Jim Geraghty of National Review Online places the Biden administration’s current woes into perspective.
One wrinkle to the “Should the Democrats dump Biden in 2024?” talk that doesn’t get enough attention: In early 2020, out of Democratic primary field which consisted of a small army of candidates, more than half of all Democratic primary voters picked Biden; the former vice president received more than 19 million votes, way ahead of Bernie Sanders with 9.6 million. Democrats had a long buffet table of options; they deliberately picked Biden and strongly preferred him to all of the other alternatives. Most Democrats got what they wanted.
Biden could have picked any Democrat as his running mate; he chose Kamala Harris, and at the time, 84 percent of Democrats approved of the selection. Democrats got what they wanted.
As 2020 ended and 2021 began, Democrats didn’t quite have control of the Senate as Georgia voters contemplated their options in the runoff races. Democrats got what they wanted –control of the Senate to go along with President Biden, and Democratic control of the House. Shortly, after taking office, Biden gave Democrats what they wanted – a shutdown of the Keystone XL Pipeline and a new focus on the environment and climate change in national energy policy. In March 2021, Democrats legislatively got what they wanted, $1.9 trillion in new spending to throw into an already recovering economy, with no concerns about the runaway inflation that so worried Larry Summers.
Time after time, step after step, Democrats got what they wanted… and it all ended up terribly for the country. It is going so badly that not even most Democrats want another six years of this.Dumping Biden would be an admission: “We screwed up. We thought we wanted Biden, and we thought he wasn’t too old, and that he would be an old reliable statesman and restore normalcy after Trump and the pandemic. But he didn’t.”
