“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” former Obama adviser David Plouffe is quoted saying in a New Yorker excerpt from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
The supposition of the piece, headlined “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump,” is that Democrats only failed to hold the White House because of Biden’s prideful obstinacy.
Scapegoating Biden for all the Left’s considerable political problems is an ugly hypocrisy. It is also self-delusional. There is a reason the Democratic Party’s polling is at historic lows right now, and it’s not just Biden’s memory problems.
Let’s recall that every congressional Democrat decided to shoehorn the Inflation Reduction Act into law even after most economists warned it would plunge the nation into price spikes. Biden wasn’t the only one leaning into the hysterics of “semi-fascism.” If anything, Biden had merely adopted the social science quackery on gender that so many Democrats champion.
Did any elected Democrat speak out about the anarchy of illegal immigration? If so, I must have missed it. Yet, according to a preelection Pew poll, 78% of people believed the border was a crisis or major problem.
One of the big criticisms of Biden is that he failed to make room for another candidate earlier. Almost surely, Kamala Harris would have been the nominee regardless of when Biden dropped out. Does anyone really believe a hyper-ambitious politician ensconced in the White House was going to step aside or let some middling governor wrest the nomination from her? The only Democrat who consistently outperformed Harris in most polls after Biden’s debate debacle was Michelle Obama. It was going to be Harris.
What makes anyone think that Harris would have experienced more success had she enjoyed more time? After an initial jolt up, the vice president’s popularity steadily declined. Harris needed less time, not more. The more the public heard from her, the more they disliked her.
Harris, like any other possible Democratic candidate, was compelled to run on the president’s record. And that record, championed by virtually every Democrat, was unpopular long before the media were compelled to acknowledge the president’s declining mental state.
The Democratic Party had blown it. Polls found that only 36% approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, 28% approved of his handling of immigration, 33% approved of his handling of foreign policy, and 30% approved of his handling of the Middle East.
Now, even with those numbers, elections are a contest between two visions. A CBS News poll found that 65% of Americans remember the economy under Trump fondly, while only 38% said the same about Biden.
Does anyone really believe that Govs. Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear or JB Pritzker possess the kind of charismatic personality or compelling message to overcome that record? It’s exceptionally unlikely.
Plouffe might have been one of the few Democrats who publicly questioned the wisdom of running a man whose mental acuity had slipped for years. Until the day of the first 2024 presidential debates, however, virtually the entirety of the party and media had been shielding Biden. If the president had refused to debate Trump, the Left would have almost surely kept on concealing Biden’s condition. It had no choice but to turn on the president once he had been exposed.
We learn in The New Yorker that Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at the infamous Hollywood fundraiser where Barack Obama had to lead the president off stage by hand. Recall that even at this point, the big media were still gaslighting the public about the president’s deteriorating acuity. Three days later, Tapper’s colleague wrote in CNN’s media newsletter that the claim had been a “fabrication.”
Two days before the debate, then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had told reporters the president was sharper than he’d been in years. “He’s fine. All this right-wing propaganda that his mental acuity has declined is wrong,” he said.
In the New Yorker piece, we learn that Schumer would speak to Biden on the phone regularly, “and, after some chit chat,” the president would “admit that he’d forgotten why he’d called. Sometimes he rambled. Sometimes he forgot names. Schumer wasn’t concerned about Biden’s acuity, but he was worried about the optics.”
The president is the most powerful man in the world, and the Senate leader was worried about optics. So, indeed, was the rest of his party.
Which is merely to say that Democrats screwed themselves.
David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “The Rise of Blue Anon,” available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.
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I find the current parade of MSM personalities and Democrat politicians, all acting like they didn’t know that Biden was severely impaired with dementia going all the way to when he was running in 2019, as laughable. The same people who also believed Mayorkas was telling the truth when he said the border was secure as thousands of people streamed daily into the United States unimpeded. Yet surprisingly based on a number of on-street interviews from various MSM networks asking about what people think about the string of books coming out from various MSM shills and Democrat pols claiming to be completely unaware of Biden’s state of mind, we do have a substantial part of the public that is truly gullible and clueless. The same percentage of the public that no doubt will continue to robotically vote for Democrats in the future.
Why don’t we just state the obvious? The dems, the uniparty, the rinos, the deep state and the WEF do not believe the United States needs or should have a strong and capable President. Biden and Harris were perfect candidates for them as neither has ever shown any real commitment; to values, the Constitution, or the rule of law. They both represented little more than a figurehead, a signature to be applied with the autopen!
The real questions are “who sets policy, who actually runs the Country, is anyone really in charge” when the “Machine” democrat or republican catapults one of these incompetents into office?
Congress has been a dismal failure for so long it is hard to remember a dynamic and effective, results oriented class. Spending is totally out of control and even though DOGE has identified hundreds of billions in potential savings neither party seems to be able to get behind cutting wasteful spending and ending the absurd practice of borrowing $2 trillion a year on grandchildren’s credit cards.
As Seniors we have an obligation to force our government to budget responsibly. Anything short of “Ron Johnson’s return to the 2019” ($5 Trillion or so) budget and immediately implementing all the DOGE recommendations will be yet another Congressional embarrassment! The current funding proposals amount to little more than a republican surrender to a democrat house after the midterms.Please call your Congress people we need an immediate course correction!
Democrats don’t like to eat what they cooked, should blame the chef, not Biden, he only served. Not being able to accept the truth does not help.
The last statement was “the Democrats screwed themselves.” This is true, but the problem is that whatever they do they screw Everybody else in the country along with them.
We, as Americans of either party, need to realize that Biden only did what his handlers told him to do. Now this is not conspiracy or a political statement, it is just a fact. Most of us realized that Biden was a quart low, back in 2019. This period is the time that the handlers took the chore of hiding this so called great leader from we the people and the Pandemic gave them the perfect platform.
The 2020 election, was so lawless as to still be doubted by many. We saw election laws ignored by state governors and secretaries of state, no names mentioned here, and these same state legislators would not even look at the evidence the legal people brought before them.
And the irony is the legal people got prosecuted for their part in trying to affect justice as they needed. Just my opinion, of what our country suffered for the last four years! Joe Biden was handled and many knew it, I believe
Excuses, excuses, and more excuses. Will it ever end? No sympathy from my corner.
There were numerous occasions that caught the general public’s attention, it wasn’t just the Trump/Biden debate. Biden falling on stage at the Air Force ceremony, his stumbling/tripping as he was going UP Air Force One’s ladder, him falling off his bicycle, his numerous confusing moments as to where he was supposed to exit a stage. All the while, both the MSM and the entire Democrat Party denying his decline and then claimed that it was simply a “right-wing” spin and lie. I have just one question: WHY isn’t anyone still talking about all the Biden executive orders that were auto-pinned in the last 6-months of his tenure, especially all the “pardons” issued on his last day in office? — He no longer had the mental acuity to issue any executive orders in those last few months. Okay, one more question… Why isn’t any of Biden’s cabinet members being called into a Senate oversight committee to be question about Biden’s decline? — I realize the Dr. Jill Biden cannot be compelled to testify against her own husband.
Good advice for the Dems which at some point, we need to take ourselves.
They had better check Obiden for brain cancer as he’s had his head up his rear for 40 years at least.
Maybe scapegoat Majorkas?
There was a lot of lies about Biden not just the lies but the lies they did in front of everyone in this country. The Democrats in Washington did know about his mental decline but just covered it up along with the media. Hard to believe that his cancer just was not there when he was president. I think everyone knows he had the onset of dementia and that showed while being president, what is sad he only wanted to run because of his hatred for President Trump not to make this country better.
Heck, the Democrat Party is the Democrat Party. They will blame all their ills on Biden knowing full well that his odds of eating Turkey in late November are slim. Their train of thought is “how is a corpse going to defend himself from anything we lie about”?
The question is however, how much of what they will say will actually be true? Sleepy Joe is/was one evil and corrupt SOB.