Four more years. Have those words ever elicited less excitement? Have 48 months ever loomed as a more unnerving slog through domestic political strife and rising global insecurity? Has a nation ever peered more anxiously into a future under the leadership of a man far along the path of cognitive decline from which no one has ever returned?
Normally the prospect of an incumbent’s re-election is a rallying moment, a chance to remind supporters why you’re there in the first place, an opportunity to offer the nation that curious but compelling combination of continuity and renewal. It should be a moment for hope for at least half the country. This time around four more years sounds like a parole board’s answer to a prisoner’s appeal.
Second presidential terms are rarely successful. Since the imposition of the term limit in the 22nd Amendment 70 years ago, the litany of disappointment and disillusion has been familiar: Richard Nixon and Watergate, Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, George W. Bush and the near-collapse of the world financial system, Barack Obama and the various pathologies that led the nation into the dystopia of Hillaryland and Trumpville.
But all these at least started out as promising journeys — campaigns ready to travel hopefully even if never quite arriving at their planned destinations.
Who is honestly enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s campaign for a second term except perhaps for a son who can hope that a father in the White House will continue to shield him from the accountability he deserves?
Certainly not most Americans. Only a quarter of voters want him to run again, according to an Associated Press-NORC poll released last week. Even Democrats are unenthusiastic; the same poll showed slightly less than half favour a second term.
There’s no getting around the age problem. The president’s widening mental deficit makes a bid for a second term a risky proposition. It’s not only an act of wilful recklessness; it amounts to a grand deception. Most Americans have seen enough of the president to understand that as his capacities continue to shrink, he will be less capable of making the crucial decisions the office requires. A large amount of executive power will be delegated to family members such as the first lady, to unelected officials close to the Oval Office and perhaps to the vice president.
Which is why a bid for a second term is also reckless. The domestic and international situation demands measured judgment and steady leadership, but we would be forced to wake up every day of a Biden second term wondering if this is going to be the Inauguration Day for Kamala Harris, the accession to the top job of the embodiment of vacuity.
No wonder Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running. A crank candidate, a peddler of quack medicine and bad science, is apparently running at 14 per cent of Democratic voters, according to another poll. With Marianne Williamson, also of the moonbeam community, polling 5 per cent. That’s almost 1 in 5 people who voted for Joe Biden supposedly now willing to sign up for a total leap in the dark. Perhaps we should hear less from the media about the crackpots who dominate the Republican Party.
It’s usually a bad sign for an incumbent when there is so little enthusiasm for him in his own party. It signals a primary challenge that is less than lethal but sufficiently wounding to doom the presidency — as Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush discovered.
But I suspect that for all the diffidence and disquiet among Democrats, Mr. Biden is pretty secure. The main reason for concern among the rest of us is that, as things stand, he has a good shot — a shot he doesn’t deserve — at winning.
As his political handlers know, the president is the ideal figurehead for a party that has moved aggressively leftward in the last few years.
The Biden presidency has been a notable example of the power of false advertising. It’s a flag of convenience under which the coalition of economic and climate extremists of the Bernie Sanders wing and the cultural extremism of its critical-race and identitarian wing has been happy to sail, taking the country farther toward their progressive utopia, paid for by the rest of us in higher inflation, taxes and interest rates.
Enough Americans are still incredulous that Joe from Scranton could really be the vehicle for all this stuff, so that his claims to be the same old moderate he has always been somehow resonate. Expect a re-election campaign that insists it’s not the Democrats but the Republicans who are remaking the country.
That’s the second thing the president has going for him: his opposition. The other message we can expect to hear from the Biden re-election campaign is that a second term is the only way to save the country from another four years of Donald Trump.
Republican primary voters have the best chance to prove him wrong.
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