Biden could use some love from Massachusetts Dems
The Massachusetts Democratic Party ought to invite President Biden to give the keynote speech at its June convention.
He is bound to accept. He has nowhere else to go.
And he would get a warm reception from the diminishing number of Massachusetts Democrats who, despite his train wreck of an administration, say they still support him.
But don’t look for Attorney General Maura Healey, the leading Democratic candidate for governor, who will be endorsed at the convention, to issue an invitation.
And don’t expect Sen. Elizabeth Warren to invite Biden either. Warren, who would run for president in 2024 if Biden does not, still remembers 2020. That was when Biden humiliated Warren by defeating her in the Massachusetts presidential primary. Warren
came in third in her home state behind Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Now she is not so subtly nudging old Joe out of the way.
As things stand now, the only places Biden has been invited to — Ukraine and the Texas southern border — are places he wants to avoid, with good reason. Both are too dangerous.
But Biden has at least in the past visited Ukraine when he was vice president. He has never been to the southern border, despite unverified rumors that grateful illegal immigrants wading the Rio Grande have renamed it the Rio Joe.
Things are bad for Biden. Nobody wants him around. He has plummeted so far down in the polls that it would take the coal miner’s daughter to find him. If she searched, that is, because she is probably a MAGA supporter by now.
Even U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio is signaling Biden not to come to the Buckeye state to campaign for him. Ryan on Tuesday won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate.
He will run against Republican J.D. Vance, a MAGA supporter, who won the Republican Senate primary, but only after he was endorsed by former
President Donald Trump.
While Vance embraced Trump, Ryan gave Biden the cold shoulder, like everybody else is doing. It can be lonely at the top.
Biden has not even been asked to give a commencement speech at any of the state’s famed institutions of higher learning, either. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland will speak at the Harvard commencement.
Even Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, with less than a year in office, will deliver commencement speeches at both UMass Boston and Bunker Hill Community College.
And to add insult to injury, Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control will give the commencement speech at Worcester Polytechnic Institution May 23, a week before the Democratic convention in Worcester.
So, a visit and speech by Biden at the Dems’ June 3-4 state convention in would go a long way toward boosting Biden’s sprits as well as the morale of the Democratic Party.
Just because the Democrats are facing a wipeout come the November 2022 Congressional elections is no reason for Massachusetts, a Democratic stronghold, to give up the ghost.
Because Massachusetts is the Democratic and progressive state that it is, all nine members of the U.S. House are expected to be re-elected. And both Democrat Sens. Warren and Eddie Markey are safe by not being up for re-election in 2022.
In the face of a national election disaster, Massachusetts Democrats can show the rest of the country and indeed the world, what it means to be a true progressive Democrat by inviting Biden to Massachusetts.
They can do for Joe Biden what they did for Sen. George McGovern back in 1972 when the beloved Democratic liberal from South Dakota ran against the hated Republican conservative Richard Nixon.
They stood strong and voted for McGovern. McGovern carried Massachusetts. He just happened to lose in all the other 49 states.