He's making gaffes, and he's repeatedly awkward and even confused. And he's piling up Democratic endorsements. Joe Biden's "selected not elected" presidential campaign is a defiant pose against the current prevailing political winds that argue you cannot win simply by running as an establishment "it's gotta be me" candidate in the post-Trump era.
Biden is clearly hoping to turn back the clock some 10-20 years to when a George W. Bush, a Mitt Romney, an Al Gore, or a John Kerry could "inevitably" secure a major party nomination based on money, establishment backing -- anything but a genuine organic groundswell of support from grassroots voters. As Jeb Bush did in the Republican race in 2016, Biden anointed himself the frontrunner from the moment he announced. But Bush had a charismatic disrupter named Trump in his way, who devastatingly exposed the hollowness of Bush's attempt to nail down the nomination well before a single primary vote would be cast. Biden has not had to deal with such a formidable opponent in a mediocre 2020 Dem field, and so he has retained his claim to leading the pack despite an incoherent, error-plagued performance on the campaign trail. With votes about to be cast in Iowa and New Hampshire within weeks, the question now becomes, "Can he really pull this off?"
Cozy Framing
A generic appeal to party above any specific ideological or policy pull is essential to reviving the old Bush/Kerry/Romney recipe. The avowedly friendly establishment media are helping Biden make this case. Liberty Nation's Jeff Charles points out that the leftists who make up so much of the big box media ranks are protecting the "centrist" status of Biden rather than exposing his glaring weaknesses on explosive issues such as his son's financial dealings in Ukraine. "Perhaps the progressive element in the press understands that they don’t have much of a chance of defeating President Trump in 2020 with the current field of far-left candidates," Charles wrote.
"With the impeachment effort growing weaker by the day, they know that they can’t afford to rock the boat with a leftist candidate who wants the government to exert more control over health care and education."
There certainly does seem to be a party line when it comes to Biden. On Jan. 5, the former vice president received the endorsements of three Dems from swing states. To see the media attention they garnered, one would think it a decisive moment rather just another day in the Swamp. All three endorsers echoed the totally unproven notion that only a political lifer who has been in the game for some five decades can unite Team Blue without alienating the rest of the nation. “President Trump has only driven people further apart. Joe Biden has promised to try, above all, to bring people together, and that’s why I support him," Rep. Conor Lamb (D-PA) said. "Joe Biden is 'battle-tested' on the world stage, in Congress, and in the White House. He will defeat Donald Trump and win in tough districts like mine," Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) added. "Our country needs a steady hand, someone who can help heal the country, an experienced and proven leader who can build teams with deep expertise and work across the aisle," Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) asserted.
Gross Miscalculation
Joe Biden (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The three statements share two special traits: They lack specifics on policies espoused by Biden, and they assume the American voting public somehow longs for those wistful days when establishment Dems and GOP dinosaurs happily worked together to build up and feed a bloated federal government at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.
Democrat primary voters will get a chance to reject the tired and sorely outdated politics of inevitability in the coming months. If they decisively turn their backs on Biden, it will go a long way to ending the rigged nominating processes of the past that pushed to the forefront prominent establishment family names with little to no grassroots popular support. But if Biden succeeds, it will encourage feckless Republicans already salivating at the chance to return to "normality" in 2024.
Nothing spells out the continued misreading of the 2016 election by a clueless establishment media like an NBC News article that ran Jan. 5. Titled "The unsinkable Joe Biden?" with the question mark serving as a mere fig leaf, the fawning piece labored to weave a bizarre narrative that a moderate rock like Biden is just what progressive Democrats are seeking.
The article quotes a transgender cashier in North Carolina who said, "I look at it this way: We’re all on the Titanic, it’s sinking. The iceberg is Donald Trump. We as Americans all thought that the ship was unsinkable. You can go with a lifeboat that looks fancy-schmancy, but that has never been tested on the waves of the ocean. You’ve got Joe Biden's boat, which may not be flashy, but it is reliable, it is steady."
What NBC and its media cohorts fail to grasp is that the Americans who elected Trump did indeed see him as an iceberg. The Titanic that nose-dives beneath the waves is not the nation; it is the Swamp brand of politics that has favored insider cronyism over the concerns of the American people for far too long.
~
Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
.jpg&w=1920&q=75)
