Biden Clearly Running & GOP Clearly Happier About It Than Dems – The American Spectator

On Feb 10, 2023

Eighty-years-young Joe Biden did not explicitly announce the launch of his reelection bid this past week. But three separate events during that time send Towering Inferno smoke signals that the president seeks a second term.

This past weekend, the Democratic National Committee reordered the traditional starting order of the nomination season by allowing South Carolina to cut the line. If you recall, Joe Biden lost Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada before finally winning a contest in South Carolina in his 2020 bid for the Democratic nomination. He rigs the game this time around by uprooting decades of tradition to reorder primaries and caucuses to his advantage.

The weekend New York Times huff piece on Kamala Harris, whatever its origins, felt like a trial balloon — eclipsed by another, much larger trial balloon — sent out by the administration to float the idea of dropping the vice president from the ticket. The reaction to the passage, “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her,” fixates on this indicating the obliviousness of her inner circle to her unpopularity. Is it possible they knew exactly what they did in sending reporters to the figures who bad-mouthed the vice president? It seems unlikely Biden drops Harris. But that does not make it unlikely that his team does its due diligence in weighing the pros and cons of dumping her.

On Tuesday, Biden delivered a populist State of the Union address designed to peel away those crucial MAGA voters of the industrial Midwest that elected Donald Trump president in 2016. Instead of abortion, transgender rights, or a green this or a climate that, Biden emphasized such words and phrases as “blue collar,” “fair,” “forgotten,” “invisible,” “left behind,” “buy American,” “made in America,” “manufacturing jobs moved overseas,” “factories close down,” and “the middle class has been hollowed out.”

Why pivot so sharply from the city-centric leftish manner of governing to a mini-MAGA way of campaigning, possibly float the idea of switching running mates, and blow up the traditions of primary season? The short answer is, in a word, desperation.

The president knows he enters reelection season closer to Jimmy Carter in 1980 than Bill Clinton in 1996 or Barack Obama in 2012. He can win, particularly if he faces the right opponent. But, unlike most incumbent presidents, he holds an equal chance of losing.

A Monmouth poll found that while 39 percent of respondents regard the state of the union as strong, 58 percent say otherwise. The “strong” number weakened from 46 percent last year, 48 percent in 2019, and 55 percent in 2018.

The RealClearPolitics average of the president’s approval-disapproval ratings showed a 42–53 split on the day of the State of the Union’s delivery. Eleven points underwater does not spell doom, particularly when your main rival’s disapprovals eclipse his approvals by 17 points. It does not scream “strength,” either.

Turning 86 before the end of a theoretical second term did not dissuade Joe Biden from accepting his destiny as a placeholder president elected to displace Donald Trump from office and hand over the baton. The eruption of a classified documents scandal, which more than a few speculate arose because Democrats wished to rid themselves of him as a candidate, similarly did not knock him from the race.

Embarrassments abroad in Afghanistan and Ukraine, at home in inflation hitting levels not experienced in four decades and the economy receding for two quarters in 2022, and on the border with illegal immigrants, fentanyl, and crime running over it without serious impediment failed to curb his determination.

A Rasmussen Reports survey released last week revealed that most voters do not want the president to run for reelection. A Washington Post-ABC News poll out Sunday reported 62 percent of all respondents reacting negatively to a hypothetical Biden win and 58 percent of Democrats noting a preference for their party to nominate someone else. An AP-NORC poll released Monday indicates just 22 percent of Americans and just 37 percent of Democrats want Biden to seek reelection.

Americans do not want Joe Biden to run. Democrats do not want Joe Biden to run. But Joe Biden clearly wants Joe Biden to run. And some Republicans want him to run, too.

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