A Woke Joe Biden Ends His Hibernation Will the return of the Democratic nominee preserve his fourth-quarter eroding lead? By: Victor Davis Hanson September 20, 2020 “You don’t have to do this, Joe.” — Barack Obama The Democratic presidential nominee had embraced one of the most bizarre but—until recently—effective strategies thus far in a presidential campaign. Like some fictive vampire, Joe Biden has been ensconced in a basement tomb and, now pale, he is reemerging into the light and finding the glare all but lethal. Under the cloak of the coronavirus and national quarantine, Biden essentially had shut down his campaign from late March to the present. Ostensibly, his handlers believed that any downside of appearing to play-rope-a-dope and to avoid unscripted events was more than outweighed by not putting a sometimes frail 77-year-old man with apparent cognitive challenges out on the campaign trail for 16-hour days. Or as his former boss, Barack Obama, reportedly warned Biden of the looming 2020 ordeal and his apparent fragility, “You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t.” He really didn’t have to—except that Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders proved inept messengers of socialism. The “Summer of Love”As the media-constructed summer news cycle from May through August wounded Trump—Trump, the Typhoid Mary, COVID-enabler Trump, the mask denialist and bleach drinker Trump, the Herbert Hoover economy-wrecker Trump, the reincarnation of the racist Lester Maddox Trump—Biden kept torpid in his home basement. And that mostly successful sequestration required lots of complicity from our elite. Mainstream polls, though still wounded from their 2016 washout, once showed Biden had a substantial lead. As Biden snoozed, the media was certainly doing more damage to Trump than an active Biden might ever have inflicted. In brilliantly diabolical fashion, the now virtual campaign was outsourced to subordinates but not in any traditional sense. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would obstruct economic relief by holding bills hostage to blue-state demands for massive multibillion-dollar bailouts of their insolvency and past profligacy. Trump would then look callous by not expanding on the prior $4 trillion stimulus that allowed many wage earners to make as much on government assistance than they would have had they returned to work. In the Democrats’ logic, printing only $4 trillion in cash would now soon be seen as cold-hearted. Then there was the media’s role. It was tasked with the sniper’s work of aiming, shooting, and then scurrying off to the next ambush nest. That is, every few days a new media-driven “scandal” would surface to put Trump on the defensive and allow the congealed Biden to remain phlegmatic without much concern. And so it has been lately. We were told Trump didn’t blink an eye when his friend Vladimir Putin was putting bounty money on American soldiers in Afghanistan. When that myth was refuted, next Trump was stealthily yanking away public mailbox stands, no doubt to sabotage mail-in-voting. Then there was Trump the coup-master, who would never leave the White House after his inevitable November defeat—hence the tolerance of another round of actual coup talk from our retired humanistic generals and admirals. Next in the queue was Trump as the vile slanderer of American war dead who was terrified to ride in a helicopter to cemeteries, given his dry hair was worth far more than the hassle of praising fallen “suckers” and “losers.” Bob Woodward, in his sequel to his last 2018 “bombshell” Trump take-down book, waited patiently in line for his new charge that Trump lied about COVID-19 and thus logically was culpable for mass death, even as his top military and intelligence officials knew that he was unfit and needed an “intervention” apparently to remove him. Bottom line: more coup porn as a bonus to Trump, the COVID partner in death. More of this will come every week until the election. The problem is not whether these media mythologies work to drive down Trump’s polls and eat up the finite days left in the campaign—so far they have had only a hit-and-miss effect. But rather, will the sheer monotony and predictability of these “walls are closing in” disclosures simply go the way of the Mueller team’s leaked news bulletins of imminent Trump indictment and frog-marching out of the White House? Like cheap funny money, the currency of these concoctions eventually becomes so ubiquitous and inflated to the point of being worthless. Or perhaps a better metaphor is vaccination: the more the Biden team orchestrates these inert serial “scandals,” the more they provide antibodies and with them immunity to the next assault. The big-money donors were given their tasks. On spec, George Soros promised his millions to route through various anti-Trump PACs. Mike Bloomberg said he would chip in $100 million to ensure Trump would lose—on his theory that his millions would not be burned up for nothing if he at least was not on the ballot. Billionaires promised more millions for the Lincoln Project. The old left-wing accusation of “dark money” no longer exists. In the next seven weeks, many of the Fortune 500 wealthy families will have pledged their assistance to Biden who, as likely as Hillary did in 2016, will outraise Trump. We are reminded again that the new Democratic Party is the alliance of the nation’s richest, in league with those in most need of public assistance, with both sharing an innate disdain for the middle classes. Then there are the foot soldiers of the Biden campaign, which is the de facto military wing of the Democratic Party. These are the nasal-voiced Antifa veterans, who appear nightly in road-warrior garb to burn and destroy, along with their BLM partners who will riot and loot. Their collective message is that anarchy, chaos, and mayhem are the inevitable wages of a Trump presidency. A vote for the newly rebooted Biden socialist agenda—everything from the Green New Deal to reparations and open borders—supposedly will magically dissipate the carnage by mid-November. The logic is that the rioters and arsonists now hold the country hostage, as if to say “you can snap out of your fetal position and rise up if you just vote for our puppet Biden.” And Biden himself is also their hostage on the premise that to get nominated he had to renounce his former self, and for the next month or more, if he expects them to help elect him, he will have to keep mum on the violence and wink that he too is now a democratic socialist. Finally, there is the Biden basement campaign itself. Up until this week, it largely was a stage crew. Flaks wrote scripted questions for preselected obsequious journalists. They set up strategically located stealthy teleprompters. They wrote out Biden’s talking points and canned quotations on Biden’s iPhone. And they sent out a cadre of young contextualizers to the networks to suggest instead that Biden, in virtuoso fashion, was batting away hard-hitting questions with ease. The Return of Fighting Ol’ Joe from Scranton?Biden then, not only has a war room, but also an intensive care unit whose task is to deny—and reinterpret—the prior day’s Bidenisms. And Biden’s rambling themes predictably are twofold: gaffes will usually entail some creepy reference to women as in last week’s macabre riff about a veteran killing a young woman (inspiring stuff for an audience of U.S. military vets?), or the chance for former quartermasters to find jobs in the “second floor” lady’s department in chain stores, or they will be clumsy racial pandering of the sort from “you ain’t black” to shaking with Latino music on his iPhone. Otherwise, it is the usual stuff, such as 200 million Americans—over 60 percent of the U.S. population—already dead from COVID-19. Again, Biden’s hibernation was predicated on the assumption that Trump, by September, would be imploding from a swarming virus, a recession devolving into depression, a national quarantine mimicking a Communist Chinese shutdown, and the George Floyd death sparking a 1960s-style nonstop mass protest movement. Trump so far has never run against Biden, given the latter has no agenda that we know of, no plan of competing action other than impromptu homilies and “here’s the deal” generalities. Instead, it has always been Trump versus a virus, a lockdown, a recession, and a riot.What then brought Biden out to risk blowing up his campaign with five minutes of talk? Polls seem to be closing. They likely reflect that the public is beginning to think COVID-19 is no longer the bubonic plague, that the recession will be more likely ending in recovery than in a 1929-style depression, that 50 million schoolchildren are in greater danger of ill health shut up at home than in school, and that the violence in our streets no longer has much to do with the death of George Floyd. Again, the problem is not that Biden is now necessarily behind in the polls, although a few suggest that he may be more or less tied. Rather, there is no backup strategy to stop the slow but steady Trump trajectory. Trump at age 74 seems more like he’s 64; while Biden’s 77 is more akin to 88. Trump can cover three times the ground. As presidents do, he can stage his own October surprise “breakthroughs,” as we saw last week in the Middle East, or at home with an unexpected Durham indictment or two. Experts assured us nonstop that a repeat of 2016 was impossible. The pollsters had learned their lessons. So did the media that purportedly were no longer so haughty and publicly biased. No president could overcome a year of virus, quarantine, recession, and riots. Trump would be even more outspent than four years earlier. And yet here we are with the clouds of another 2016 perfect storm gathering. So now, in the 11th hour, Biden is slowly becoming a candidate and not a mere projection on Zoom. The Joe of 1988 and 2008 has returned for a third attempt as the “first” in his family to have gone to college, the fracking scion of Scranton’s “coal” miners, the hard-scrabble guy who took the train to Washington, but this time around as the stealth vessel for a Bernie Sanders agenda. Don’t expect that Biden suddenly will become comprehensible, much less offer a detailed counterplan to Trump. Instead assume that House and Senate Democrats will obstruct and make more wild accusations. The media will offer more scandals and slanted polls. A new tell-all book will line up for its 10 minutes of fame. An angry former administration employee or yet another “heroic” retired four-star general will emerge to tweet out his disgust. More mass signed letters of “concern” will appear from doctors, or retired military officials, or state department grandees. Still more billionaires will brag that they are giving Biden millions. Will the return of Joe preserve his fourth-quarter eroding lead? Only if his reentry assumes that Biden will keep mum for six weeks or suddenly and magically sound extemporaneously presidential or the media can selectively edit everything he says. So Barack Obama was prescient when he feared what a Biden candidacy might do to his legacy or to Biden himself. But I would only slightly reword his warning to read something like the following: “Joe, You don’t have to do this to the country. Joe, you really don’t.” |
Archives
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- October 2019
- September 2019
- August 2019
- July 2019
- June 2019
- May 2019
- April 2019
- March 2019
- February 2019
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
-
Recent Posts
- ONE OF THE WORST ASPECTS OF THE CURRENT SITUATION IN OUR COUNTRY IS THAT LANGUAGE HAS BEEN CORRUPTED. RIGHT AND LEFT ARE SPEAKING DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. IT IS A CASE OF ORWELLIAN SPEAK WHERE WORDS AND MEANING HAVE PARTED COMPANY.
- HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE SERVING THE ANTICHRIST
- Peter Navarro RELEASES THE THIRD VOLUME OF HIS REPORT ON THE VOTE THEFT AND FRAUD THE DEMOCRATS PERPETRATED IN THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND IT IS MIND-BLOWING
- Rudy Giuliani RELEASES AN ALLEGED TEXT MESSAGE OF JAMES SULLIVAN, BROTHER OF John Sullivan WHO HAS BEEN ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH INSTIGATING THE CAPITOL RIOT. IN THE TEXT MESSAGE JAMES SULLIVAN STATES THAT HE IS WORKING WITH THE FBI TO EXPOSE HIS BROTHER JOHN AS THE LEFT-WING ANTIFA AGITATOR INVOLVED IN THE CAPITOL RIOT
- PRESIDENT Donald Trump, IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO ISSUE AN EXECUTIVE ORDER TO SAVE THE 2020 ELECTION BALLOTS FROM THE SWING STATES SAVED AND AUDITED.
Top Posts & Pages
- MEET John Sullivan, ANTIFA LEADER, WHO STORMED THE U.S. CAPITOL
- WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED TO LEARN THAT A CNN REPORTER WAS IN ON THE CONSPIRACY TO HAVE ANTIFA DISGUISE ITS MEMBERS TO APPEAR TO BE TRUMP SUPPORTERS AS THEY LED THE BREAK IN TO THE United States CAPITOL
- THE LINK SHOWN BELOW IN THE EMAIL I RECEIVED FROM ALISTAIR WILL TAKE YOU TO A VALUABLE ESSAY ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE OCCULT IN THE CHURCH SINCE THE OCCUPANCY OF THE CHAIR OF PETER BY JORGE BERGOLIO
- A PRAYER OF DELIVERANCE FOR PRESIDENT Donald Trump
- AMERICA'S NEXT CIVIL WAR WILL START THE DAY AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WHEN THE MILLIONS OF FRAUDULENT MAIL BALLOTS WILL MIRACULOUSLY APPEAR TO OVERTURN THE RE-ELECTION OF Donald Trump
- WITH Joe Biden AND HIS SON JOINED AT THE HIP WITH COMMUNIST CHINA SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED WITH THIS NEW THREAT OF CHINA AGAINST THE United States
- HOW TO KNOW IF YOU ARE SERVING THE ANTICHRIST
- Peter Navarro RELEASES THE THIRD VOLUME OF HIS REPORT ON THE VOTE THEFT AND FRAUD THE DEMOCRATS PERPETRATED IN THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND IT IS MIND-BLOWING
- Rudy Giuliani RELEASES AN ALLEGED TEXT MESSAGE OF JAMES SULLIVAN, BROTHER OF John Sullivan WHO HAS BEEN ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH INSTIGATING THE CAPITOL RIOT. IN THE TEXT MESSAGE JAMES SULLIVAN STATES THAT HE IS WORKING WITH THE FBI TO EXPOSE HIS BROTHER JOHN AS THE LEFT-WING ANTIFA AGITATOR INVOLVED IN THE CAPITOL RIOT
- The Populist Press news outlet reported that the FBI apparently lied about "claims that there had been no warnings of the violence" and the supposed claim that the Capitol police were "surprise."
Top Clicks