Hail to old Joe the Chief
Yes, old Joe Biden — closing in on his eighth decade — confuses his dates and places.
He gets his numbers all mixed up.
He squints at the teleprompter and moves his lips like a kindergartner sounding out the words.
And sometimes, when he gets off script, he babbles and sputters.
On the rare occasion when he’s asked a challenging question, he gets testy — and nonsensical.
“You’re a one-horse pony,” he snapped at a reporter who inquired about the provenance of the Biden family fortune.
Nobody since has bothered to ask him what the heck he meant by “one horse pony.”.
But don’t be fooled by any of this stuff.
Detractors dismiss old Joe as the Forrest Gump president. They should keep in mind all those Oscars the Gump movie garnered.
What Biden lacks in mental acuity he makes up for with his experience as a lifetime Swamp insider.
His previous presidential campaigns turned out to be bumbling, slapstick comedy routines, with Joe slipping on one banana peel after another.
Upon yet a further try, he finally succeeded in pulling off one of the shrewdest presidential campaigns in history. You gotta give him credit for persistence.
His belated, successful effort was mischaracterized as a “front-porch” campaign, a reference to certain candidates who successfully employed lowprofile strategies in the distant past. (All Republicans, it turns out: James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren Harding.)
But the brilliance of Biden’s campaign strategy was not to campaign from his front porch. It was not to campaign at all!
He hitched a ride on the Corona lockdown and kept out of sight.
Adhering to this playbook with unflagging discipline, he adamantly refused to answer any questions, including the singular most important one: Does he favor expanding the membership of the Supreme Court to render it more politically pliable?
If Biden often was not aware what city or state he was in, he at least had the mental wherewithal to follow the rule they teach in Campaigning 101: Make the campaign about the other guy, not yourself.
Donald Trump, fully convinced that’s he’s the sun at the center of the planetary system, was only too happy to accommodate this Biden strategy. And so, of course, were the media.
But let’s not heap all of the credit on old Joe alone. The guys and gals behind the scenes of his campaign surely deserve some of the kudos. At least, in any case, Joe had the good sense to stay out of his handlers’ way and let them call the shots.
And of course, vote counters in those key metro areas where the Democrats have long enjoyed a one-party monopoly — especially Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee — surely merit at least a tip of the hat for the helpful role they may have played in the Biden triumph.
The media and not least Trump’s own blabbering mouth kept Trump on the defensive and front and center as the principal issue of the campaign.
Biden made the election a referendum on Trump himself, not on Trump’s policy accomplishments. And Trump, being Trump, gladly played along. When has Trump in his lifetime ever turned down an invitation to be the center of attention?
His bombast, his thin skin, his bluster, his fact-averse hyperbole, his supernova-size ego guaranteed that Trump remained the campaign’s featured pinata.
Meanwhile, Biden’s non-campaign campaign sidestepped nagging questions that will follow him right into the White House.
— With the national debt now well over $200,000 per taxpayer, how does he propose to pay for the massively expensive Democratic Party agenda he’s largely adopted with his victory?
— Will he be willing to shift an even greater tax burden onto the oligarchy, a significant part of which has now become a main financial pillar of the Democratic Party?
— How exactly will flinging the door open again to cheap-labor immigration — legal or illegal — benefit low-income citizens, especially African Americans?
— What about the sinister irregularities of the government’s powerful intelligence apparatus, as cited in alarming detail by the Obama-appointed Department of Justice Inspector General? Does the Deep State now get the all-clear signal?
— Is the Hunter Biden laptop with the thousands of emails on it — including ones implicating his father in suspected sleazy, money-grubbing activities — authentic?
If they’re a Russian disinformation scheme, how so, exactly? Please explain in as much detail as possible.
— How will America’s workers benefit if the trade concessions Trump wrung out of China are rescinded?
It’s said generals are always
fighting the last war, instead of the one in which they’re currently engaged. That looks to have been the case with Trump’s campaign generals.
They thought they could win again by riling up resentful voters who feel snubbed by the elites; that they could win again as last time around by staging raucous rallies and eking out narrow margins of victory in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
But the Wuhan pandemic largely put the kibosh on this repeat strategy.
Also, it seems, more than a few voters — enough to constitute the margin of victory — had their fill of Trump, Trump, Trump.
Trump went into the campaign welcoming and energized by the daily political pugilistics. But not quite enough of the electorate bought it, not this time.
The Biden campaign’s hunch was a savvy one that this time there was substantial popular sentiment that, okay, enough’s enough, the show’s over. The Donald got gonged.
Biden, meanwhile, offered his familiar political-hack persona as a welcomed respite from the Trump’s tiresome, 24/7 cable and Twitter political vaudeville. The omens began to favor Biden back with the debates. The expectation (or GOP wishful thinking) was that Trump would blow the blithering, blathering Biden right out of the water.
Portrayed as a Grampa Simpson, Biden survived the event, buoyed by his own rock-bottom expectations. Republicans should have remembered a previous debate — the one in which Ronald Reagan faced off against Walter Mondale,
There was widespread talk at the time, encouraged by the media, of course, that the aging Reagan had lost the zip on his fast ball. But when he survived the debate without drooling, his performance was declared acceptable, and the old Gipper was hailed triumphant.
Old Joe emerged from the debates in like manner, holding his arm aloft center ring as he narrowly won the bout on points.
Political parties are squabbling coalitions, and incidents of back-stabbing are not unknown. An example was the primary debate in which Kamala Harris, her own candidacy foundering fast, suddenly attacked Joe Biden as a mossback opponent of civil rights, as a race-baiting buddy of Old South, segregationists. Remember that one?
And she added that she was inclined to believe those females who had declared old Joe to be just a tad creepy with his hairsniffing and such. Boy, did she take the shiv to poor old Joe!
But the Democratic Party, more than the Republican Party, grasps the implications of the old saying, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Look where Kamala Harris is today!
Democrats get it that it’s crucial to the maintenance of power that the squeaky wheels get greased, one way or another.
Biden not only survived that back-stabbing but survived the palace upheavals of the party’s ideological crackpot wing — Bernie Sanders, AOC, BLM, Antifa, et al. He deftly strung them along without fully embracing their loony agendas.
Meanwhile, he managed to reassure the less rambunctious factions of the party that old Joe is the same old back-slappin’ pol he always was — inoffensive (at least to males, anyway), ever willing to go along to get along.
Trump backers admit, off the record, that their guy, too, utters preposterous statements and emits outbursts that leave his staunchest backers rolling their eyes. But at least — or so Trump’s backers told themselves — he doesn’t spew gibberish like Biden does, indicating a malfunction in his cognitive neurotransmission capacity.
As for Biden’s misfiring synapses, there are plenty of specimens, such as this one, quoted here verbatim: “We cannot let this, uh . . . we’ve never allowed any crisis from the Civil War straight through the pandemic of ‘17, uh, all the way around — ‘16 — we have never, uh . . . never allowed our democracy, uh sakes, uh second fiddle . . . uh way . . . uh we can both have a democracy and be correct on public health.”
That may have sounded like gibberish to Trumpsters. In retrospect, it now has almost the ring of genius — a sort of unsung Casey Stengel or Professor Irwin Corey.
Meanwhile, the initial omens look auspicious for the Biden presidency.
The vaccine-development program that Trump initiated and saw carried through in record time will help the nation finally turn the corner on Covid. The pent-up, heldback economy will come roaring back like a mighty lion.
Folks will say that old Joe is, by golly, a friggin’ wizard.
But the Swamp, alas, is a fickle, not to mention treacherous place.
Old Joe’ll need, meanwhile, to keep an eye on those pending probes hanging overhead like the Sword of Damocles — the probe of the Hunter Biden laptop, the probe of the Obama/Biden Deep State efforts to fabricate a Russia “collusion” case against Trump.
Yes, old Joe’ll need to keep an eye on these. And maybe, while he’s at it, keep an eye also on that back-stabbin’ lady he brought along to Washington with him.
In the Swamp you can never be too careful.