Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The Democrat Party is much more worried about stopping Joe Biden than whatever Republican he might end up facing in 2024. Everyone expects Biden not to run, but no one told him that.
Biden keeps talking about running again and it’s not a joke. After spending two generations clawing his way to power, the guy who would have been one of the youngest presidents when he first tried to make a dash at the big job, is not about to just walk away whistling to Delaware.
The Democrats have become a gerontocracy of dementia patients with the party trying to push Senator Dianne Feinstein, 88 years old, and Rep. David Scott, 76, to the exit after reports that they appear out of it. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 82, has vowed to run again and so have her number two and three, Steny Hoyer, 82, and James Clyburn, 81, who got Biden the party’s nomination, making it rather difficult to dump Biden on account of being old or out of it.
The real issue comes from the poll numbers which are catastrophic for Biden and the Dems.
Fantasies of a Twenty-Fifth Amendment aside, which even if somehow executed would just saddle the party with Kamala in the White House who polls even worse than her boss, the Dems know that they’re going to be stuck with Biden’s idiotic nonsense for a few years.
Biden cunningly kept his promise to pick a black woman, but also picked one with little support from the black community or the Left, making it unlikely that he’d be ‘Breyered’ to make way for her. Kamala’s only base are the members of her staff and they’re leaving because they know that working for her isn’t a step toward working for the president, just a political dead end.
Dems want to get rid of both Biden and Kamala by keeping him from running again, but what’s going to convince a hack at the end of his wits that he needs to step down and make way?
Family.
The party has to walk a fine line between publicly damaging Joe Biden in a way that would doom the party if he were to run and win, and persuading him that he ought to consider spending the rest of his life in a padded Delaware basement stocked with lots of ice cream.
Biden’s son is the leverage. During the election, Democrats and their media feverishly suppressed any coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop only to now revive the story. In recent weeks and months, the New York Times and the Washington Post have legitimized the laptop.
Going much further, Yahoo News ran a Michael Isikoff article suggesting that Hunter may have been the target of a Chinese counterintelligence operation. Isikoff had been a crucial component of Russiagate with his previous Yahoo News article being used to justify a FISA warrant after he was privately briefed on the Steele smears. The last time Isikoff and Yahoo News put out an article suggesting that a White House candidate was a potential target of a foreign intel scheme, it was just the tip of a much bigger iceberg being used to try and wreck his candidacy.
The media’s treatment of Hunter Biden has been more nuanced than some conservatives realize. While there was a frantic effort to shut down reporting on Hunter during the election, there was no effort to shut down the actual investigation the way that Durham and others have been targeted. The media and the publishing industry abetted a redemption narrative for Hunter and even now the articles suggest that Hunter will likely have to do little more than pay a fine.
Democrats and the media are best served with Schrödinger’s Hunter, not indicted or exculpated, but the subject of an ongoing investigation that can be used as leverage on his father, that holds out possible consequences for the son without severely damaging Joe’s election chances.
They would like Joe Biden to say that he’ll be stepping down after one term and for the Hunter Biden investigation to go away with a slap on the wrist. But will the Dems get their wish?
The current investigation is relatively trivial compared to the sort that could be unleashed against Hunter and James Biden, Joe’s brother, and that’s the real power play. The same media that blithely provides inside details on the Hunter investigation could provide starter packs for a dozen more comprehensive investigations that would be far more damaging and dangerous.
It’s a game of chicken in which the Democrats and Biden are facing off. The party wants him to step down after one term, but without crashing the already damaged party car with a fight. But what if Joe Biden is ready to crash the car and wage a primary battle for the nomination? If black voters come out for him again while the white vote is split, Biden could win again.
Black voters are a solid part of the party’s base, and they’re also intensely loyal to the candidates they know. That’s why they initially backed Hillary over Obama, why they picked Biden, and why the Congressional Black Caucus is full of machine politicians in their seventies and eighties who have spent their whole lives commuting between mansions and D.C.
While black support for Biden has declined, it’s fallen less than among any other group.
Black voters helped Carter stave off a challenge from Ted Kennedy. They could play the same role for Biden and whatever candidate or candidates emerge to oppose him in the primaries. The primary battles fatally damaged Carter, but didn’t succeed in blocking him from the nomination thereby giving the Democrats the worst of both worlds.
That history could be about to repeat like a skipped record.
Democrats can’t afford to alienate black voters and they also can’t afford to alienate all the other voters by running the same old damaged ticket. They’re prisoners of their own demographics.
The party and its media don’t want Hunter and James Biden in real trouble, but they also don’t want his father on their ticket. Blowing up the investigation weakens Joe Biden’s election prospects, but it also weakens the party, and so the Dems have to play a double game, slowly legitimizing the investigation to weaken Biden while being ready to pull back at any time.
The quiet pressure campaign isn’t just being aimed at Joe Biden, but at his donors, warning supporters and staffers that there’s no future here because a bigger scandal could be coming.
Why bother investing your money and your career into a politician who’s on the way out?
How far will they go if Joe Biden doesn’t see reason and announce that he wants to spend more time with his word salads, inappropriate sniffing, and his Corn Pop? That’s the big question.
Joe Biden, despite his blowhard posturing, is naturally cautious. It’s why he pulled out rather than face Hillary in 2016, opposed taking out Osama bin Laden, and fled Afghanistan. Like most big talkers, he’s a coward whose boasts and lies are pathetically obvious overcompensation.
But is he really ready to give up the big chair and everything that comes with it to appear remotely on telethons? If he’s not, the Hunter Biden scandal may become very serious.
Who needs the Twenty-Fifth Amendment when you’ve got a family of crooks?
Leave a Reply