Biden’s Selfishness Showcases What Has Continually Plagued the Democratic Party
It’s not the Ideology of Selfishness, that would be the Republicans, but that old “Me First” bugaboo continues to derail the Party of the People.
How about them debaters? Awesome, eh? Trump and Biden, each an already or soon to be octogenarian. As one random voter quipped on MSNBC following the debate, “Hell no, and oh no.” Both contestants ended up scaring the bejabbers out of us, the Republican with dystopian whoppers and claims of great past and future miracles that would make Narcissus himself blush and Mussolini smile, and the Democrat, well, by being the guy who stands between us and the wanna-be dictator who will bring on that dystopia. This is the best America can offer! Oh wait. Check that. There’s an anti-vaxxer with a famous name waiting in the wings as a spoiler. Stand by for more drama. The possible end of America, as we know it, will be entertaining, if nothing else.
The Republican Party, of course, is getting what it deserves, and thrilled about it. As the party of conservatism, the Ideology of Selfishness, it couldn’t have a more perfect candidate than a world-class narcissist whose only waking thought is, “What‘s in it for me?” And if not the Dumpster, then the party has a deep, deep bench of mini tyrants, conspiracy nuts, theocrats, corporate shills and others just itching to find something they can oppress or corrupt, and move up in the power rankings to expand on that penchant. These Republicans love a Bozo, and they have Bozos on top of Bozos to choose from.
While the Republican culture warriors are gleeful, the Democratic Party is just sad. The “Party of the People,” with its perhaps naive notion of actualizing true American values — you know, that liberty, equality, justice, pursuit of happiness for all stuff — is being led, and oft sabotaged, by, what else, selfishness, in the form of just a few individuals, from the few who on the Left even want power. The Democrats crave an erudite, well-spoken, compassionate, steady, progressive icon of goodness for their candidates. But as we look down the Democratic bench, we see a whole lotta mediocrity. Which makes the current predicament perilous.
In the aftermath of Biden’s debate debacle, there have been many calls for him to drop out of the race, even at this late June date in the election cycle. No less than the editorial board of the New York Times did as much, as have a startling array of famed commentators. In all of these, the gist is good, old Joe has been a capable public servant, a good president and long a dogged, determined, dependable politician, but now is the time for him to do what’s right for the nation and withdraw from the race. Rarely does the word “selfishness” appear. Yet, make no mistake, that’s what we are confronting here. 2024 marks the fourth time Joe Biden has run for president, and every single time it was pure selfishness that prompted him to do so. He flopped twice, was propped the third, and now is back to try his luck again. Heaven help us.
He’s not the only Democrat who has in fairly recent decades torpedoed the party’s welfare through entirely selfish behavior.
We could go back to Bill Clinton’s decision to have a little, secret (yeah, right) dalliance with a young intern right there in the Oval Office. The sheer audacity. He got away with it. Sort of. But the Democratic Party did not. Clinton burnout has been tabbed as one of the reasons Al Gore lost the 2000 election and brought us the Wonderful World of W! Failing to anticipate a terrorist attack, twin simultaneous stupid wars, bungled hurricane response and crashed economy… here we come!
Then there was Ruth Bader Ginsburg coasting along as a rock star Supreme Court justice, taking the “life appointment” a little too seriously, not being willing to bow out gracefully in a timely fashion as the clock ran out on Obama’s second term, and at the age of 87 betting she could survive Trump’s time in office. She, and the more liberal party, lost that bet. “RBG” died suddenly just before the 2020 election, handing Trump a third Supreme Court nomination. In that vein, we could also nominate Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who was self-indulgently determined to hold on to her position until death, spending her final years in service to the people either absent, or loopy, as she gasped to the finish line in 2023 at age 90. Upon her death in office, she was temporarily replaced by the governor with another Democrat, but now a super-popular, former L.A. Dodger star, Republican could claim her seat this November. And how about Fulton County (GA) district attorney Fani Willis, the Democratic prosecutor in the all-important Trump interfering with the 2020 election in Georgia case, selfishly, stupidly, having an affair with the very lawyer she chose to handle the prosecution? Really? Yes, really!
Or we could consider Hillary Clinton’s 2016 assumption that it was her God-given right to become the first female president, even with massive negative numbers and Republicans having practiced and perfected hating and slandering and linking her to conspiracy theories for thirty years previous. In the election, she still won the popular vote, but managed to lose the Electoral College and hand the White House over to the reprehensible Trump.
Maybe Obama shares some blame for asking his vice-president, Joe Biden, to sit out a run in 2016 because it was “Hillary’s turn.” This was/is telling. Joe had long seen himself as presidential material but few were eager to agree. He had spectacularly flopped in three previous tries (1984, 1988, 2008). Let’s get real; he is not a good debater, he is not a great thinker, visionary, orator or leader and his moral compass sometimes goes awry. He’s a career politician who has a record of some really bad policy stances and no particular passion for any actual progressive cause. Perhaps Obama saw, like everyone else, that good old Joe is seriously charisma-challenged.
But let’s ponder if Obama had not interfered and Biden had been the nominee in 2016, with an even stronger Obama connection and far better poll numbers than Hillary. Would he have won the Democratic primary? Probably. Would he have defeated Trump? Seems very likely. Fast forward four years… and how, with no Trump presidency, is the nation different? Well, if nothing else, the Supreme Court features a 6–3 liberal majority! For the 2020 election, with Trump a proven loser, would the Republican Party have found someone else to run against incumbent Biden? Probably. The Covid Pandemic comes anyway, handled much more smoothly and effectively by a Democratic team rather than the contradictory and wacky approach of Trump. Nobody in the Biden administration, much less the president himself, would have recommended untested drugs, “light therapy” or drinking bleach to ward off the virus. A Biden administration, as the pandemic worsened, wouldn’t have been issuing mandates one day and then turn around and tell everyone to ignore them the next. Biden would have had a good chance to coast to a second term (despite no shortage of angst and whining from the anti-science, zealous, “My Freedom” crowd). And so, in this revision of history, we would arrive at this moment in time… with a gracefully departing Joe Biden giving over to a new face, presumably much younger, as the Democratic nominee for the 2024 election.
But, of course, that’s not what happened. What happened was that Joe Biden, after taking a three year vacation, decided that, “C’mon man, I’m still presidential material” and jumped into the 2020 election, even though he would be 78 if and when he took office, the oldest age ever for an in-coming president. Biden tells the story of deciding to run after hearing Trump disrespect the dead soldiers at Normandy. But there was zero groundswell for him to run, and he did (predictably) poorly in the debates and primaries initially. As Bernie Sanders appeared to be running away with the race, Biden came in fourth in the Iowa Caucus, fifth in the New Hampshire primary, was a no-show in the Nevada primary, and running out of gas and money when he was miraculously saved by Congressman Jim Clyburn’s herculean effort to swing South Carolina to him. Shortly thereafter, in a concerted effort to stop Bernie, party officials and all the other candidates (except Elizabeth Warren) effectively coalesced around Biden, handing him the nomination… not because of his great campaigning skills but despite his bare competency. Joe went on to gather 72 million votes to defeat Trump in the general election, the most ever in a presidential election. But the majority of those votes were virulently anti-Trump orientated more so than “ain’t Joe the greatest” fervor.
Mind you, deciding to run in the 2020 election was during the very time-frame when Joe, and his family, must have clearly recognized (as did the nation) that his physical and mental acuities were declining. Worse, it was a time-frame when he and his family (and Republican operatives) knew that one of their members, Hunter Biden, was running amok, a crack-head dashing around the globe making dubious business deals and other bad decisions. Did the Biden family really believe this crap wouldn’t come out? Or did they just not care? Joe’s ambition needed to be served, come what may.
Four years later, that same decision hung over Joe Biden and his family again. And once more, they all made the selfish choice. If he wins another term, Biden will be 86 years old when leaving the White House. The average lifespan of American men is 76 years. If he happens to die during his second term he will leave Vice-president Kamala Harris as the leader of the party, another overly-ambitious, poor campaigner and lackluster communicator, pure politician with a load of negative numbers. Biden and his family had no qualms taking this risk, making the decision to run again even knowing that a storm was coming for Hunter Biden. Just as they threw caution to the wind prior to the 2020 election, the Biden family dismissed as a problem having Hunter’s baggage along for the ride through one more political campaign. At any rate, with Hunter now a convicted felon, the Republican slur of the ‘Biden Crime Family” now rings totally believable for a huge swath of the American public. Who, with a modicum of wisdom, could possibly have thought that Joe Biden running again in 2024 was a good idea?
Yet here we are. Biden’s shockingly pathetic performance in the first debate of the presidential candidates for the 2024 election was a deep indictment of the wisdom and judgment of Joe, himself, and those family, friends and other advisors around him who approved of his running one more time. It just smacks of pure ambition, and complete lack of true self-awareness. As of now, his handlers, supporters and the party officially are doubling down on Joe.
The story out of Camp David is that his family has urged him to “keep fighting.” And get this. According to sources, “One of the strongest voices imploring Mr. Biden to resist pressure to drop out was his son Hunter Biden, whom the president has long leaned on for advice… Hunter Biden wants Americans to see the version of his father that he knows — scrappy and in command of the facts — rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night.”
Well, alrighty. Don’t know about you, but I’m sure relieved to know that old Joe prioritizes advice from such a font of wisdom as Hunter Biden.
He, and they, are lost in a delusion of grandeur. Biden was never as great as he and they imagined, and now he’s a wobbly, hoarse, cognitively impaired senior citizen. If only the opponent this time around was a wet noodle, it might be a fair fight. But it’s not. Biden looked dazed and confused, as clueless as Don Quixote, as the lying whirling dervish spun around him like a deranged windmill. Continuing to “fight” like that is exactly what we are worried about.
Now it’s Joe who has Hillary-like negative numbers. Forty-five percent of his own party did not want him to run, and that was from before the debate. He doesn’t sound good. He doesn’t look good. He doesn’t feel good for the rest of us as the person to foil Donald Trump. It’s not going to be enough this time around to simply be “not Trump.” More than ever before, the Democratic party needs a great communicator and believable champion who can clearly delineate the stakes of this race and evoke the strength to get the job done. We need a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, an Obama, heck even a Truman would do, to inform, to rally, to inspire. Not Joe. He has never been talented as a communicator; now he’s aged into absolutely pitiful. He needs to be at home enjoying the final years of his life. His family should full well know this. And they, as much as he, have failed America in not taking him home at the appropriate time.
We can say this about Joe Biden. In terms of his career, he is one of the luckiest politicians in American history. Indeed, it seems his awareness of this very fact is one of the driving forces behind his inflated ambition and now utter selfishness. He has never been defeated in a general election. The only thing Joe is actually good at is winning elections, with that luck ever attending. But there is such a thing as pushing your luck too far. And taking American democracy along for the crap shoot is not the right or fair thing to do. He has never faced the uphill battle he faces now, with half (probably a solid majority after the debate) of his own pool of supporters wishing he weren’t running, and against an opponent who has built a surging cult following who will believe anything. Hanging our hope on Joe’s “luck,” seems pretty flimsy and dangerous about now.
This serial, rogue, selfishness within the Democratic Party is cause for great concern, and certainly should be a major topic within the party elite, as well as rank-and-file, as to how and why it occurs and how to nip it in the bud… instead of passively going along with it. But is anyone in the party, anyone in the media, talking about it? Nope.
It would be par for the course if the Democrats once again are betrayed and sorely damaged by one of their own, the arrogant, ambitious, delusional selfishness of a single individual and his/her admirers.
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No Hate.
No Violence.
All Life is Sacred.
The Universe is Magnificent & Beautiful.
Love is the Way.
Copyright 2024, Rusty Reid
