By Dave Andrusko
To paraphrase a song from The Sound of Music, “How do you solve a problem like Joe Biden?”
Everyone understands the President’s extraordinary limitations. It’s not just age, but clearly supporters can (and have) rationalized away everything but the unforgiving fact that he is 80 years old now and would turn 82 the same month as the 2024 elections.
Many pro-abortion Democrats are unnerved by the prospect of Biden running for a second term, a decision he evidently cannot be dissuaded from. New York Times’ pro-abortion columnist David Brooks (a “moderate conservative”) wrote a long, long column published today that laid out all the reasons Biden had to run. That starts with the truism that if he didn’t there’d be the problem of his Vice President Kamala Harris: “If the door were open, the vice president would probably run even though her poll numbers are lower than Biden’s. Her shambolic 2020 presidential campaign does not inspire confidence”
Brooks whole column is a first and foremost a nostalgic look back at President Biden. Brooks is so blinded by his admiration for Biden and his gut-level hatred for former President Trump that he could write paragraphs like this: “The Republicans who portray him as a doddering old man based on highly selective YouTube clips are wrong. In my interviews with him, he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87. He is clearly still an effective pitcher.”
Actually, to stay with the baseball simile, Biden resembles nothing so much as one of those creaky non-athletes asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch which winds up an embarrassing 20 feet short of home plate.
Brooks even tells us that he’s “noticed some improvements in his communication style as he’s aged.” IMPROVEMENTS”? Oh, my goodness. To correct Brooks would require piling on Mr. Biden who struggles even to read text off a teleprompter.
And if it’s just Republicans who are bad-mouthing Mr. Biden, how does he explain this admission from his column?
“Biden’s approval ratings are stubbornly low. In a recent ABC poll, only 30 percent of voters approve of his handling of the economy and only 23 percent approve of his handling of immigration at the southern border. Roughly three-quarters of American voters say that Biden, at 80, is too old to seek a second term. There have been a string of polls showing that large majorities in his own party don’t want him to run again. In one survey from 2022, an astounding 94 percent of Democrats under 30 said they wanted a different nominee.”
What to say about this column which goes back and forth between a grudging admission that the President deserves at least some of the blame for his standings in the polls and his insistence that after more than almost five decades in Washington, D.C. Biden remains still “rooted in the unpretentious middle-class ethos of the neighborhood he grew up in. He has a seemingly instinctive ability to bond with those who are hurting”?
That “instinctive ability to bond” also means “On cultural matters he is most defined by what he doesn’t do — needlessly offend people with overly academic verbiage and virtue signaling.” Really?! “That is why I worry when he talks too stridently about people on the right, when he name-calls and denounces wide swaths of people as MAGA.”
You think?
As pro-lifers our primary concern is that his administration is fanatically pro-abortion. Joe Biden is relentless. He hijacks even programs whose whole purpose is to affirm life.
Congressman Chris Smith once put it this way. He recalled President Biden’s inauguration speech when he said that “the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer” and that this is “a cry for survival from the planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate …”
Smith, co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, concluded, “I believe the dream of ‘justice for all’ cannot be achieved if an entire segment of society is legally ignored and discriminated against because of where they live—in their mothers’ wombs—and how small and defenseless they are.
“We know the President understands this. He gets it—or at least he once did.”