An Enfeebled President

By now you must have heard: America’s political scientists took a survey. They pronounced Donald Trump the worst president in American history and rated Joe Biden the 14th best.

For reasons that need no explanations they rated current Democratic presidents ahead of the greats of American history. Daniel Greenfield summarized:

And the survey from the American Political Science Association says that Obama is greater than Eisenhower and JFK, that Bill Clinton was greater than John Adams and Biden is greater than Reagan (not to mention Ulysses S. Grant and James Monroe of the Monroe Doctrine).

Is Biden really the 14th greatest president in American history? Obviously not. But these same “political science experts” also ranked Obama as the 7th greatest president, Bill Clinton as the 12th greatest president and Carter near the upper middle as the 22nd greatest president.

Since the purveyors of this nonsense are academic historians, the only sane conclusion is that college students should avoid taking courses in history and political science. Add to that the drivel that pretends to define work in the humanities, and you have learned to stick to STEM subjects. Outside of the STEM field, the American academy has been dumbed down to the point where it has become an international embarrassment.

So, we turn to Arthur Herman, a serious thinker, who labels Biden a tragic figure who has done nothing but fail. Biden has failed the country. He has failed his constituents. People who would never have voted for Donald Trump are beginning to wax nostalgic for the old days. 

According to Herman, Biden has failed. He has failed tragically. He was not up to the job and is evidently not in charge. Next to Richard Nixon he will be considered the most discredited president in American history. Quite the achievement, that.

Instead of uniting Americans as he promised in 2020, he has made us weaker and more divided, in large part because he lacked the strength and integrity to do his job. Those closest to him knew it and let it happen. In the end, it isn’t Mr. Biden’s tragedy, or even theirs. It’s America’s.

Those who define themselves by how much they hate Donald Trump would have accepted anyone but Trump. To do so they emptied their minds of judgment and covered up Biden’s manifest inadequacies. At present, thanks to the Robert Hur report, the lie has been exposed and the serial fabulators are running for cover.

We can say it’s infuriating that those around Mr. Biden know he is failing mentally and physically and have worked to cover it up, just as those around Woodrow Wilson, including his wife, tried to cover up his strokes. It was infuriating to see Mr. Biden publicly blame Donald Trump for the border mess he himself had created by reversing Mr. Trump’s policy in the first place.

Biden was incapable of making deals or even of addressing the nation’s problems. He was committed to undoing whatever Trump did, beginning with the successful border policy. 

From his first days in office, Mr. Biden handed out concessions to anyone who seemed to threaten American interests, in hopes they would leave us in peace. Some called this appeasement; I call it the Art of the Bad Deal. Among them: deals with the Taliban by abandoning Afghanistan, with Russia by not blocking the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, with China by allowing it to buy Russian oil and natural gas after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with Iran by not enforcing Trump sanctions.

We have occasionally noted the mess that Biden’s foreign policy has produced. When it came to domestic policy, Biden defined himself a the anti-Trump. He promoted green energy and opened the nation’s borders:

On the domestic front, instead of a deal maker we got a rigid ideologue on issues like green energy and open borders, while soaring government spending gave us the worst inflation since the 1970s. Mr. Biden has used the bludgeon of woke ideology to silence critics, including opponents of Covid vaccine mandates. He has resorted to lawfare to cancel Mr. Trump, even as many Americans look back with nostalgia to the presidency of the man Mr. Biden wants to destroy.

The largest question about the Biden presidency is going to be: who is in charge? Joe himself is barely awake most of the time. His staff spends its time covering up his obvious mental deficiencies.

For now things have gotten so bad that the Democratic Party has begun to see that Biden will most likely lose an election to Trump. Thus, it has set about working to remove him from the scene, without his knowing what is happening. 

Perhaps the most important point does not involve policy. It involves bearing and demeanor. Joe Biden comes across as weak and frail, as one misstep from calamity. He does not work very long or hard. He does not command respect. He does not stand tall and proud, representing a proud nation.

Consider the Daily Mail’s description of a typical Biden day:

Bleary-eyed and with a sleep apnea machine strapped to his face, Biden wakes up most mornings when his cat Willow crawls across him.

After getting out of bed, he heads for a 45-minute workout with his physical therapist, who focuses on balance exercises to stop him falling and to deal with his increasingly stiff gait.

The president is not at his Oval Office desk until at 10am and usually leaves at 7pm – Obama, by comparison, began an hour earlier.

Aides schedule most of his public events between 10am and 4pm because, White House insiders say, 'that is when he is at his sharpest.'

His news conferences are heavily limited, and he has clocked just half the number of them compared to Obama. He is often late to them, by up to an hour – aides refer to this tardiness as 'Biden Time'. Follow-up questions are heavily limited in case disaster strikes, as it did recently when he got the Egyptian premier's name wrong.

In short, he does not seem to be leaderly. He is one slip from embarrassing himself and making America look enfeebled. His staff and now the American people watch each of his public appearances, in dread of the moment when he will collapse into a puddle, making the nation look weak and frail.

How can he run when he can barely walk?

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