Opinion | Joe Biden Is Not a Hero of Democracy
By: Opinion by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. (The Wall Street Journal via MSN)
The fact remains, Joe Biden has been a true blue Democrat to the very end. So, should true blue Democrats really be our heroes now?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I’m told my mouth literally fell open when the news came over the car radio, demonstrating the difference between a shock and a surprise. Already almost a year earlier I’d noted in print that the respective timing of the conventions meant Democrats would be able to jettison their incumbent once Republicans had shackled themselves to Donald Trump.
“A landslide of voter sentiment may yet impress on Democratic elders how little America wants to see Joe Biden on the ballot,” I said in September.
“Each passing day makes it more implausible that he will be his party’s nominee,” I said in December.
The reason wasn’t only Mr. Biden’s lousy poll numbers. The lousy numbers obviated a key “norm violation,” as I put it, on which his campaign was going to depend—Mr. Biden skipping the debates to hide his age-related thinking and speaking difficulties.
You know the result: the double reverse Hail Mary of holding an unnaturally early debate, which Mr. Biden then flubbed. Game over.
It behooves us not to speak ill of Mr. Biden at the moment of his humiliation except as necessary not to falsify the world and all of reality.
His admirers liken him to George Washington, but he didn’t lay down power willingly. He would still be feverishly seeking a second term if he wasn’t certain to lose. He was certain to lose because, whatever he thinks of his own marbles, his “friends” and “allies” in the Democratic Party had loudly broadcast to the world that he had none left.
“Few things recently have been more of a strain to live through than the uncertainty surrounding Mr. Biden’s presidency and the nature of presidential power,” a New York Times editor wrote this week, illustrating a certain elite myopia.
For 99.9% of Americans, a hangnail, quite rightly, would be considered a harder strain to live through. But normal voters also long since noticed Mr. Biden wasn’t fit to be re-elected. The civil war that exploded among top Democrats in the last month concerned a very different question: What did naked revelation of his infirmity mean for me, me, me?
His June 27 debacle was the unraveling of a strategy designed to get around voter concerns by concealing Mr. Biden’s condition and lying about it.
This strategy had a second part: Because 46% of the electorate would vote for a kumquat if its opponent were Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump had to be his opponent. This end was largely secured by piling up criminal charges on Mr. Trump at Mr. Biden’s unsubtle urging, predictably ensuring his march to the GOP nomination.
If you dread Mr. Trump’s return, Mr. Biden isn’t your hero now. If you believe Democrats and the country would have benefited from a real contest for the Democratic nomination, he’s not your hero either.
If Mr. Biden had made Sunday’s decision a year ago, we would likely be talking about a very different election, with two different, younger, more normal—and, crucially now, properly vetted—candidates, exactly what polls said voters wanted all along.
Mr. Biden deserves to be remembered as the cat’s-paw of the most cynical attempt to cling to office in the history of the presidency if not the actual author of it, only part of which was his attempt to hide his impairment.
For all the legitimate complaints about Mr. Trump, his was outsider mischief, unsupported by the establishment. Our democracy is weaker now because of insider mischief, because of the self-corruption of an establishment.
The revelations during Mr. Biden’s presidency included how much, after so many denials in the face of so much media credulity, he really had aided his son’s business of selling an “illusion of access” during Mr. Biden’s vice presidency. Beyond dispute now is the role of the U.S. intelligence establishment in nevertheless lying to the America public about Hunter’s laptop to help Mr. Biden to the presidency.
And it continues. Today’s Kamala Harris enthusiasm bubble (also predicted here) is almost certainly the ephemeral product of Democratic and media ecstasy at being relieved of Mr. Biden.
Thanks to the truncated campaign, its bursting may only come after Election Day when the electorate has already saddled itself with an improperly vetted President Harris.
We also have yet to see how our national-security establishment will be busy for the third election in a row trying to keep Mr. Trump out of the White House.
Mr. Biden’s best defense before the bar of history for creating this situation, such a mockery of orderly democracy, will be that he really was senile. Blind yourself as much as you wish, but the net result is to validate the cynicism of Mr. Trump, his followers and also of many others who are no fans of Mr. Trump.
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Joe Biden used every trick in the Democrats' playbook to stay in power. Perhaps it is some sort of sublime justice that Democrats used that same playbook for force Biden to quit.
Joe Biden certainly revealed that he is no hero to democracy. And the Democratic Party has thrown democracy under the bus to hold on to power. When do we finally admit to ourselves that the Democratic Party has fallen and cannot get up?