The Case against Biden

Consider the source of this Wall Street Journal op-ed. Its author, one Julian Epstein, is a Democratic Party political operative. (via Maggie's Farm) Thus, we assume that he speaks for other members of his party. His takedown of Joe Biden, his dismissal of the Biden presidency as a miserable failure suggests that serious Democratic politicians are terrified that another Biden candidacy will doom their party. Wishful thinking, perhaps?

Worse yet, according to this Democrat the Biden presidency has been a failure. While the media and Democrats extol the virtues of the Biden presidency, the truth lies elsewhere.

Epstein identifies a core cowardice among Democrats. They are simply too afraid to cross good old Joe. And this is so even though the polls say that Democrats do not want him to run again.

So, Epstein opens thusly:

But my fellow Democrats have shown their own kind of cowardice by refusing to say that President Biden shouldn’t run for re-election. Polls show most Democratic voters don’t want Mr. Biden to run again, but Democratic elites apparently believe that any dissent from party leadership or independent thinking—even in the name of an obvious truth—is dangerous to their job security.

As for the man himself, Epstein offers this unflattering description:

He is a preternatural panderer with nearly every audience, which keeps many activist groups at bay. And increasingly he comes across—even to his supporters—as a foggy retiree. Attacking him can seem ageist, even sadistic.

As many Republicans have noticed, Biden presented himself as a centrist moderate, but has governed from the far left.

But unlike his Democratic presidential predecessors, Mr. Biden’s job approval has been consistently in the dumps, and his legislative record is debatable at best. He and his staff promised centrism but instead governed from the far left. Voters of all races—especially working-class voters, for whom Democrats claim to fight—continue to desert the party.

As for Epstein’s bill of indictment, he begins by pointing out that Biden is incapable of uttering a coherent sentence in the English language. And that his statements count as bad policy. It’s a quality he shares with his vice president:

…  he consistently makes embarrassing and confused misstatements on nearly every policy front: Afghanistan (glaringly inept claims about Al Qaeda’s reconstitution and his generals’ support for total withdrawal, among many others), Ukraine (the suggestion that “minor incursions” by Russia may be tolerated and followed by an implication that forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could join the conflict), student-loan forgiveness (false claims that Congress authorized it), nearly every other major policy area and even his own life story.

And then there is the cognitive impairment, often noticed by Republicans, but rarely acknowledged by Democrats:

The president seems frequently confused on stage, unable to identify public officials and even calling on a deceased official. None of us can imagine him surviving a press grilling without countless mistakes. An increasingly partisan mainstream news media gives Mr. Biden a pass. A few years ago, the media would have savaged any president for the mind-numbing regularity of the gaffes.

For all of the legislation that the Biden administration has apparently passed into law, the truth remains that the Biden economy is a trainwreck. Moreso lately, what with the banking system in serious trouble, but clearly Biden must take responsibility for the intractable inflation:

… the Biden economy has been the worst-performing of any Democratic president since Jimmy Carter by most measures. Voters have expressed strong bipartisan dissatisfaction with the worst inflation and interest-rates hikes in nearly half a century after White House economic bureaucrats pushed for an additional and unneeded $2 trillion Covid stimulus—far in excess of the $400 billion shortfall in gross domestic product at the end of 2020. Many of the supposedly new jobs created under Mr. Biden are rebound jobs from the pandemic, and labor-force participation is abysmally low. Retirement funds have been decimated with one of the worst-performing stock markets in memory. Mr. Biden’s war against oil and gas was bungled for lack of a meaningful long-term transition plan for decarbonization, and the result only aggravated inflation.

And also, it matters, as Epstein says, that the news media, having reached terminal corruption, has refused to call out Biden on any of his failures and failings:

Third, while partisans in the news media would have you believe the president has significant legislative accomplishments, it’s a hard case to make. The infrastructure bill was a consensus bipartisan bill years in the making. The Chips Act, while important, had no meaningful dissent. The Inflation Reduction Act hasn’t much reduced inflation, and the bill’s renewable energy subsidies, while helpful, will have a marginal impact on climate change without a more meaningful international framework on carbon reduction.

And then there is the national crime wave, about which Democrats have had little to say:

Fourth, Mr. Biden promised to govern as a centrist but stayed silent until this month when local progressives pushed to defund the police and reduce prosecutions, holding fewer criminal suspects amid dramatic crime spikes in the nation’s cities. The White House denied that local school administrators were pushing extremist ideas on race and gender despite mounting evidence that many are. There were nearly three million illegal border crossings in 2022, a record, as the White House shrugged it shoulders.

But then, Democrats did not do badly in the last Congressional elections. Doesn’t this tell us that Biden is more popular than we all think? Not so fast, Epstein says:

The Biden administration apparently believes it got a pass on these issues because Republicans underperformed on Election Day 2022. The real reason Republicans underperformed is that Mr. Trump’s election grandstanding penalized the candidates he endorsed by 5 to 7 points, and the abortion issue may have given Democrats a temporary bump. There was still a 7-point swing in the popular vote in favor of Republicans, and the election would have been a wipeout absent that Trump penalty.

In the governor’s race in Florida, and elsewhere across the country, Democrats saw hemorrhaging of their traditional constituencies, mostly because of concerns over the far-leftward drift of the party. Democrats would be smart to find someone with the wherewithal to recognize this and right the ship.

It’s as good an indictment of the Biden presidency as I have read. True enough, more than a few Republicans have been making the same points, but still, we are happy to hear it from a good Democrat.