Why Joe Biden won’t be Democrat nominee for a second term
Biden was at Camp David with Hunter over the weekend. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t give a moment’s thought to the prospect he might not be set for a second term in the White House.
Don’t count on Joe Biden being the Democrat nominee for president next year. The octogenarian has presented his candidacy as a fait accompli, a proven winner against the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who now more than ever has been weighed down by political and legal baggage.
But three factors are undermining Biden’s chance of a second term in the White House: his obvious physical decline, Vice-President Kamala Harris and mounting evidence that he has lied about his business dealings with his wayward son, Hunter, which have recently been laid bare through whistleblower testimony released by a congressional committee.
You could almost hear Democrat party grandees wince when Biden fell over on stage at a naval academy event earlier this month; likewise when he inexplicably uttered “God Save the Queen, man” at a gun safety summit in Connecticut last week.
The President’s frequent physical and verbal stumbles make a mockery of the idea that he (at 80 years old) could hold his own in a series of high-stakes presidential debates, which will take place in the lead-up to the November 2024 poll, setting the party up for a potentially catastrophic moment where the President’s support crumbles, live on air.
And that’s if the physical rigours of a normal presidential election campaign – rather than one conducted largely online as in 2020 – don’t trip him up beforehand.
Biden’s age, as distinct from his physical decline, exacerbates the party’s Kamala Harris problem too. The Vice-President, a sprightly 58 by comparison, is even more unpopular than the President, especially among independent voters, who will be decisive in the 2024 election. Indeed, a quick look at standard US actuarial tables reveals an almost 30 per cent chance the President would die before the end of 2028, when he would be 86.
Vote for Biden, and get Kamala, the Republican argument will go. And don’t expect Harris, a heartbeat away from an office she could never win herself, to voluntarily relinquish her position. She’s in pole position to become America’s first female president.
The gathering storm over the President’s integrity is an even bigger problem.
While the world was distracted by the tragic implosion of the submersible near the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic, the House of Representatives Ways and Means committee released hundreds of pages of explosive testimony from two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers that pointed to government efforts to throttle an investigation into the President’s son, including by obstructing the issue of search warrants and tipping off the Biden family.
Most shockingly, they revealed an authentic communication from Hunter Biden, who was formally charged with tax and firearm offences last week, in July 2017 via WhatsApp to Chinese businessman and Communist Party official, Henry Zhao.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” the younger Biden wrote in a message that appeared to contradict the President’s repeated claims – before and during his presidency – to have nothing to do with his son’s business dealings.
Separate bank records, unearthed by the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives, have already revealed payments of millions of dollars to the Biden family from shady businesses in China, Ukraine and elsewhere.
The walls, as they say, are closing in around the President, whose public approval is already terrible. The overwhelming bulk of Democrats repeatedly tell pollsters they want someone else to run in 2024.
An extraordinary 44 per cent of Democrats told a CNN poll last month they would “consider” supporting longshot challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr, on top of the 20 per cent who said they were already supporting him.
Democrats have been operating on the assumption that a 2020 rematch with Donald Trump, the most likely GOP nominee at this stage, would have the same result. They shouldn’t count on it.
In any two-horse race one always has a chance of winning, and Trump remains well ahead of Biden in most national polls, despite the massive load of legal and political baggage that comes with him.
Indeed, Biden may now be the worst Democrat to run against Trump given Hunter Biden’s laptop, the source of much incriminating evidence against the Biden family, was far from Russian disinformation as President Biden falsely claimed in the 2020 presidential debates – a fact candidate Trump would likely dwell on next year.
Voters will likely also blame Biden for any recession that emerges in the US before the election, which is far from unlikely given the prospect of yet higher interest rates to stamp out high inflation.
The Democrats can only hope that sometime later this year or early next, the President chooses to spend more time with his family. If he won’t go quietly, the party may need to encourage other candidates to join the race, which shouldn’t be difficult.
Gavin Newsom has made his ambitions clear, popping up in other states to extol the virtues of his tenure as California Governor, sparring in particular for a fight with Florida counterpart Ron DeSantis. Newsom even appeared on Fox News with Sean Hannity earlier this month, an odd choice for a so-called progressive Democrat unless he wanted to broaden his appeal.
But opening the nomination to new challengers would present the party with another problem: having to organise primary debates that would inevitably give RFK Jr – the Democrat challenger to Biden and the party machine – an additional platform to talk about issues the party doesn’t want to discuss, including war, censorship and the capture of regulatory agencies by corporations and the security state.
President Biden was at Camp David with his son over the weekend. It’s hard to imagine they didn’t give a moment’s thought to the prospect that Biden, and his family, might not be set for a second term in the White House.
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