biden
should not seek it. If he does, he will have a fight on his hands.”
Biden should have a fight. He should lose it.
The Republicans used to enjoy that kind of
pseudo-regicide from time to time. There was Ronald Reagan’s challenge to
President Gerald Ford’s nomination in 1976, and in 1972, National
Review led conservatives backing John Ashbrook in the primary over
President Richard Nixon, noting that representative from Ohio “shows the kind
of political courage by which one distinguishes between those automatons who
represent us in Washington and those special others who are human beings
endowed with mind and an active conscience,” by implication judging the sitting
Republican president to be the conscienceless automaton type. (National
Review has often declined to endorse the nomination of incumbent
Republican presidents, including both George Bushes and Donald Trump.) In the
eternal battle between Caesar and Brutus, I am Team Brutus all the way, and I
believe that it is an excellent thing for a president to be horse-whipped from
time to time. The political world is lining up to beat Joe Biden like a rented
mule, and “I’m not Donald Trump!” is unlikely to save the incumbent bacon.
Joe Biden’s workaday problems are obvious and specific to
him: He is elderly and diminished, a fact about which Democrats have suddenly
decided it is permissible to speak. The only kind of politics Biden really
knows how to do is politics among senators, having been first
elected to the Senate back in the Age of Disco when John Ashbrook was
challenging Richard Nixon. He is a creature of the 20th century at odds in his
tone and his temperament with the catharsis politics of the contemporary Left. But
while his roots are in the post–New Deal Democratic Party, he does not seem to
have any very strong commitments but is instead willing to be carried along
wherever the political currents take him. Biden’s “leadership” is the opposite
of leadership. Barack Obama made Democrats proud to be Democrats, whereas Joe
Biden makes Democrats wish they were Canadians.
But the problem with Biden is not that his administration
will not aggressively pursue the kinds of policies progressives want. The
problem with Biden is that his administration is doing just that. The Democrats
may need to dump Biden for reasons of political survival, but dumping Biden
will not solve their problem, because their problem is fundamentally a policy
problem.
If Biden had been a more able and energetic champion of
the policies his administration has put forward, what would we have? Probably a
couple of trillion dollars more sloshing around the economy making inflation
much worse than it is, a bunch of wasteful make-work projects, and a catastrophically
stupid tax scheme. If a more committed and vigorous Joe Biden had been
installed in January 2021, there would be more chaos in our economy and in
world affairs rather than less. If Biden were more solicitous of progressive
priorities, he might have made Afghanistan even more of a debacle than it was.
Democrats are right now experiencing a collision of
theory with reality. Americans like big spending in theory, but they hate the
reality of inflation and rising interest rates. (They’ll hate the reality of a
national debt crisis a lot more.) Americans tell pollsters that they oppose
vacating Roe v. Wade, but they are not warming up to the unseemly
spectacle of Elizabeth Warren calling to turn Yellowstone National Park into an
abortion mill. Americans like the idea of economic protection until they can’t
buy baby formula or ground chuck for less than the price of a bucket of
diamonds.
Everybody is an environmentalist when gas is $2 a gallon.
Everybody is a good civil libertarian when crime is low. Everybody is a
peacenik when Moscow is playing nice.
Democrats who want catharsis from their politics may
prefer someone more along the lines of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the
representative from New York will turn 35 a few weeks before Election Day in
2024), but more sensible voters who are interested in lower inflation,
geopolitical stability, and crime control — many of whom are Democratic voters
— will not be satisfied with the outcomes of the policies
currently in vogue among progressives, however inspiring those proposals may
sound in campaign speeches.
Joe Biden was Joe Biden when he was elected — it is not
as though he has undergone some radical political or stylistic change since
being sworn in. What has changed is that the country is worse off under the
influence of policies that are not unique to Joe Biden and that are in fact
likely to become worse under some other Democrat.
Progressives who believe that Joe Biden is Democrats’
problem are fooling themselves. It’s no good dumping Biden and keeping the
worst of Biden’s agenda.
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