By Dave Andrusko
Almost exactly one year away from the 2024 presidential election, it is nothing short of jaw-dropping that the Democrat party and their cohorts in the legacy media are in a panic. Why now, you ask?
It can’t be because President Biden’s job approval numbers have suddenly dropped precipitously. They’ve ranged from a low of 37% to a high of 43% and have been essentially unchanged for months.
How about faith in his handling of the economy, the justly derided “Bidenomics”? The numbers have gone from bad to worse. A headline in the New York Times reads “A new Times/Sienna poll shows the president behind in five of six key states. Voters cite his economic track record, indicators notwithstanding.”
An important point in that regard: “Just 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent, the poll found. Worryingly for Biden, that discontent is being reflected in demographics crucial to his re-election: 48 percent of Black voters in the Times/Siena poll rated the economy as poor, as did 59 percent of voters under 30. Zero respondents in that age group in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin rated the economy as excellent.”
The same point could be made on the question of whether we are on the right/wrong track. An NBC News poll “found that 72 percent of respondents believe that ‘things are off on the right track.’ Only 22 percent answered that things are ‘headed in the right direction.’”
However, I think the reason why Democrats are in a panic is the aforementioned New York Times/Sienna college poll which “shows the president behind in five of six key states.”
There was always going to be a point where (to borrow from columnist Byron York) “The entire Democratic political establishment freaked out” [] over the prospect of pro-abortion President Biden running for a second term. (How could there not be?)
This was it! But…
If that wasn’t the snowball that escalated into an avalanche of doomsday prophecies, I’d nominate a column Politico’s Jonathan Martin. (Actually, it was a single paragraph, the rest of the column was how President could dig his way out.):
2024 will be an extraordinary election, and it demands extraordinary measures. That’s in part for reasons Biden refuses to accept: his capacity to do the job. The oldest president in history when he first took the oath, Biden will not be able to govern and campaign in the manner of previous incumbents. He simply does not have the capacity to do it, and his staff doesn’t trust him to even try, as they make clear by blocking him from the press. Biden’s bid will give new meaning to a Rose Garden campaign, and it requires accommodation to that unavoidable fact of life.
National Review Online’s Charles W. Cooke’s had a classic response:
When Martin describes “how Biden can turn it around,” he is not addressing the remaining 14 months of Biden’s first term, but outlining how Biden can win reelection and remain president for the next five years, two months, and seven days.
Stop and look at those numbers: Five years, two months, and seven days. That’s 1,895 days. It’s 62 months. It’s 270 weeks. It’s 45,480 hours, or 2,728,800 minutes, or 163,728,000 seconds. If Joe Biden is not trusted by his staff now, how do we think things are going to be as those years, months, weeks, days, minutes, and seconds count down?
What sort of pieces will be written in Politico two years from now, in November 2025? How will Biden be described in 2027? What level of autonomy and drive can we expect from him in 2028?
Yowzah!
More tomorrow.