More On Joe From Obama's Staff

Yesterday I ran across yet another set of remarks from a former Obama-era staffer who'd gotten to know Joe as vice president.

Mike McCormick, who served as Joe Biden’s stenographer traveling with him around the world including to Ukraine, recently published a book revealing what he saw, which included criminal activity in regards to the Burisma kickback scheme. “The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden” lays out probably the most comprehensive account ever written about the scheme.

I'm less concerned about Burisma, because it really isn't figuring into the current campaign, and I'm still puzzled that the amounts of money involved are so trivial, especially when spread around among Hunter and maybe a dozen other family members. A vice president ought to be getting more than a million here and a million there -- how can this be worth his time? That's the really interesting question, and if we ever get an anmswer, it'll say a lot more about the roots of his character. Is he a combination of kinda greedy but really dumb?

McCormick's remarks on Biden's overall persona seem consistent with those of Obama advisers and cabinet members we've already seen:

“When I worked for him, I thought Joe was harmless — egotistical, buffoonish, and unpresidential, but harmless,” he said.

Here's a problem worth working through: current conventional wisdom claims Joe has been in decline at least since his time as vice president, but this guy Mike McCormick served as his stenographer and traveled with him around the world -- and his impression as of ten or 15 years ago was that he was "egotistical, buffoonish, and unpresidential", pretty much what we have now. But if this was the case, how was he ever sold as presidential material?

After a brief web search, from what I can see, Joe was consistently listed as the front runner as of August 2019. There were several dozen candidates in the early running, including Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, John Kerry, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabetgh Warren, and, of course, Kamala Harris. NPR's recap of Biden's path to the nomination in 2020 said this:

What people do remember is that Biden began the current presidential cycle as the Democrats' putative front-runner, that he stumbled along the way and nearly washed out early. The Real Clear Politics average of polls showed him leading — but not dominating — the field throughout 2019. In a field that at one point teemed with more than 20 other hopefuls, Biden's polling rarely surpassed 30%.

. . . As the debates ground on and impeachment proceedings in Washington diverted media attention, Biden struggled to break away from the field. When his main challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, had a heart attack in October, some Sanders backers gravitated to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other candidates, not Biden.

By the end of the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, Biden found himself an also-ran, just as in 2008. It was upstart candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who shared the winner's circle with Sanders. Biden finished fourth.

But Sanders won primaries until South Carolina, when James Clyburn, the highest ranking black member of Congress as the House majority whip, announced his endorsement of Biden. According to NPR, this changed the momentum.

After Nevada, Sanders had been poised to win most of the 14 states voting in the March 3rd Super Tuesday contests. But South Carolina shifted the momentum. Sanders won in California, Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont. Biden swept the rest, including Texas and five other Southern states where he won at least 55% of votes among African Americans.

The shift in momentum dimmed Sanders' hopes for recovery in states where he had done well in 2016 — such as Missouri, Michigan and Washington. After Wisconsin joined that list on April 7, Sanders dropped out. Within a week, he endorsed Biden.

It appears that the lizard people Democrat establishment thought Sanders was too far left -- or at least, he seemed too far left and threatened to give up the game -- to succeed against Trump. In hindsight, it looks like there was never mich daylight between Biden and other putatively farther-left candidates like Sanders or Warren, which is a question someone needs to pursue.

As best anyone can tell, the lizard people then conducted a campaign based on a strategy of keeping Joe out of the public eye as much as possible while portraying him as a moderate. At the same time, COVID restrictions kept Trump from holding rallies, which reduced his visibility. But it looks like Biden's weakness as a candidate was fully apparent to insiders as of 2020, which may be behind more recent moves as reported by Politico last week:

President Joe Biden’s campaign is bringing on a slate of new pollsters to lead its number-crunching operation.

The group, which features several pollsters involved in efforts around Democrats’ stronger-than-expected 2022 midterms, reflect a continued shift to broaden Biden’s polling operation beyond the team that worked on his first successful campaign against former President Donald Trump. The moves were shared first with POLITICO.

. . . The expansion of Biden’s polling team comes at a complicated moment, given Biden’s stubbornly low approval ratings and pollsters’ struggles to measure the electorate accurately in the past two presidential races.

This may also reflect the lizard people's discomfort at Joe's, and now Dr Jill's, insistence that Joe is up in the polls, and the media is just reporting the wrong ones. The problem overall is that Joe is Caesar, which isn't much different from the problem the Romans had, which was that Caesar was Caesar.