President Joe Biden and his team are out of ideas and running out of time.
Trying to quote eye-popping jobs numbers hasn’t worked for him, because Americans are smart enough to realize the natural bounce-back from COVID lockdowns does not an economic recovery make.
The umbrella concept of “Bidenomics” is more of a joke than a tagline. The promised return to normalcy has been anything but. And one imagines that the octogenarian president’s handlers have had to repeatedly remind him that the applause line “General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead!” only worked two administrations ago.
So, last week, White House advisers sent their aged marionette out on stage and social media to yet again wave the bloody shirt of Jan. 6, 2021, and warn voters that Democracy Is on the Ballot™.
For instance, in a speech on Friday in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, one day before the third anniversary of the Capitol incursion, Biden said he was there to “mark the anniversary of Donald Trump trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the U.S. Capitol at his urging.”
Trump, Biden claimed, was “trying to rewrite the facts” about the Capitol incursion and “trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election,” according to CBS News.
“Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest; it was a violent assault,” Biden continued. “They were insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the Constitution; they were there to destroy the Constitution.”
Later in the day, he — or, more likely, a young ‘un on his staff who can figure out that Eye-Phone or whatever you call it doohickey with the socials medias appers — posted this: “You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-America.”
You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-America.
— President Biden (@POTUS) January 6, 2024
Deep, man. Deep.
Never mind, of course, that former President Trump has not been charged with insurrection and the only entities that have suggested it are one (1) state Supreme Court and one (1) state-level secretary of state, both in deep blue territory.
This is what Biden has been reduced to, again: Standing in front of American landmarks and yelling and screaming about how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and/or how he ordered his Moons Over My Hammy 25 minutes ago and what kinda Denny’s are you runnin’ here, pony soldier? Where’s the manager? Huh?
It’s bad enough that, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Republican strategist Brad Todd dismissed this kind of talk as “ghost stories.”
The remark came up while the panel was discussing former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s brag that he’s getting booed for telling Republican voters “what they need to hear and what they deserve to hear,” according to a CNN transcript.
“I have never heard a candidate go on TV and brag about being booed,” host Jake Tapper said, according to a transcript of the show. “Although I don’t want to dismiss — he does get booed for telling the truth, or at least for being critical of Donald Trump.”
“He’s tried everything else,” Todd said. “So he has to try this now.”
“I watched Joe Biden’s speech, and I saw an old man telling ghost stories, trying to scare the kids,” he continued. “And the fact of the matter is, Biden doesn’t want to talk about where the state of the country is. So he wants to campaign on Donald Trump.
Should Biden drop out of the 2024 presidential race?
“And it’s a trap for both candidates,” Todd continued.
“Trump and Biden are the likely nominees on both sides. And the trap is that both of them want to run a campaign in the rearview mirror. I thought there was nothing in that speech that talked about the future. There was nothing in that speech to talk about how Biden’s vision for policy is different than Trump’s.”
One is halfway surprised that CNN didn’t cut the feed five seconds into that and claim technical difficulties.
Todd almost nailed it. Yes, the idea that Trump’s supporters “were insurrectionists” who “were there to destroy the Constitution” is an old man telling ghost stories — but above all else, he’s an 81-year-old boy who continues to call wolf.
We heard this in 2022, when Biden gave his Darth Vader-themed Independence Hall speech just before the midterms. Biden’s team is apparently banking on that working again because the projected “red wave” of the midterms turned out to be a red trickle, at best.
But correlation is not causality: Both the shock of the Dobbs abortion decision and iffy candidate choice in key parts of the electoral map meant that the Democrats held on to the Senate by the barest of margins and didn’t lose the House as badly as expected.
Those midterms are a year-and-change in the rearview, however, and they’ll be two years old when the election rolls around. The Democrats can’t keep banging on about how democracy is under threat when it seems to be perfectly healthy — except, of course, when Democrats are busy taking the chief political opposition off the ballot using specious interpretations of the 14th Amendment.
Ghost stories only scare the first few times, after all, and as Biden’s chances in 2024 keep looking slimmer, repeating the same old falsehoods isn’t going to help.
