#Biden’s a dud man walking

According to the election calendar, Joe Biden has three years remaining in his term. According to political reality, his presidency is over, kaput, finished. 

It ended last week because of an accumulation of serious wounds, most of them self-inflicted. The final blow came from a boomerang after the president who campaigned as a decent man and uniter declared his opponents traitors and racists. 

Included in that category were Democrats as well as Republicans, leading even members of his own party to concede Biden had gone too far. 

The scene was Atlanta where he gave a speech filled with distortions and extremely nasty attacks, as when the president challenged those who refuse to break the Senate filibuster to pass federal election legislation: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” 

He accused Georgia and other states of aiming to “subvert” elections and said they were acting like “totalitarian states.” 

In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seemed genuinely shocked, calling Biden’s address “profoundly unpresidential,” and “deliberately divisive.” 

“I have known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday,” McConnell said. “Twelve months ago, this president said that ‘disagreement must not lead to disunion.’ But yesterday, he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War to demonize Americans who disagree with him.” 

On its surface, the back-and-forth resembles Washington-as-usual. But this incident was anything but normal in that Biden angered both progressives and moderates in his own party while further alienating independents and Republicans. Good thing he has a dog, because it will be his only friend. 

Despite burning so many bridges in spectacular fashion, Biden failed to advance his agenda an inch. In fact, his bizarre behavior rang the death knell. 

Just two days after his repellant speech, he was forced to concede defeat at the Capitol when Dem Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia repeated that they would not break the filibuster. 

As if to humiliate Biden, Sinema did so in a speech on the Senate floor just before the president entered the building to try to rally Dems. 

“We missed this time,” Biden told reporters. 

While his failure was inevitable, the mystery is that he apparently believed he had a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding in the first place. 

Biden knew, or should have known, that Sinema and Manchin were not going to budge on the filibuster before he gave the speech, which is why it sounded like a suicide letter. Without a chance of victory, why did he waste more of his rapidly declining political capital on any speech, let alone one so inflammatory? 

The answer is pure lunacy, but it explains all you need to know about the total incompetence and incoherence of the Biden presidency. It turns out that he and his team, feeling pressure from left-wing activists to get the voting bills passed, believed Biden needed to prove he was still fighting for them despite the odds against passage. 

Thus, the speech wasn’t designed to win new converts, only to buck up discouraged followers. The need to impress explains the broad-brush charges of racism and treason. 

The idiotic language he used aside, the effort highlights how Biden’s decision to side with the party’s most radical elements has left him cravenly dependent on their support at the expense of abandoning all moderate voters — the people he pledged to represent. 

Even then, the president struck out. Many of the activists he was trying to please believe Biden had not prioritized the election-bill issue enough, and some stayed away. Among those was Stacey Abrams, the uber-activist who is running again to be Georgia’s governor. She and the White House said her absence was due to a “scheduling conflict.” 

Right — the president comes to your state to talk about your issue and you are too busy? Pure and simple, this was a snub and a sign of Biden’s weakness. 

As it turned out, the failure to break the filibuster and get the elections bill passed were only part of the president’s extremely bad week. COVID cases continued to soar, the Supreme Court nixed his mandate forcing companies with 100 or more employees to require workers to be vaccinated, and inflation climbed to its highest levels in 40 years, with the consumer price index rising 7% last year. 

To top it off, evidence that the public is giving up on Biden came with a new Quinnipiac poll finding that just 33% of voters approve of his performance. Q polls had the approval number at 50% in February and 40% in September. 

This is not a drip-drip-drip. This is a fast-paced hemorrhage of support, and there is no reason to believe Biden is capable of turning things around. 

One sign there is blood in the water is the emergence of two sharks, Bill and Hillary Clinton. The balloons floated suggesting that Hillary is the party’s answer felt like the start of a concerted effort to test her strength — and outflank Vice President Kamala Harris as the post-Biden alternative. 

The White House, clearly stung by its falling fortunes and rumblings of party discontent, put out a memo calling the Quinnipiac poll an “outlier,” which CNN summarized this way: “The White House wants to get something straight: President Joe Biden is unpopular. But he’s not that unpopular.” 

When a Democrat loses CNN, the fat lady is getting ready to sing.