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Selfish Biden Doesn’t Care If Trump Wins

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Ted Rall

President Biden doesn’t care about the country. He doesn’t care about his party. He doesn’t mind if Donald Trump wins back the presidency. The only thing he cares about is himself—his ego, to be exact.

I’m not inside Joe’s head. But there’s only one other possible explanation for his stubborn continuing insistence on running for reelection—that he’s insane.

Unless Trump dies or succumbs to a major health setback, there’s an 85% chance that the legally embattled former president will be the Republican nominee in 2024. True, a 15% chance is real. It’s not zero. But you shouldn’t, you can’t, not unless you’re a total moron, make an important decision that relies on 15% probability.

Biden will almost certainly be running against Trump again.

And he will probably lose. The polls are clear about that.

True, the election is a year away. Things may change. Biden might eek out a victory. But Trump is in the lead, his lead is increasing, and it’s hard to imagine an event that could significantly affect voters’ opinions about either man. We know them both all too well, the good, the bad, the ugly, everything.

Historical point: No incumbent in modern history has recovered from polls this poor and won reelection. CNN polls taken 11 months before previous re-election bids show Clinton at 52% (he won), Bush at 63% (he won), Obama at 49% (he won) and Trump at 44% (he lost).  Biden is at 37%.

Biden’s floor is dropping out from beneath his feet: even voters who supported him in 2020 think he’s too old for a second term and/or feel disappointed with him for a variety of reasons (failure to deliver on student loan forgiveness, inflation, his support of Israel). He relentlessly trends downward. “On question after question, the public’s view of the president has plummeted over the course of his time in office,” The New York Times poll reported a month ago. “The deterioration in Mr. Biden’s standing is broad, spanning virtually every demographic group, yet it yields an especially deep blow to his electoral support among young, Black and Hispanic voters, with Mr. Trump obtaining previously unimaginable levels of support with them.”

Setbacks usually, well, set back a candidate—unless his name is Trump. As Trump’s legal issues pile up, his primary and general election poll numbers soar.

Democratic voters are much less enthusiastic (33% want him as their nominee) than Republicans are about Trump (46%).  The concern is not that Democrats will vote for Trump; analysts worry that they won’t vote at all, or vote for an independent or third-party candidate, as I plan to do.

Trump, most Democrats and some Republicans believe, has authoritarian tendencies. Whether a second term would lead to dictatorship or merely erode democracy, he threatens our rights and freedoms. Biden himself has said as much on countless occasions.

Democracy, they say is on the ballot. If that’s true, and if democracy matters, why go into this fight with a historically weak candidate?

A patriot puts his country ahead of his desire to go down in history as a two-term president and the thrill he feels when “Hail to the Chief” plays when he walks into a room. Not Biden. He insists on running despite his historically unprecedented old age, atrocious poll numbers and the high stakes of the election.

In 2020 Biden convinced himself that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump. This wasn’t true: any number of other Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, would have done better than he did. Biden can’t possibly believe the same thing now.

Even the famously unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris outperforms the president against Trump.

Biden may take comfort in hypothetical matchups which show that Trump would also defeat alternative Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom. If so, he is a fool.

Other Democratic politicians with presidential aspirations like Corey Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Newsom himself are not popular—and it’s Biden’s fault. These other figures have all been denied their chance to build a rapport with voters because Biden and the DNC have cleared the field for Biden.

Forced to stand down while pledging fealty to Biden, no other Democrat has had a chance to build their case for running against Trump. It may well be true that none of them could do as well as Biden, much less defeat Trump. But we know that Biden will probably get clobbered. If Biden were to step aside and withdraw his candidacy, at least there would be a chance that some other Democrat might beat Trump.

If Biden isn’t able to grasp this simple arithmetic, he may well be as mentally impaired as his harshest critics allege.

Whether it’s his pride or intellectual frailty, Biden is such an SOB that he appears to be willing to sleepwalk his candidacy, his party and possibly the country to their doom.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Biden’s Reelection Campaign Begins Unimpressively

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Ted Rall

           Coupled with leaks from inside his campaign, President Joe Biden’s announcement video indicates the general tenor and strategy of his upcoming reelection bid.

            Biden’s messaging is especially notable for what it’s missing.

            Absent from the voiceovers and images is a reference to the COVID-19 crisis. Biden was arguably elected in the first place in large part, if not primarily, in reaction to Donald Trump’s inexplicable attacks on science and common sense in the face of the coronavirus. Biden took office after hundreds of thousands of Americans had died, presided over distribution of vaccines and billions of dollars in federal aid to employers and workers who might otherwise have been financially obliterated, and declared an end to the emergency. You’d think he’d take a wholly-justified victory lap. Perhaps his team believes a mention of the American Rescue Plan would trigger accusations that the stimulus package triggered inflation.

            There’s still time. Anyway, like it or not, Republicans will make the economy their top issue. If I were Biden, I’d have a simple response to the inflation question: which would you choose? Losing your job and therefore 100% of your earning power? Or dealing with inflation and losing 10%? Republicans wouldn’t have done anything to help you. Thanks to me, there are “help wanted” ads all over the place instead of bread lines. You’re welcome.

            Trump, of course, was also silent about the best part of his record in 2020. A President Hillary Clinton would have been far more cautious and slower, dotting every I and crossing every T with the FDA and so would have fallen short of the remarkable achievement of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Trump’s decision to play exclusively to his right-wing base, running away from his big win, cost him votes even among people whose lives were saved by his gamble.

            Also missing from Biden’s rap is Ukraine, where he is fully vested in that proxy war to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. No doubt, falling support among voters for arming and funding Ukraine is responsible for that omission. Americans like a winner and hate a loser; results of this summer’s fighting will impact the race.

            The most glaring absence, of course, is any indication of what Biden will do to improve the lives of voters and the people they care about should he win reelection. In the old days, we called these statements “campaign promises.” Are Democrats worried that Biden wouldn’t be able to fulfill his pledges because Republicans might control one or both houses of Congress after 2024? Do they want voters to forget the promises he flaked out on last time—a $15-an-hour minimum wage, a legislative push for student loan forgiveness (as opposed to the half-hearted, clearly doomed-from-the-start executive order), a legal path to citizenship for undocumented workers? Whatever the reason, substituting vague pabulum like “I’d like to finish the job” in place of an actual platform violates Electoral Politics 101. Why should people vote for you if you aren’t promising anything new and improved?

            Biden has one thing right: abortion will be a good issue for Democrats. 85% of Americans, a record high, now support, abortion rights with or without exceptions. Republican actions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reek of right-wing overreach, making even evangelical Christian conservatives uncomfortable. Pregnant women—including those who spent tens of thousands of dollars undergoing in vitro fertilization—have nearly died since the Dobbs decision prompted doctors to wait to abort their fetuses until they were coding. Each case like this makes for a potentially devastating Democratic attack ad—just wait until the first death.

            Perhaps the biggest misfire in the 2024 cycle thus far has been Biden’s hammering away against “extreme MAGA Republicans,” often in conjunction with footage from the January 6th Capitol riot. American elections are always about the future, never the past, and in a country as ahistorical as this one three years had might as well be an eternity. January 6th was a shameful and embarrassing chapter in history, but it’s no more worth wallowing in than were the September 11th terrorist attacks, which we have finally managed to put behind us. It wasn’t a coup d’état, it wasn’t an insurrection, we weren’t close to dictatorship and Biden looks silly when he says otherwise.

            To the extent that January 6th offers red meat to the Democratic voting base, its negative potency is stronger still. The tiny subset of protesters who invaded the Capitol building cannot reasonably tarnish the thousands more attendees who attended and did not go inside, much less Republican voters or Trump supporters as a whole, yet it’s impossible to interpret the implication any other way. The problem for Biden is not that a base strategy turns off swing voters—there are so few of them, it’s high time for Democrats to start ignoring them anyway—but rather that refusing to shut up about January 6th energizes the GOP by feeding their narrative that they are beleaguered by evil coastal elites and demoralizes progressive voters, who yearn for a party that fights for significant policy change rather than bickering over symbolism.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #82: McCarthy Loses Again, “Don’t Run, Joe!” and Is It Time to Ban Football?

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Ted Rall

Big issues face our award-winning editorial cartoonists here on the DMZ podcast. Ted Rall and Scott Stantis analyze the deadlock in the race to choose the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. They beg President Biden not to run for reelection. Lastly, Scott and Ted debate whether football should be banned following the near-fatal injury Buffalo Bills Safety Damar Hamlin suffered during the recent game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Which comes on the heel of several studies showing that players suffer from significant brain damage after playing the sport for years. 

 

Denying Reality Is Bipartisan

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Ted Rall

Democrats complain that Republicans don’t live in the reality based world on issues like climate science, vaccines and economics. But they engage a lot in magical thinking as well. In the run up to the 2022 midterm elections in particular, the dream of things that they have to know will and can never happen.

Say You Ain’t Running Again, Joe

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Ted Rall

When you're too old to be president: Gene Lyons - Chicago Sun-TimesDemocrats need to stop playing cute about the president’s reelection plans.

Asked in March whether he’s going to run in 2024, Biden’s answer was, shall we say, less than unqualified: “The answer is yes, my plan is to run for re-election. That’s my expectation.” He added: “I’m a great respecter of fate. I’ve never been able to plan three-and-a-half years ahead for certain.”

Eight months and ten approval points later, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: “He is [running]. That’s his intention.”

Weasel words like “expectation” and “intention” signal that Biden is sticking to the “alternative strategy” that The Politico revealed in December 2019: “quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.”

According to aides, Biden expected to be a “transitional” figure due to his age. The Politico piece quoted an unidentified advisor: “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen then I’ll run for reelection.’ But he’s not going to publicly make a one term pledge.”

With an approval rating of 28%, Kamala Harris is not that running mate. She is the least popular vice president in the history of polling. But running again is unrealistic for the oldest president in history. He would be 82 years old when he runs again and 86 when he completes his second term.

An 86-year-old president today would be the third-oldest head of state on earth.

And Biden isn’t the sharpest 79-year-old. He is visibly infirm, gets easily confused and can’t be trusted to hold a traditional press conference involving an unscripted back-and-forth with members of the press corps.

Whether he knows it or not, Joe Biden will almost certainly not run for reelection. Political insiders know it. (“One Democrat involved in campaigns said they couldn’t think of a single person they had spoken to in the last month who considers the possibility of Biden running again to be a real one,” The Washington Post reported recently.)

Voters know it too: 54% of Americans, including 45% of Democrats, told an August Quinnipiac poll they don’t believe Biden will be a candidate in 2024.

Democrats should deep-six this absurd game of “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” and admit the obvious truth. A man in Biden’s mental and physical condition at age 79 will not rally. He won’t get stronger by age 82, when he will be required to hopscotch the nation for a grueling series of campaign appearances and presidential debates, while simultaneously heading the federal government.

Credibility is the most valuable coin of the realm in politics. Anyone with a scintilla of common sense knows that Democrats are lying about Biden’s current fitness for office as well as his plans for reelection. There are lies and then there are lies that insult your intelligence; Trump’s ridiculous claim that Mexico would pay for his border wall stood apart from his other untruths.

It would be hard to overstate the brand damage caused by political messaging that doesn’t pass the smell test. “What [Biden] is saying publicly is what he firmly believes. There’s no difference,” former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell told The Washington Post. “He will not run if he feels he can’t do the job physically or emotionally.” Biden once had a word for this kind of playing-both-sides statement: malarkey.

“The message,” notes the Post, “is aimed in part at tamping down the assumption among many Democrats that Biden may not seek reelection given his age and waning popularity, while also effectively freezing the field for Vice President Harris and other potential presidential hopefuls.”

This strategy is misconceived. Harris is hobbled by her unpopularity. How can she intimidate potential primary challengers, much less clear the field? How can you freeze the field for Harris and someone else at the same time?

So the real question is about Biden. If he runs, the DNC will back him. Democratic candidates and donors are understandably reluctant to committing time and money toward 2024—something they need to begin now—if there’s a strong possibility that Biden will run. More candidates, running longer campaigns, improve the likelihood that the eventual nominee will emerge well-funded, seasoned and tough enough to face Donald Trump or another Republican.

There are, of course, costs and risks associated with exposing a sitting president as a lame duck. First and foremost would be Biden’s ability to push through major legislative initiatives. Which is why he should delay his admission that he plans to be a one-termer until after the passage of whatever is left of his Build Back Better social-spending bill next year. BBB is the last major law Biden will ever have the chance to sign; he’ll be a de facto lame duck anyway.

Congressional Democrats won’t like going into the midterm elections without a strong president, but they’re going to get shellacked no matter what. They can recover their losses in 2024 on the coattails of a presidential nominee made stronger by a vigorous primary battle and Biden’s willingness to step aside.

 In any case, voters might give Democrats credit for being honest about the physical and mental health of the president, for being mature enough to prepare for who will follow Biden and for treating them like adults.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Highlights of the Biden Presidency

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Ted Rall

What will a Joe Biden presidency look like? We should probably assume that it will look a lot like his campaign: virtual, online, filed in remotely from his basement.

No Action

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Ted Rall

No matter the moment or the circumstance, there’s always a reason to make excuses for presidential inaction.

Still Making Excuses

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Ted Rall

Obama announces his reelection campaign. Meanwhile, his apologists continue to blame his predecessor for the problems he has perpetuated.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Fool Us Twice?

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Ted Rall

Can Obama Get Reelected?

Usually I don’t care about political horseraces. Yet I am fascinated by Obama’s reelection bid. Never mind what’s good for the country. I’m dying to hear him make his case for another four years.

I don’t pretend to be able to predict the future. But I have a rich imagination—and I still can’t begin to guess how the president can convince a majority of voters to choose him over the Republican nominee whether he be Mitt Romney or she be Michele Bachmann.

Obama is good with words. But what can he possibly say for himself after this first fiddling-while-Rome-burns term?

The president only has one major accomplishment to his credit: healthcare reform. However—assuming Republicans don’t repeal it—it doesn’t go into effect until 2014. Which, from Obama’s standpoint, actually helps him. After people find out how it transforms the First World’s worst healthcare system into something even crappier and more expensive, they’ll be burning him in effigy.

“Socialized” (if only!) healthcare has driven away the Reagan Democrat swing voters who formed half of Obama’s margin of victory in 2008. Unless the GOP nominates some total loon (hi Michele) or past-due retread (what up Newt) these ideological reeds in the wind will blow Republican.

The other major component of the Obama coalition, young and reenergized older liberals, see ObamaCare as a right-wing sellout to corporations. Nothing less than single-payer would have satisfied them. On other issues it seems that Obama has missed few opportunities to alienate the Democrats’ liberal base.

“The combination of Afghanistan and Libya could bring a bitter end to the romance between Democratic liberals and Obama,” Steve Chapman writes in Reason magazine. “Many of them were already disappointed with him for extending the Bush tax cuts, bailing out Wall Street, omitting a public option from the healthcare overhaul, offering to freeze domestic discretionary spending, and generally declining to go after Republicans hammer and tong.”

Chapman predicts a strong primary challenge to Obama’s left flank—someone like Russ Feingold.

Lefties are also angry about Obama’s other lies and betrayals: keeping Gitmo open, signing off on assassinations and even the torture of U.S. soldiers (PFC Bradley Manning), redefining U.S. troops in Iraq as “support personnel.” Just this week he reneged on his promise to get rid of Bush’s kangaroo courts and put 9/11 suspects on trial.

Everyone—left, middle and right—is furious about his Herbert Hoover-like lack of concern over the economy. While the multimillionaire president blithely talks about a recovery as he heads off to golf with his wealthy friends, unemployment is rising and becoming structural. Obama will surely pay for the disconnect between reality (no jobs, shrinking paychecks, hidden inflation) and the rosy rhetoric coming out of the White House and U.S. state media.

What, exactly, will be Obama’s 2012 sales pitch? I seriously want to know. Think about it: how many other presidents have been so disappointing that they had to distribute lists of their accomplishments so their supporters would have talking points?

Among the highlights of one of these enumerations going around the Internet are:

“1. Ordered all federal agencies to undertake a study and make recommendations for ways to cut spending.

“5. Families of fallen soldiers have expenses covered to be on hand when the body arrives at Dover AFB.

“14. Removed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research.”

I’m in favor of these things. (Although I’m not sure why, with real unemployment over 20 percent and the NSA rifling through my email, I should care about numbers 76—”appointment of first Latina to the Supreme Court”—or 86—”held first Seder in the White House.” Really?)

Will micro-mini-accomplishment lites be enough to pry liberal asses off the sofa on Election Day? I think not. On the Big Issues That Really Matter—war, the economy, civil liberties—Obama is a right-wing Republican. He’s only a Democrat on the little stuff. Liberals won’t turn out big for Obama in 2012.

That goes double for the youth vote, a big bloc for O in 2008. From student loan debt to unemployment (which hits Americans under 30 even harder than other age groups), Obama hasn’t delivered. They’ll sit on their hands.

“We’ve always known that lasting change wouldn’t come quickly or easily,” began Obama’s official campaign announcement.

“Always known”?

Remember those Soviet-style “Hope” and “Change” posters from ’08, presenting the skinny Columbia grad as a postmodern Messiah for a nation ravaged by eight years of Bush? Just guessing, but somehow I doubt Obama’s propaganda would have gone over as easily with the caption “Change That Won’t Come Quickly or Easily.”

“It begins with us,” will apparently be one of the slogans for Obama-Biden 2012.

That’s the problem Obama faces next year. In 2008 he told us it was going to begin with him.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

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