We are watching the unraveling of the Biden Presidency as much with dismay and concern as with sadness. One gets the feeling that Joe Biden really wants to lead the country to a better place, but is in the thrall of a political base that is propelling him toward the embrace of an impossible socialist agenda and growth of government here at home and an isolationist view of international affairs that undermines any notion of an American-driven global order to things.
He continues to be pushed into a pattern of bad decisions and less than credible excuses for them. Unfortunately, countering the course taken by his Democratic Party would have been a Herculean task when he was in his prime. In his current state, it is proving insurmountable.
We are not unmindful that a good part of Biden’s slide is doubtless a function of old-fashioned politics. But it would be a mistake to think it’s all the same old, same old, and that the Republicans have just rebranded the fierce Democratic partisanship of the Trump years. In fact, the Democratic confrontation with the Trump presidency was something very different and something that remains unprecedented. It is also something we should pray is never repeated, whatever one’s politics.
Democrats resolved even before Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination that he would be an inappropriate nominee and, during the ensuing presidential campaign, that he would be an unacceptable president. While it was all ostensibly based on their sharp disagreements with many of his positions, they targeted not just those positions but the man himself and accordingly seized upon anything that could conceivably be used to make a case against him – even things that would be deemed insignificant in the normal course.
Had the Democrats focused instead on the policies themselves, those relatively minor issues would not have been morphed into the very big deals that they became. And the unfortunate, debilitating confrontations and disruptions would have been far less in play.
So, while President Biden’s lapses certainly raise questions about his capacity to lead our country, objectively, there is no conclusive smoking gun. So we would hope that Republicans would continue to focus in the main on the Biden policies and the alleged prevarications – Republican calls for his impeachment are far and few between – and raise the roof about them but look to the 2022 midterm congressional elections for relief. It is no time to try to delegitimize and seek the removal of a president.
Sadly, there would seem to be grist enough for opposing the Biden agenda on its merits. As noted, economically he arguably seems on the road to bankrupting the country and transforming our country into a virtual socialist state through his embrace of the decades-old leftist Democratic wish list. And his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal continues to be almost universally criticized – if not condemned – by Republicans and Democrats alike.
What we are pointing to is nothing less than the question of whether our system can reboot and return us to the kind of politics that we were used to before the Democrats declared war on Donald Trump. Surely that political history was far from uncontentious and non-partisan But it was also not about the disabling a president from governing.
Of course, a lot will depend on whether the mainstream media will fulfill its mission of reporting the news and not spinning it. Unfortunately, the distinct lack of attention paid to Biden’s remarkable telephone conversation with president of Afghanistan as compared with the treatment of Trump’s relatively vanilla call to the president of Ukraine does not bode well.