Joe Biden, in a TV interview on Monday, harped on the “14 million votes” that he received during the “open process” in the 2024 Democratic Party presidential nominating contest.
“The bottom line here is that we’re not going anywhere. I am not going anywhere. I wouldn’t be running if I didn’t absolutely believe that I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump in 2024. We had a Democratic nominating process, and the voters spoke clearly,” Biden said in a supposedly surprise phone interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.
I have to throw in that qualifier, that it was a “supposedly surprise” interview, given what we’ve learned about the radio interviews that Biden did last week, which turned out to have been with pre-arranged and pre-approved questions.
“Morning Joe” is reportedly Biden’s favorite morning news show – his “Fox and Friends,” as it were.
Host Joe Scarborough did a 180 on Friday, blasting the “elites” who had called for Biden to drop out of the 2024 race, days after himself calling for Biden to drop out of the race, following the president’s disastrous performance in the June 27 CNN debate.
You have to do more than wonder if that’s just Scarborough being chastened, then having to agree to do this “surprise” interview to make amends.
Back to the “14 million votes,” and the “open process”: it’s fair to ask if the process was “open” given what we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks about what Team Biden, top Democrats and media insiders have kept hidden from us about Biden’s mental acuity.
We’ve been inundated, in the days since the CNN debate, with reports about Biden’s decline over the past six months, the past year, and that there were even questions from people in the know about his sharpness during the 2020 campaign, which were harder to see because the COVID pandemic limited public appearances, or was at least used as an excuse to limit his public appearances.
One report suggested that Biden is at his best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.; Biden himself told donors at a private event that he needs to cut down on his schedule so that he can get more sleep, playing into the “Sleepy Joe” pejorative lobbed at him by Trump, who himself comes across as needing more sleep.
That all of this is just coming out now suggests to me that the Democratic Party nominating process was anything but “open.”
If the political and media insiders who are now telling us about Biden’s limitations had been up front, say, in 2022 or 2023, the president would have almost certainly had more than a token primary opponent.
We might very well have seen one of the rising-star Democratic governors – Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear – test the presidential waters.
Maybe a Mark Warner or Elizabeth Warren dips a toe from the Senate side.
And it’s entirely possible that the reckoning that we’re seeing play out right now leads Biden to pull an LBJ and step aside before the nominating process begins, and his VP, Kamala Harris, adds her name to the mix.
We didn’t get that, because the process that Biden is claiming was “open” was anything but.
Voters went to the polls in nominating contests across the country not knowing that the insiders knew about Biden’s reality, and now Biden is suggesting that, in essence, because we’ve since cast our lots, well, we’re stuck with him.
And we’re supposed to think that this somehow doesn’t make those who made it that we’re stuck with Biden the moral equivalent of those in the MAGA ecosystem who have made it that Republicans are stuck with Trump.
For all the dangers that come with putting Trump back into the White House, and they are legion, how is it also not a clear and present danger that we’ve allowed Team Biden and his Democratic Party and media elite enablers to mislead us on the mental clarity of the man we’ve elected to lead the country, and are being asked to lead us for another four years?
There’s an old saw about how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, that would seem to apply here.
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Chris Graham
