Mysteries of Biden
Election Day is upon us, and we still don’t know what we would be getting with a Biden administration: the agenda of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as many hope and others fear, or sort of a less charismatic reprise of the Obama administration.
Even more remarkable is that we have no idea how long a Biden administration can be expected to last—we are in unfamiliar territory when being asked to elect a president who will be older the day he assumes the presidency than any other president was upon leaving it.
Biden’s lack of clarity on the issues has been both a deliberate waffle designed to obscure his ideological intentions but also a reflection of his inability to complete one thought before moving on to another; a case where unintentional incoherence has worked productively in tandem with the intentional.
As such, it would seem morally compelling to ask how a candidate who lacked the energy to wage a traditional campaign, spending probably more days off the campaign trail than on it and “putting a lid” on events by mid-morning on many of the days when he did show up, can somehow be abruptly revitalized by taking the oath of office.
However slow Joe is as a candidate, he isn’t going to get any faster as a president.
Biden’s daily bouts of incoherence and confusion become even more concerning when one realizes that they occur not just occasionally amid so much questioning and speechifying but under conditions of the most limited access and exposure; they are not outliers but the consequence of allowing him to perform even the bare minimum of activity associated with a political campaign.
Since Biden is widely viewed as a purely instrumental candidate, a means toward the end of getting rid of Trump, there is also no reason why those who vote for him should wish to see him hold onto office for very long after assuming it; his usefulness being over, his primary function having been performed, mercy would suggest an honorable discharge be granted.
When learning that Barack Obama told Biden “you don’t have to do this,” my assumption was that he was kindly telling his former vice president that, given his depleted condition, he shouldn’t feel obligated to take on the burden of slaying the dragon, but now, on the verge of having done so, there is no reason the dragon-slayer should feel compelled to stay president for longer than necessary.
Granted, it would be unseemly to resign the presidency only a few months after winning it on the grounds of declining ability to perform its duties since those would have been the same grounds that should have discouraged Biden from running for it in the first place. An admission of irresponsibility on the part of both Biden and those who voted for him will have been given.
In many respects, the question of how long a Biden administration might last also contains within it the question of what ideological direction it will take, for if Biden swings toward the center he will only enrage the hard left of his own party and ensure that pressure builds for him to vacate in favor of the more ideologically reliable Kamala Harris (indeed, one of the few perceptive comments that Trump made during the campaign was when he claimed that Nancy Pelosi’s 25th Amendment commission was aimed at Biden, not him).
If, on the other hand, a docile President Biden allows himself to be sufficiently used by the hard left, he will be allowed by the hard left to stay President Biden for longer, albeit at the cost of becoming merely a figurehead.
For Never Trumpers of various sorts, Biden was a tool to remove Trump; for the radical left he will be tolerated only as long as he remains their tool.
As Andrew McCarthy nicely sums it up, “whatever instincts toward moderation may be ricocheting around like a terribly lonely pinball inside the vast empty interstellar expanse of Joe Biden’s doddering old noggin are sure to be overwhelmed by the relatively disciplined and organized efforts of the hard-left Democrats, bat-guano nutters such as Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are so barking mad that Nancy Pelosi is, incredibly enough, now a figure of the party’s center rather than a meshuga San Francisco outlier.”
Many people are planning to vote for Biden out of “Trump fatigue,” essentially casting their ballots as an exercise in political hygiene.
It is unclear how many know that they aren’t really voting for Biden at all; that what they’re getting if he wins is a Kamala Harris administration instead, either sooner or later, either formally or in effect, perhaps unconstrained by a Republican Senate.
Biden will either govern to the hard left (with Harris as liaison), or be replaced by his hard-left vice president in short order if he doesn’t.
Democrats want us to believe that a vote for Biden is a vote for a “return to normalcy” in American life, but it’s actually a vote for the opposite, for a woke transformation of America.
Whether that’s a price worth paying to get rid of Trump is the real election question.