"I m Actually Doing You A Big Favor!"
President Biden said Tuesday that he might have retired after a single term of office if former President Donald Trump wasn’t running in next year’s election.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” the 81-year-old president told a group of Democratic donors in Boston. “But we cannot let him win.”
Well, certain kinds of people, if you suggest they've screwed something up in an unhelpful way, will try to turn things around and insist that "I'm actually doing you a big favor!" by, say, suggesting you didn't want that person as a friend anyhow. In the vignette above, I think Joe's subtext is that you may think he's screwing things up by insisting on running in 2024, but he's actually doing the country a big favor by keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, which by implication nobody else can do.If Joe is acknowledging his awkward situation in even the most backhanded way, it must be because the auguries are beginning to look bleak even to him. I've already posted on the kinds of stories that emerged in the summers of 1988 and 2004, sourced to unnamed Democrat insiders, complaining about stalled campaigns, but we're beginning to see those stories now at the end of 2023, not next summer:
Democrats nervous about the president’s low approval ratings, and recent national polling showing him trailing or within the margin of error of Donald Trump in a potential rematch, have begun sounding the alarm about what they see as the lack of urgency on the part of Biden’s team.
Nor should we discount Trump's gut feelings on this or many other matters:
Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested that President Joe Biden's physical health and mental capacity might prevent him from becoming the eventual Democratic nominee in 2024.
"I don't think he makes it. I think he's bad shape physically," Trump said during an Iowa forum with Fox News's Sean Hannity. "I watched him at the beach, he wasn't able to lift a beach chair which is meant for children."
At age 81, Biden's health and fitness for office have attracted mounting scrutiny from the media, with his penchant for making awkward gaffes and telling bizarre anecdotes fueling much of that speculation.
It's worth noting that although there's been a series of revelations from House committees on Biden family business transactions that implicate Joe, these alone seem to have little impact on his poor polling. Currently,
President Joe Biden's approval hit an all-time low in a CNN poll released Wednesday.
Just 37 percent of the poll's 1,795 respondents approved of the president's job in office, while 63 percent disapproved. The numbers represent the lowest approval and highest disapproval rating Biden has received in a CNN poll since the beginning of his presidency. The margin of error of the poll was 3.2 percent.
. . . CNN's poll is not the only one to show Biden is struggling with public approval. The RealClearPolitics polling average on Wednesday shows 40 percent approve of his job and 56 percent disapprove. FiveThirtyEight's polling average the same day had his approval rating at 38 percent and his disapproval rating at 55 percent.
As I've been noting here already, one disadvantage for Joe is that he can't respond well to questions from the press about the family business, which applies as much to the issue of his age and fitness as it does to whether he's on the take.
Joe Biden spoke to the press for the first time since the revelation that he received direct payments from one of his son's shady businesses. That news broke in the face of the president's repeated denials over the years claiming that he had zero connections to Hunter Biden's dealings.
When faced with the glaring contradiction, Joe Biden freaked out, doubling down and storming out of the press conference.
. . . He can't just keep shutting down questions on this without inviting a backlash from even those in the press who are predisposed to defend him. Further complicating his situation is that there are many Democrats who do not want him to be the nominee in 2024. Every piece of bad news provides fodder for those trying to force him out.
I think most Democrats realize that this is only going to get worse as more and more is uncovered. To ride with Biden in 2024 is to invite very bad odds of winning the presidency. I expect the internal drama to get much worse in the near term.
RedState suggests,
At what point does the Democrat Party kick Joe to the curb?
Granted, the ultimate decision would be Biden's, but one would think that the people around him, even including his limelight-loving, pretend-doctor wife, at some point, would say, "Joe. It's time to go."
And Joe being Joe, he'd do his damnedest to make it look like it was his idea all along.
That may be, but if he withdraws, there's no serious Plan B. The bet is that he'll withdraw in favor of Kamala, but neither she nor Gavin Newsom at this point would be acceptable to the far left of the party, while one more traditional member of the New Deal alliance, the Jews, are following labor and Catholics out the door.