Bashing Biden

DEMOCRATS: BASHING ‘OLD JOE’ WON'T DEFEAT THE TRUMP-CRAZED GOP

JOE BIDEN campaigning in Henderson Nevada in 2020. CREDIT: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons license

By Brian C. Jones

IF IT’S MONDAY, it must be beat up Joe Biden Day.
   Wait it a minute, wasn’t that yesterday? Sunday is the day they have the pundit TV shows that nobody watches, and it's the day that newspapers offer their most thoughtful editorials.
    Actually, when it comes to Biden bashing, any day will do.
   Bothered by what’s going up at the pump? Immigration got you down? Tanks rolling into Ukraine? Retreat in Afghanistan? Agenda stalled in Congress? Too (much/ little) action on climate change?
   Must be Joseph Robinette Biden's at work again.
   Is your toilet backed up? Has it snowed too (much/ little) this winter? Didn’t like how “Ozark” ended its latest season? And how come that dog runs away when she’s off-leash?
   But Joe doesn't do all of this by himself. The Old Guy has plenty of help from the Silly Left. You know, the Lefties, those crazed, over-the-top, impractical “woke” lunkheads, who want their party, among other things,  to keep promises made to Blacks. They sound ridiculous, I know.

I WAS REMINDED of this blame Joe and lash the Left movement by a column in last Sunday’s New York Times by Maureen Dowd, headlined Can the Dems Dodge Doomsday?
   Don’t be fooled by the question mark. Old Dowdy already knew the answer when she rounded up folks she described as “old hacks” to make her case: James Carville (Bill Clinton’s man); David Axelrod (Obama’s man) and Stan Greenberg, whom Dowd describes as “the first to identify the fateful trend of Reagan Democrats.”

MAUREEN DOWD CREDIT: Tulane University

   Carville for months has been warning Democrats against being defined by their Left wing, which he mocks as “faculty lounge” losers, who are out of touch with the real America, and who talk all that “woke” nonsense. Carville delights in scolding them: “People don’t like you.”
   Axelrod says Biden should stop talking like “the voice of the government” (ignoring the fact that Biden  IS the President) and, instead, he should go back to speaking like Joe from Scranton, using “the language of America, not Washington.”
   Greenberg says Democrats should not “present themselves as the party of Obama,” because “Obama did not give voice to the hurt and anger that working class voters were feeling,” which ignores the fact that Obama ended the Great Recession and was elected twice. Still, Greenberg says the first president of color didn’t prosecute the bankers.
   This Biden-bashing and the lashing of the Left has been going on since Joe rescued democracy in 2020 by winning 7-million more votes than Donald Trump, thus driving him from the White House.
   Again, these critics who are going after Joe & Co. aren't Trump-crazed Republicans . They are fellow Democrats, and supposedly anti-Trump pundits, and they've been on a tear for months.

THE 'OLD HACKS' - As Maureen Dowd christened her panel of political experts: James Carville, David Axelrod and Stan Greenberg

 THEY MEAN WELL. They're  terrified – just like the rest of us – by the prospect of a Trump-poisoned Republican Party regaining power in November, then two years later returning Old Orange to the Oval Office.
   Carville at least acknowledged that he’s bewildered by how Republicans have been consumed by Trump’s madness, including their embrace of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. He said that Democrats should remind voters that everything bothering them now will be worse under Republican rule.
   But what bothers me is that the Biden blamers never seem to have anything useful to say:
   Don’t be so out of touch. Don’t boast. Herald your successes. But not too much. Sound a little more like Republicans, who are tapping into voters’ angst. Show some empathy. And avoid the Black sheep on the Left branch of the family.
   In fact, as I look at the solutions offered by Dowd’s expert panel, they all suggest backing away from the party's Black activists.
   Hence, Carville’s reference to “woke” Lefties. “Woke” is Republican code for people who are too enthusiastic about Blacks and not enough about about Whites. Greenberg comes right out with it: turn away from Obama, under whom “the Democratic Party has lost touch with all working people.” In political-speak, "working people" means working white people.
   Trumpism has always been about race. And maybe that’s what Dowd’s old hacks are sensing – they  seem worried about stirring up that ever-present, always-lurking racism that nests within all of us who are born in the USA. Best to give Black Lives Matter a rest; we’ll get back to it later.
   I think it's folly to mimic Republicans and disavow the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. It's the Left that has the practical solutions to economic and climate meltdown, and Blacks surely know a thing or two abut justice.
   Republicans, in contrast, are the party that says no to everything except death: Covid death, climate death and political death. To borrow from Jim Carville: nobody should like them.

BIDEN on a visit to Walter Reed hospital in 2021. CREDIT: White House

ELECTION PROSPECTS do sound awful, especially for the mid-term voting in November.
   It’s still February, and already 30 Democrats in Congress have turned tail and won’t even try running again. Thanks, incumbents, for abandoning the rest of us. You cowards.
   Biden’s poll numbers are awful, too: Real Clear Politics average of public polls today gives him a 53.1 percent DISAPPROVE rating.
   In this long, painful winter of blizzard and ice, I wish I knew what to do.
   Joe Biden has terrible faults, because there's no such thing as a perfect president. And old, at 79 (and here you thought he was 78).
   But if anyone asks, I’ll say this:
   Bless you, Joe Biden. You stopped Trump. No one else could; no one else did. I wake up every morning celebrating how wonderful it is to have my country back, my government acting imperfectly but normally, and America trying to move forward, not backwards.
   Bless the Left. I never warmed to Bernie Sanders, a fellow Vermonter. And Lefties, like the rest of us, say stupid things like “defund the police.” But you on the Left are the brains and heart of reform, which has always been America’s passion, however frustrating it turns out to be in practice.
   The Green New Deal makes sense to me as a coherent and smart way to cure climate change, while creating a just economy. Fixing immigration will allow more legal entry to people eager to energize our economy and enrich our culture. And working, working, working to cure our genetic racism has always been the right thing to do.
   I say this to Old Dowdy, to the Old Hacks and to all the other naysayers: shut up. Just shut up until you have something useful to offer, something that makes sense, something that will work.
  And to them and to everyone, near and far, I say: please vote.
  Vote for a better economy; vote for a better environment; vote for a better country; and vote for our better selves.

BIDEN arrives in the United Kingdom in 2021. CREDIT: White House