Weekend at Bernie’s answered the age-old question of how many laughs can a movie milk out of the corpse of a dead fraudster. “Weekend at Biden’s” is giving us the answer to how many tears will the Left shed trying to control the walking husk of a fraudulent president.
One is a strangely enduring dark comedy. The other is an ’80s movie.
In the movie, Larry Wilson (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard Parker (Jonathan Silverman) try to maintain the illusion that the stone-cold body of Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser) is still a hot-blooded party animal, in order to frustrate the mob hitman determined to kill them all. In our absurdist real world, a bitterly divided White House is trying to maintain the pretense that they can reanimate this virtual corpse of an administration in a futile effort to save their own asses from an angry electorate.
CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere reported on Thursday that Biden’s “struggle” to reconnect with voters is part of “a deeper dysfunction among White House aides.”
“You are thinking,” one person familiar with the chaos told Dovere, “why are we doing this?”
Biden and his inner circle get weekly readouts of the metrics on local newspaper coverage of his speeches, how long and for what he was covered on cable, but also videos that staff post on Twitter and other social media interactions. Those reports go on the piles with internal memos from pollsters saying Biden isn’t breaking through in traditional news outlets and that the people who are engaged are mostly voters who’ve already made up their minds.
The “Weekend at Biden’s” divide falls between those from Biden’s “inner circle who have been around Biden for longer than most of the rest of that staff has been alive.”
In other words: There’s a struggle for control of the White House between people who were too old to go see a teen and twenties comedy like Weekend at Bernie’s on the big screen, and those who were still in elementary school when Weekend at Bernie’s hit basic cable.
“At the center,” Dovere writes, “is a president still trying to calibrate himself to the office.”
This guy’s been in public office almost non-stop his entire adult life and after 17 months in his current office he still can’t “calibrate” himself? Biden effectively really is a propped-up corpse. But where Larry and Richard basically agreed how to keep Bernie in action, the Old Farts and the Young Turks surrounding Biden can’t agree on anything.
Older aides dismiss the younger aides as being too caught up in the tweet-by-tweet thinking they say lost the 2020 election for everyone else. Younger aides give up – what’s the point of working up innovative ideas, they ask themselves, if the ideas constantly get knocked down and the aides get looked down on for suggesting them?
“Why are we doing this?” indeed.
It would seem that things aren’t going to well for The Real President™, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.
Klain came in with big ambitions for the Big Guy, sincerely believing he could take an unloved, un-feared, nearly unconscious, near-octogenarian and, with the help of bare majorities in Congress, turn Biden into the next FDR.
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Instead, the chief of staff can’t even manage the president’s staff — which is Klain’s one actual function.
Rumor is that Klain is out the door after the midterms, which are going to be a disaster for his first-term lame-duck excuse for a chief executive.
Instead, Klain ought to be given a white towel to kneel on and a samurai sword.
Klain’s potential replacements include Biden senior advisor Anita Dunn, whose speciality is hatchet jobs on behalf of struggling Democrats.
Also under consideration is White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, a swamp dweller of no particular note dating back to the Clinton administration.
Finally, there’s White House domestic policy director Susan Rice. She’s also been failing upward in D.C. since the Clinton years, but gained genuine notoriety in the Obama administration for “going on Sunday shows and lying.”
If anyone is going to breathe life back into the cooling corpse of the Biden administration, it’s impossible to picture any of these three playing Miracle Max, if you’ll allow me to mix movie metaphors.
Besides, “Weekend at Biden’s” isn’t mostly dead — it’s all dead.
The delightful Weekend at Bernie’s wrapped up in a brisk 97 minutes.
The dreadful “Weekend at Biden’s” we’re stuck watching from the cheap seats for the next 31 months.
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