Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online analyzes Democrats’ proposed revisions to the presidential primary calendar.
Joe Biden has sought to promote South Carolina to first-in-the-nation status in 2024, and New Hampshire isn’t exactly taking it lying down. (The state will likely run its primary first regardless — as required by state law, so jealously do Granite Staters covet their status — and simply omit Joe Biden’s name from the ballot.) At nearly 4,800 words, the [New York] Times piece is informative, and in fact perhaps a bit too much of a good thing — near the end, it begins to chase its own tail — especially because for all its length it rather curiously fails to address the elephant in the room: Joe Biden’s weakness as a candidate.
Now, Joe Biden and the state of New Hampshire have never had the warmest of relationships. He dug the grave of his first presidential run there all the way back in April 1987, when, on camera, he infamously tore the head off an actual voter who innocently asked the wholly innocuous question, “What law school did you go to and what was your class rank?” Biden’s response is legendary and deserves to be printed again, because it pretty much served as his epitaph in the state prior to the 2020 general election (my notes in italics):
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship [he did not] — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship [he was not]. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class [he was caught in a plagiarism scandal]. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class [he did not].”
