So let's see here President Biden is about to sign the now passed Inflation Reduction Act into law and we've got a 3.5% unemployment rate yet a majority of Democratic voters and a growing number of Democratic politicians who don't want Biden to seek a second term.
Democrats who don't want Biden to run again in 2024 should be careful for what they wish because they could end up with Donald Trump back in the White House. Because unless Trump dies he is going to be the Republican presidential nominee for a third time and lot of Americans are still prepared to vote for him and very possibly enough to for him to win despite Fox's flirtation with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. If Democrats don't want Biden to run then they run the risk of nominating someone who will won't be able to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin not to mention Arizona and Georgia.
To be sure, Biden has had his share of problems. The inflation situation isn't ideal because it reduces individual purchasing power and does increase costs for business. But inflation is an issue among all G7 countries even Japan. We would be dealing with inflation regardless right now even if America had seen fit to re-elect Trump in 2020.
No doubt the Afghanistan withdrawal was a mess but it was Trump who saw fit to legitimize the Taliban in the first place. This left Biden with few, if any good options. COVID also has not and will never disappear. But it's not like the Biden Administration hasn't made testing and vaccines widely available. Some people simply refuse to get vaccinated. While cases continue to abound hospitalizations and deaths have been greatly reduced. Progress has been made.
Then there is the question of Biden's age. Writing in The Atlantic, Mark Leibovich asserts:
Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024. He is too old.
Biden will turn 80 on November 20. He will be 82 if and when he begins a second term. The numbers just keep getting more ridiculous from there. “It’s not the 82 that’s the problem. It’s the 86,” one swing voter said in a recent focus group, referring to the hypothetical age Biden would be at the end of that (very) hypothetical second term.
Last I checked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 82 and is second in line in succession to the Oval Office behind only the Vice-President. Yet in all of the hoopla regarding her recent trip to Taiwan there was no reference made to her age nor has anyone seen fit to make an issue of it.
Joe Biden has never been beloved by the Democratic base in the way Barack Obama or the Clintons were. I am not surprised that nearly 95% of Democrats under 30 do not want Biden to seek another term. They didn't want him to seek a first term. I remember watching one of the Democratic presidential debates at a pub near NYU and Biden was lustily booed every time he came on the screen. I suspect that most of those people who booed him that September night in 2019 cast a ballot for him in November 2020 albeit as a vote against Trump.
If not for the pandemic, Democrats probably would have nominated Elizabeth Warren who would have been soundly defeated by Trump. But the pandemic did happen and the Democratic Party and the nation turned to Biden.
In so doing (with the help of a Democratic controlled Congress) President Biden brought about COVID relief, an African-American female Supreme Court judge, an infrastructure bill and now the Inflation Reduction Act. It doesn't make America a socialist utopia, but Biden made no such promise in the first place. Yet these are good things. So what good would it do the nation, let alone Democrats, to turn away from President Biden now?
No comments:
Post a Comment