Gerard Baker
WSJ, July 1, 2024
“But now, 42 months (and 81 years) in, it is going horribly wrong. Much of his party has no use for him anymore. They are trying desperately to jettison him and, in a remarkably cynical act of bait-and-switch, swap him out for someone more useful to their cause.”
There is something fitting about the disarray in which the Democratic Party finds itself, a fearful symmetry in the now-fraught relationship between President Biden and panicking friends and colleagues.
Mr. Biden succeeded because he made toeing the party line his life’s work. Like all politicians whose egos dwarf their talents, he ascended the greasy pole by slavishly following his party wherever it led. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Democrats were a party of post-Vietnam peacenik activists, seeking accommodation with the Soviet Union abroad and appeasement of economic decline at home. And Joe was one of them.
When that was discredited by three straight election defeats, the Democrats became the New Democrats, and there was Joe again, backing welfare reform, being tough on crime, and getting macho with America’s post-Cold War enemies. After 9/11 the party fell in for a while behind George W. Bush, and of course Mr Biden was right there too, leading from the middle, backing the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq—until it started to go wrong, when, as his party quickly deserted, so did our man of constant borrow.
Finally—or at least we thought it was final, given his already advanced age—in the ultimate act of partisan servility, he became Barack Obama’s vice president, the summit achievement for the incapable but loyal, the apex position for the consummate yes man. His only roles were to offer his signature eloquence on the boss’s achievements (“This is a big f— deal”) or provide advice that could safely be ignored (“Don’t kill Osama bin Laden”) … [To read the full article, click here]