Batman can’t save America from Joker Biden
George Clooney’s New York Times op-ed calling on President Joe Biden to end his re-election bid is more than a blip in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s a sign that the pressure on the president to step aside within liberal and Democratic party circles hasn’t even begun to crest. Pressure won’t stop now until Biden bows to the inevitable, and steps aside.
The last two weeks have been an historic time for American politics. Before the debate with former president Donald Trump, Biden led a party united behind him in a crusade to prevent Trump’s return to the Oval Office. No serious Democrat had challenged him for re-nomination, and any worries about Biden’s age were either expressed privately sotto voce. Media analysis of Biden’s increasingly obvious infirmities, rarely expressed, were swiftly met with a deafening chorus of denunciation.
The message was clear: Biden might be far from well, but dissent would not be tolerated and would be ruthlessly suppressed.
The debate changed all of that. 51 million people saw a man who could not keep his train of thought for more than a minute. He rambled haltingly, unable to even provide a rehearsed closing statement without verbal hitches. It got so bad that Trump could say after one incoherent answer, “I don’t know what he just said, and I don’t think he does either”. Nobody disagreed.
Now not a day passes without an urgent media intervention begging the president to reconsider his re-election bid. Clooney is said to have given former president Barack Obama advance notice of his op-ed. The man who elevated Biden to the vice presidency allegedly did nothing to dissuade Clooney, a sign (if true) that Obama tacitly supports efforts to push Biden out.
Obama knows that it would be open war were he to publicly call on Biden to step aside. He also knows that this report will signal to his many supporters within the party, especially black Democrats, that it’s alright to join in the pile on. Expect many to do so – and soon.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is engaged in a similar line of attack. Her recent statement on “Morning Joe” that Biden needs to decide if he is going to run might have been innocuous, had it not been delivered two days after Biden issued a two-page letter emphatically and unequivocally saying he will stay in the race. Going public after that to say that Biden should decide whether he will keep up his re-election effort is a poorly veiled way of saying that he should not – and every politically shrewd Democrat knows that.
The fact that these not-so-subtle calls on Biden to walk away from a second term are occurring during the Nato Summit here in Washington is even more stunning. So great is the fear that these leaders are willing to embarrass Biden while he seeks to play the traditional role of an American president.
Trump has many flaws, flaws that prevent him from trouncing in the polls the most unpopular first-term president since World War II. Everyone, though, can see that Trump has the physical and mental stamina Biden sorely lacks.
A late break to Trump would devastate Democrats. They could lose as many as 8 Senate seats if that happened, giving the GOP its largest number since the 1928 election. The House would also move from a toss-up over whether Democrats can retake control to a clear Republican majority. No wonder concern is highest among Democrats defending seats that Biden either lost or won by ten points or less. They know that Biden sinking rapidly would likely drag them down too.
The Clooney cabal will grow in the next few days. The only question now is whether Biden will be able to stop the groundswell calling for his departure. Don’t bet on it.