Presidentish Joe Biden is about to have his best week ever, the one that will save his failing administration. Also, he’s old and tired and unpopular and needs to go because he’s having another terrible week.
His best worst week? His worst best week?
And it’s only Monday.
Whatever you want to call it, Democrats right now seem to fall into one of two camps: Those who can’t wait to see Biden go and those deluded few still clinging to the hope that Biden is just one big spending bill away from the love he deserves.
Let’s cover the deluded people first, because they’re fun to laugh at.
The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky is just the most recent example of Happy Delusion Syndrome (HDS). Tomasky, apparently without any pharmaceutical help, argued today that two things could turn the midterms around for Democrats.
“Maybe all is not lost,” Tomasky concludes, thanks to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s $5 billion bribe to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) and the Supreme Court strike-down of Roe v. Wade.
Never mind that voters are going to be pissed that the Inflation Reduction Act, if passed, won’t do anything about inflation but will present most Americans with a higher tax bill.
Other outlets are touting Biden’s “bipartisan win” with last week’s passage of the CHIPS act.
The CHIPS act is almost entirely a boondoggle (surprise!) and won’t do anything to relieve semiconductor bottlenecks in time for the next election. Or maybe not even in time for the election after that.
Former Obama Administration Czar Van Jones, fully recovered from last week’s brief bout of sanity, is practically ecstatic now:
Listen, if you just erase the past six months of nutty stuff, it looks like you’ve got a president that can get an infrastructure bill done, get COVID stuff done, get something done for the American people on climate, get something done on CHIPS – that’s a successful presidency, you just have the past six months of nonsense that takes away from it.
It’s hard to tell which six months of nutty stuff Jones is referring to, because over the last 18 months, each six months has been nuttier than the previous six.
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P.S. The infrastructure act will hardly build any infrastructure.
Biden’s “wins” consist of spending a lot of money we don’t have — an inflationary act — at a time when Americans’ chief concern is inflation.
Worse, we’re sick and damn tired of big-budget bills that deliver the opposite of what they promise. When Americans are this angry, an Inflation Reduction Act that actually makes us poorer will only stoke the flames of resentment.
Biden loses even when he wins.
Andrew Stein, former New York City Council president, is the latest Dem to jump on the Ditch Joe bandwagon — and he isn’t even willing to wait it out until 2024.
Most Democrats — and I do mean most Democrats, 74% of them — don’t want Biden to run again in 2024. But Stein doesn’t have that kind of patience for a president with “an impending red-wave midterm election, renewed concerns about his physical health and cognitive fitness, a failed domestic agenda with no path forward and glaring foreign-policy mistakes.”
“It’s clear the time has come for him to embrace his place in history as a transitional president, Stein wrote for the New York Post on Sunday, “and resign gracefully.”
In case you’re wondering what Stein means by “the time has come,” he means the time is as soon as possible: “For his party and his country, President Biden should step down before the midterms and give Vice President Kamala Harris a chance to lead.”
The fact that Stein says a Kamala Harris administration “could help shore up enthusiasm among the Democratic base and bolster the party’s midterm chances” shows that even the more grounded Democrats are still hovering a good 18 inches above it.
In the meantime, there’s an internal power struggle for control of China policy between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House. Worse, it’s being played out on the front pages with hints of World War III starting in the Pacific.
And wait until people get wind of the sweetheart deal Hunter Biden will apparently get from federal prosecutors.
Barring some miracle, or electoral chicanery on a scale that would make 2020 blush, the question isn’t whether Biden runs again in 2024 but whether he even makes it that long in office.
