President Bernie Biden
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President Bernie Biden
Maybe Joe doesn’t remember that he beat the progressives who ran against him for his party’s nomination.
More than a few of Joe Biden’s critics say he’s lost a step (or two); that his age has caught up with him; that he’s not as sharp as he used to be -- which is saying a lot since they didn’t think he was all that sharp to begin with. And they may be on to something.
Maybe Joe forgot that he ran as a moderate. Maybe he doesn’t remember that he beat the progressives who ran against him for his party’s nomination. Maybe he’s unaware that Democrats have only a slim advantage in the House and that the Senate is split right down the middle.
Most of all, maybe he forgot that he’s not Bernie Sanders.
As a headline in the Wall Street Journal put it, “Democrats are trying to pass a Bernie Sanders agenda on a Joe Biden mandate.”
Except even that’s a tad generous. A Joe Biden mandate? What Joe Biden mandate?
Biden got 51.3% to Donald Trump’s 46.9%. That’s a real victory no matter what Trump thinks. But it’s not a mandate.
Still, like Sen. Sanders, President Biden wants to make the federal government a lot bigger than it is, to make more and more Americans dependent on the largesse of government, to provide “free” entitlements to millions of Americans and make sure they know Washington will take care of them from cradle to grave.
Like Sen. Sanders, Joe Biden has absolutely no problem spending trillions upon trillions of dollars – which to him will actually cost nothing – since the rich supposedly will pay for all of it.
America, like Congress, is pretty evenly split. It’s as if Biden is unaware of that, too. A majority of voters elected him because he wasn’t Donald Trump. They didn’t elect him because they wanted a re-run of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society or Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both of them had mandates to transform America. Biden doesn’t.
Yet President Biden, who I’ve often thought is sitting in the back seat eating a cookie while somebody else is driving the car, is letting the progressives “play the part of conscience of the party,” as Peggy Noonan observed in her Wall Street Journal column. “They appear to be calling the shots, and he’s ceding to them the idea they’re not part of the party; they’re the heart of the party.”
Biden, who will be 79 next month, is too old to be having a mid-life crisis. But maybe he’s having a late-in-life awakening and has concluded that unless he succeeds at fundamentally transforming America, he’ll be just one more old, white, bland politician – one who will be remembered only as the guy who beat Donald Trump, if years from now he’s even remembered for that.
Maybe Joe has decided that the only way to go down in history as someone consequential is to forsake his middle of the road liberalism and take on the mantle of progressivism and in the process make America a different place than the one that existed as recently as the last election. Maybe Biden, who played second fiddle to Barack Obama, is trying to show the world that he’s just as consequential – maybe more consequential – as Obama himself. Maybe Joe needs to lie down on the couch and talk this out with a therapist.
Bernie Sanders lost precisely because Americans thought he was too progressive, too far out of the mainstream. That’s why they picked Joe Biden. Now a lot of them are wondering how they got President Bernie Biden instead.
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President Bernie Biden
Excellent observations Bernie. I wonder if the problem isn't as much that Biden has lost his sense of the prudential as it is that large parts of our society have eschewed reality in favor of fantasy. Biden goes along with whatever current is easiest to navigate. Our collective grip on reality is shocking when I consider the cultural insanity that routinely assaults it. Prima facially self evident facts are denied in favor of a preferred feeling in most any area. Fantasy drives our societal clown car to such an extent that the real villain becomes the very reality they deny. Make no mistake that reality will be, must be served eventually. President Biden has never struck me as particularly smart or hard working throughout his long career. So the chances that this will dawn on him are slim. Meanwhile, he fiddles while the two senators standing in the way of a party burning to the ground are pilloried by hosts of left wing pejoratives and threats. In the wings the MAGA fantasy folks stand ready to work their poison as their turn in power comes back. Now I am not a drinker. Times like these sure do present a temptation.
Bernie, this commentary is spot on. It also makes one think that possibly Joe made a deal with the devil in order to get the nomination. He wasn't doing all that well in the primaries and then suddenly he was. Seems to me that someone at the DNC knew Bernie had the most enthusiasm and might get the nomination but would never beat Trump because Independents, and maybe actual moderate Democrats, are not fond of Bernie's policies. So in some manner a deal was struck. Joe gets the nomination, runs as much of a moderate as he can, but agrees that if he wins he will then become the new standard bearer for the Bernie/AOC lunacy.