2024 U.S. Election of President and Vice President

[Albany Rifles]

Trump says if elected he will force federal workers to pass a political test and fire them if they fail

Former president Donald Trump said that if he returns to the White House in 2025, he will mandate that federal employees take a civil service test and workers who do not pass would be fired.

The former president made the remarks in a video released on Friday.

“I will require every federal employee to pass a new civil service test, demonstrating an understanding our constitutional limited government,” he said.

Mr Trump said that the test would include command of due process rights, equal protection, free speech, religious liberty and Fourth Amendment to the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure, which led him to mention the FBI searching his Mar-a-Lago estate in August for classified documents.

“We will put unelected bureaucrats back in their place, liberate the US economy and attract millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to our shores,” he said.

Mr Trump has previously called on putting in new requirements for federal employees. In March of last year, he called on passing laws that would make every employee who works under the executive branch fireable by the president.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” he said at the time. “The deep state must and will be brought to heel. It’s already happening.”

Throughout his presidency, Mr Trump regularly went after various executive branch officials, such as when he fired FBI director James Comey and when he regularly attacked his attorney general Jeff Sessions.

Mr Trump was recently indicted and arraigned in Manhattan on 34 charges related to alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He also faces a federal investigation led by Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed, to investigate both his keeping of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, including his actions on January 6.
___________

Trump would've been fired on Day One of his presidency if this was a real thing.

AFGE & NARFE have entered the chat...

[Albany Rifles]

It was kind of the Joe Biden strategy. He got 5th place in New Hampshire with 8% behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren. And Biden thanked them by taking away their first-in-the-nation primary and giving it instead to the state that propelled him to the nomination. If Biden's name were Donald Trump the media would call it vindictive score-settling.

The Democratic Party has been talking about making this change for a long time. New Hampshire and Iowa are almost all white. The Democratic Party is multiracial as a whole and South Carolina better reflects the demographics of the party. This makes too much sense from a national party perspective and is not based on some petty squabble President Biden has with the Democratic Primaries of Iowa & New Hampshire. It is a "rule" that should have been changed years ago. And the 2 states have done a poor job picking the eventual winners.

[rj1]

It was kind of the Joe Biden strategy. He got 5th place in New Hampshire with 8% behind Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren. And Biden thanked them by taking away their first-in-the-nation primary and giving it instead to the state that propelled him to the nomination. If Biden's name were Donald Trump the media would call it vindictive score-settling.

The Democratic Party has been talking about making this change for a long time. New Hampshire and Iowa are almost all white. The Democratic Party is multiracial as a whole and South Carolina better reflects the demographics of the party.

A state they last won in 1976.

I'm from Eastern North Carolina originally and can comment on how demographics work there as compared to South Carolina. I think Clyburn has played a blinder as far as hard power: All accounts are he forced Kamala Harris to be the VP choice and got South Carolina as #1 primary. As far as demographics, this is going to be considered the "black primary". The only other Democrats left in southern states are big city liberals and college students as all the moderate Democrats (e.g. Governor Roy Cooper of N.C. who is from a previous generation) have either drifted to Republican or gotten outvoted in primaries. For S.C., there's less big city liberals and college students than in North Carolina. It doesn't match the demographics of the country. The country is becoming less white, it's becoming less black too. As far as internal party dynamics, South Carolina being first really harms the Bernie Sanders-type progressive candidacies because those need young white progressives and they're dead in South Carolina in comparison to the size of the black electorate who are first and foremost party loyalists and this is not widely known but are also more culturally conservative. It's also bad for organized labor although I don't think the modern-day Democratic Party really cares about labor. Biden's anti-NH/pro-SC move he asked the DNC to do is being seen as more diversity, less lilywhite because that's what the Democrats want it to be seen as and mainstream media nowadays swallow everything the Democrats say uncritically. It's also about being more pro-Biden's wing of the Democratic Party and anti the Sanders wing. The rest of the country will figure this out after a couple open primaries have occurred with the state #1, so 2032 or 2036.

I think in theory a good argument could be made that the 1st primary is held in the state that most matches the results of the last election.

[rj1]

Probably because Joe Biden is well known for being empathetic and compassionate.

Do you know his Senate career? He was the "lock up the hoodlums" Democrat.

Prior to the 2020 election I listened to a series of great podcasts on Biden, Harris, and Trump talking about their history and what they said. For all 3 of them, a lot of 180-degree turns. Biden was in the Senate for 30 years so has quite the record and Harris was a California Attorney General that would lock up 18-year-olds for a quarter-ounce of marijuana for 10 years.

[TopHatter]

Did you follow his Senate career? He was the "lock up the hoodlums" Democrat.

Yes, and that was the prevailing attitude at that time. But by and large his political career is marked by compassion and empathy.

[TopHatter]

Is DeSantis Just Not Dumb Enough for Republicans?
The perils of a true-believing conservative intellectual in a Trumpy party.

A little over four years ago, Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign appeared to be, if not inevitable, then at least like the most strongly positioned candidacy to win her party’s nomination. The former Harvard professor had won over a large segment of the progressive intelligentsia with her impressive array of domestic-policy proposals. But the enthusiasm of activists and intellectuals seemed to augur a groundswell of support from the base that never arrived.

The Warren precedent sprung to mind when Florida governor Ron DeSantis yesterday ventured to South Carolina, where he railed against the “woke mind-virus,” which he defined, perhaps unhelpfully, as “a form of cultural Marxism.” These are terms and concepts that have ricocheted across the conservative elite, especially Republicans trapped in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and other citadels of liberal elitism, where teachers and human-resource staffers have grown enamored of Robin DiAngelo–speak. But is this worldview, and the jargon DeSantis uses to express it, actually familiar to the voters? Are Republicans in South Carolina truly in a state of despair over “cultural Marxism”?

DeSantis’s struggles have consumed the national media and inspired sundry explanations. Perhaps his misanthropy is the problem. (“He doesn’t like talking to people, and it’s showing,” one supporter complained to the Washington Post.) Maybe the issue is that Donald Trump was indicted. Maybe it’s his refusal to engage the mainstream media. Or maybe his struggles are a passing phase, willed into existence by a campaign press corps that quadrennially seizes on any wisp of momentum, positive or negative, and blows it up into a self-perpetuating narrative, before getting bored and overcorrecting the other way. (DeSantis’s new image as an inept loser is difficult to square with his 19-point victory in Florida last year.) But the deepest problem may be that he has simply brain-poisoned himself into an abstract worldview that his constituents don’t recognize.

Unlike Trump, who oozed his way into Republican politics through a combination of instinct and absorbing hours of Fox News, DeSantis came to the conservative movement from the brainy end. His first book articulates a theory that has circulated among elite right-wing economic elites for decades: that redistribution through taxes and spending via the ballot box poses an existential threat to liberty. His devotion to that theory helped drive him to take positions (in favor of cutting and privatizing Social Security and Medicare) that now constitute perhaps his biggest political liabilities.

More recently, DeSantis seems to have grown fascinated with a different theory that has spread rapidly on the right. It posits that the far left has gained control of the media, schools, entertainment, and even many corporations, from which position it will extend its control over the rest of society. (They often refer to this process by using a line allegedly from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, “the long march through the institutions.”) Conservatives believe they must gain control of government and use the power of the state to halt the spread of these radical theories, or else face ideological extinction.

DeSantis has referred repeatedly to this theory in public. His book explains this is the basis for his governing agenda. (Given left-wing control of institutions, he writes, “elected officials who do nothing more than get out of the way are essentially greenlighting these institutions to continue their unimpeded march through society.”)

Indeed, this theory seems to have ordered much of his activity over the last year. DeSantis’s measures to clamp down on instruction about sexism and gender in schools, to intimidate companies that criticized his proposals, to clamp down on ESG investing, and to make it easier to sue the media all follow from this analysis of American society. This agenda has helped build for DeSantis a loyal following in the conservative-movement apparatus. Traditional organs like the National Review and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and new Trump-era ones like the National Conservatives, have all enthusiastically rallied behind him.

But do these maneuvers actually resonate with the party’s rank and file? Many of his moves seem consumed with grievances that are only intelligible to those steeped in state-of-the-art right-wing social analysis. Does the average Republican care about DeSantis’s plans to wrest control of a tiny liberal-arts college’s curriculum? Are they interested, or even supportive, of his manic crusade to stop Disney from supposedly grooming children with insidious left-wing propaganda that the average parent cannot detect?

In an interview, DeSantis lashed out at Bud Light for featuring Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman influencer. He explained to Benny Johnson that he was boycotting the beer, although it wasn’t clear he ever drank it to begin with:
.

“Some of these controversies that come up, and people can kind of just say, ‘Oh, well it’s kind of a one-off, yeah, it was stupid to do,’ but it’s part of a larger thing where corporate America is trying to change our country. Trying to change policy, trying to change culture, and you know, I’d rather be governed by we the people than woke companies, and so I think [the] pushback is in order across the board including with Bud Light.”

“What would I do? My wife and I, whenever we just go out for a beer, we actually like the stout, Guinness.”

Of course, a politician can appeal to Joe Sixpack without partaking of his beverage of choice. (Trump abstains from alcohol.) But it seems revealing to watch DeSantis mustering passion on the subject of Bud Light entirely through the lens of his conviction that its advertising methods are part of a nefarious ideological propaganda campaign.

DeSantis’s first term as governor achieved political success in part because the pandemic allowed him to craft a populist identity based on the intuitive principle of letting people do what they want. Now he has grown obsessed with uprooting progressive ideology from every aspect of their lives, from the schools to the beer they drink to the cartoons their children watch. In the minds of DeSantis and his most ardent followers, he is pursuing a historically necessary struggle. I wonder, however, if Republican voters are even able to follow the plot.
___________

[TopHatter]

Why the Anti-Anti-Trumpers Need Ron DeSantis
His getting the 2024 GOP nomination would, they hope, validate their actions—and their inaction—since 2016.



IT WASN’T THAT LONG AGO THAT Ron DeSantis looked like Donald Trump’s heir apparent—beloved by the base, but with mainstream appeal, basically “Trump without the baggage.” Now the narrative has flipped. DeSantis is struggling: Back in January, he was just 13 points behind Trump in the RealClearPolitics national polling average; today Trump is ahead by more than 30. Some state polls had shown DeSantis ahead in Iowa or New Hampshire, but now he’s behind (often by a lot).

It’s almost a year until the first votes, and a lot could change. DeSantis hasn’t announced yet, he still has funding, and he could still win people over. Trump could crack under legal pressure, sending all but his ardent fans looking for an alternative. Declaring DeSantis dead would be a mistake, not least because every other GOP candidate is polling in the single digits.

But Trump looks like the favorite, lobbing attacks DeSantis ignores and lining up endorsements from DeSantis’s home state. Some conservatives are saying the Florida governor should wait until 2028.

Others, such as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, are urging him to run. One reason is that, for a subset of conservatives, Ron DeSantis is more than just a politician. He’s a symbol of the Republican party they wish existed—a policy-oriented, culture-warring governing coalition, not a populist, conspiracy-theorizing cult of personality. In particular, DeSantis defeating Trump would show how conservatives who recognized some problems with the former president’s character and conduct in office, but stuck with the party in support of him anyway, were right.

A DeSantis flop, however, would suggest one of the worst things they can imagine: the possibility that people they don’t like maybe kind of had a point.

Coalition Politics
TO UNDERSTAND WHY THIS SEGMENT of Republicans is so DeSantis-needy, let’s briefly revisit the typology of the GOP following its crackup. Donald Trump’s election and presidency split the conservative intelligentsia—the writers, think tankers, attorneys, professors, influencers, strategists, policy wonks, and other “thought leaders”—into three broad groups.

First, there were those who said “Never Trump” and meant it, opposing both the man and his movement.

Second, at the other end are some you could call “semi-fascist.” Openly anti-democracy, they try to harness Trumpist populism to their own ends. Think tankers at the Claremont Institute call for an American Caesar. The American Conservative praises Vlad the Impaler, arguing that America needs a leader “willing to be the bad guy.” Billionaire Peter Thiel argues that freedom is incompatible with democracy, and funds a variety of causes and candidates (J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, etc.). Fox News host Tucker Carlson belongs here too, with his Russia-friendly coverage of the Ukraine war, and promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

Third, there’s what is probably the largest category: the rationalizers. Here you’ll find many media figures, donors, political operatives, and politicians. Loyal partisans, committed culture warriors, and anyone chasing the MAGA audience, appealing to small donors, seeking proximity to power, or just trying to stick with the team.

Some of these accepted Trump as the avatar of the American right, and backed him until after his presidency when they could cheer a Republican challenger. Others went anti-anti-Trump, professing to disapprove of the president, and rarely defending him outright, but rarely criticizing him either, focusing instead on attacking his critics.

Rationalizers criticized Trump on background to reporters, but not in public. Or they’d express disagreement in public, but merely on political strategy, not principle. Or maybe, when things got egregious, they’d say something on principle. But not too strenuously—down that road lies excommunication, as with former Rep. Liz Cheney—and usually with caveats that Democrats are worse.

No matter what happened, no matter what they said in public or private, the rationalizers kept coming back. They could not, would not make a public break with the party or a final break with Trump.

Which brings us back to Ron DeSantis. The rationalizers need the Republican presidential nomination to go to DeSantis to validate their choice.

To show that their words, actions, and inaction since 2016 were shrewd and insightful, not obsequious and cowardly.

To demonstrate that they were engaged in a wise, noble effort to hold together the party for the good of the country.

It would let them move on from the Trump period without reckoning with their role in it.

Some Questions for the Anti-Anti-Trumpers
NOT ALL DESANTIS SUPPORTERS have spent the last seven years as Republican rationalizers. One part of the DeSantis coalition is made up of figures who call themselves politically neutral or independent, cast their positions as “common sense,” and consistently align with the culture war right. This includes some elites with fan bases that denounce elites, such as Joe Rogan and Elon Musk.

Other DeSantis stans admire Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and see DeSantis’s fights with Disney and fixation on “wokeness” as evidence he’s the candidate for competent illiberal statism, and will crack down on culture war enemies.

As for the rationalizers, there are economic conservatives who see DeSantis as more reliable than Trump, some cynical “LOL nothing matters” Republican operatives, and others who see Trump as an electoral liability and DeSantis as a better path to power.

If DeSantis decides not to run, or if he runs but comes up short, it will raise some questions the rationalizers would rather not think about.

What if the Republican base really likes Trump? Not tolerates him as a vehicle for conservative policies, but likes him for the reasons elites don’t? What if they like Trump because they enjoy ‘the Trump show’—the grievances, insults, and conspiracy theories, the finger to the establishment—regardless of real world results?

What if GOP voters aren’t just going along with lies and nonsense about the 2020 election, but actually believe it and therefore don’t think they need a new champion?

What if many of the things DeSantis has focused on—ESG investing, HR-mandated DEI seminars, and universities spreading CRT—aren’t working-class Americans’ top concerns?

What if Ron DeSantis 2024 was to some extent a media creation? Not entirely—he won re-election in a nationally important state, and outperformed the other high-profile Florida Republican, Senator Marco Rubio—but enough of a media creation that Trump’s current advantage in polls better reflects reality than the now-defunct narrative of DeSantis as co-favorite?

What if “Trump is the best, he’s being persecuted, we need to have his back, that’s how we defend ourselves, but don’t vote for him, vote for me” was never a winning strategy? What if one has to take Trump on to beat him, and the party won’t move on until it loses more national elections?

What if anti-anti- has always been pro-?

What then?

Look What You Made Me Do
ONE THING ABOUT RATIONALIZERS: They’re ready to embrace excuses. If the party nominates Trump again, the decision to back him—or at least oppose his opponents—becomes easier if it was someone else’s fault.

For example, the rationalizers could blame Trump’s return on investigators and prosecutors. “The Democrat indictment effort makes Trump stronger,” declared conservative radio host Erick Erickson, referring to possible criminal charges in federal and state courts. “The left will get him re-elected.”

Think about the alternative here: Prosecutors in New York, Georgia, and the Department of Justice should stop their separate investigations, and decide against charges they believe they can prove in court, because they guess that letting Trump’s various crimes slide would give Ron DeSantis a better shot in the Republican primary.

That would be an absurdly political distortion of justice. It places no responsibility on Trump for committing crimes, nor on Republican primary voters who, after all, could pick someone else.

Maybe the problem isn’t law enforcement enforcing the law, maybe it’s the media. They could be covering him too much, making him seem the star of the show, like in 2016.

Or maybe the media isn’t covering him enough.

For example, former National Review fellow Kyle Smith, now a film critic at the Wall Street Journal, preemptively blamed the New York Times for DeSantis’s loss. Smith saw that the Times’s homepage last Thursday featured articles about Xi Jinping, Ron DeSantis, shootings of innocent young Americans, and more, but not one article about Trump going “on trial for rape” this week:



To Smith, this is proof that “the media” is doing “everything they can to make Trump the GOP nominee in 2024.”

For starters, Trump is not “on trial for rape”; this is a civil suit for defamation arising from E. Jean Carroll’s accusation of rape. Trump isn’t required to appear, and probably won’t. The trial will probably get more coverage when it happens, and the Times has covered the run-up, just not at the top of the homepage on the one particular day Smith was looking. Besides, Republicans don’t typically hang on the New York Times’s every word, deciding their vote based on which stories the hated bastion of mainstream media emphasizes.

If Republican voters pick Trump, the rationalizers will probably fall in line (again) and excuse themselves (again).

But still, if DeSantis loses, and especially if he doesn’t even run, it will be harder to silence the nagging suspicion that they’re not thought leaders, they’re followers, providing the intellectual sheen on political forces that aren’t conservative, constitutional, or good.
_________

DeSantis won't succeed Trump until Trump's mental or physical health renders him unable to continue leading Cult45. Ron really needs to just stand back and stand by until that happens.

[TopHatter]

The Real Reason Trump Might Win the Nomination
He's Still The President Of Republican America



If you’re looking for reasons why Republicans continue to embrace Donald Trump as their preferred presidential candidate — he has a 58-21 percent lead over Ron DeSantis in a Reuters/Ipsos post-indictment survey — you have a rich buffet of choices in front of you.

He’s channeled the economic and cultural grievances of the white working class … He delivered an anti-abortion Supreme Court and massive tax cuts while in office … His assaults on a range of targets gladden the hearts of his supporters, insulating him from second thoughts no matter how serious the evidence of defects in his character, temperament and judgment.

Let me put another reason for his current invulnerability, one so bindingly obvious it’s almost embarrassing to offer: Much of the Republican rank-and-file regards Donald Trump not as a candidate for president, but as the president. And parties do not depose their presidents.

For almost seven years, Donald Trump has dwelled on a plane so far beyond the political norms that it’s almost impossible to analyze him through the traditional frames of reference. But if we can put aside the sheer otherworldliness of his conduct — John Kelly, his former chief of staff, called him “the most flawed individual I have ever met” — there’s an aspect of Trump’s candidacy that would be eye-opening all by itself. Trump is the first ex-president in more than 130 years who is seeking a rematch against his victorious rival.

There are plenty of nations where combatants go up against each other again and again. In France, Emmanuel Macron and Marine LePen were electoral foes last year, five years after their first encounter, with similar results; such rematches are commonplace in parliamentary systems. But here?

The great populist William Jennings Bryan faced off against President William McKinley in 1896 and 1900 and lost both times; the next rematch was Dwight Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson; Ike was victorious in 1952 and 1956. Not since Grover Cleveland took the White House back from Benjamin Harrison in 1892 has a defeated president sought to oust the president who ousted him. (When Theodore Roosevelt ran against William Howard Taft in 1912, that was an intraparty battle between former allies. In 1940, Herbert Hoover tried to mount a comeback against FDR that was met with less than enthusiastic support among Republicans and he didn’t win the nomination). The prospect of an ex-president actively campaigning for the White House is something no one alive today has ever seen.

What makes this even more unprecedented is the way Republicans regard the 45th president. In modern times before the 2020 election, every defeated incumbent but one (Gerald Ford) lost the White House decisively. Taft in 1912 finished third behind Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, winning a grand total of eight electoral votes. Hoover in 1932 won only six states, losing by 18 points in the popular vote. Jimmy Carter lost the electoral vote 489-89, winning only six states. With these results, defeated presidents would have faced a steep climb in trying to convince their party to give them another chance. They were, as Trump might put it, losers.

Trump’s standing with Republicans is very different. Sure, Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by seven million votes, but Republicans can look at the razor-thin margins in the (also decisive) Electoral College count; a shift of 44,000 votes in three states — Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona — would have meant a 269-269 tie, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, where a majority of delegations would likely have given Trump the presidency.

That’s only part of the picture; by a nearly two-to-one margin, Republicans believe that the election was stolen — that Trump is in fact the rightful president. Even as his approval ratings sink below 30 percent among all voters, his favorability rating among Republicans remains at or near 80 percent.

In a sense, then, the Republican base sees Trump less as a candidate for president than as the real president, deprived of office by fraud. That’s despite the clear lack of evidence of fraud in the election, a fact that even many Fox commentators acknowledged privately despite what they told their viewers, as the Dominion lawsuit made clear.

Moreover, history shows that political parties simply do not jettison their presidents, even when their prospects for victory are slim. The last time the country’s chief executive was denied renomination was Chester Arthur in 1884 (Ronald Reagan came close to unseating Ford in 1976; Ford, like Arthur, was an unelected president). Given the Bizarro World quality of the Trump era, it almost seems normal for Republicans to be standing behind their “president,” who they regard as the candidate who really won last time out.

All that said, is it really necessary to note this does not qualify as a prediction for who will win the GOP nomination? It’s entirely possible that one or two or three indictments — about matters more serious than hush money to a porn star — might change Republican minds. Perhaps so would a widespread campaign among GOP officials that a Trump nomination would doom the party to November defeat (though this would require Trump’s foes actually having the fortitude to mention his name when they are making that case).

For now, however, many Republicans appear to see Donald Trump as not simply their voice or their champion, but their president as well.
________

[TopHatter]

Biden announces 2024 reelection bid: 'Let’s finish this job'

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Tuesday formally announced that he is running for reelection in 2024, asking voters to give him more time to “finish this job” he began when he was sworn into office and to set aside their concerns about extending the run of America’s oldest president for another four years.

Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, is betting his first-term legislative achievements and more than 50 years of experience in Washington will count for more than concerns over his age. He faces a smooth path to winning his party’s nomination, with no serious Democratic rivals. But he’s still set for a hard-fought struggle to retain the presidency in a bitterly divided nation.

The announcement, in a three-minute video, comes on the four-year anniversary of when Biden declared for the White House in 2019, promising to heal the “soul of the nation” amid the turbulent presidency of Donald Trump — a goal that has remained elusive.

“I said we are in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are," Biden said. “The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.”

While the prospect of seeking reelection has been a given for most modern presidents, that’s not always been the case for Biden. A notable swath of Democratic voters have indicated they would prefer he not run, in part because of his age — concerns Biden has called “totally legitimate” but ones he did not address head-on in the launch video.

Yet few things have unified Democratic voters like the prospect of Trump returning to power. And Biden’s political standing within his party stabilized after Democrats notched a stronger-than-expected performance in last year’s midterm elections. The president is set to run again on the same themes that buoyed his party last fall, particularly on preserving access to abortion.

“Freedom. Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred,” Biden said in the launch video, depicting Republican extremists as trying to roll back access to abortion, cut Social Security, limit voting rights and ban books they disagree with. “Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take those bedrock freedoms away.”

“This is not a time to be complacent,” Biden added. “That’s why I’m running for reelection."

As the contours of the campaign begin to take shape, Biden plans to campaign on his record. He spent his first two years as president combating the coronavirus pandemic and pushing through major bills such as the bipartisan infrastructure package and legislation to promote high-tech manufacturing and climate measures. With Republicans now in control of the House, Biden has shifted his focus to implementing those massive laws and making sure voters credit him for the improvements.

The president also has multiple policy goals and unmet promises from his first campaign that he’s asking voters on giving him another chance to fulfill.

“Let’s finish this job. I know we can,” Biden said in the video, repeating a mantra he said a dozen times during his State of the Union address in February, listing everything from passing a ban on assault-style weapons and lowering the cost of prescription drugs to codifying a national right to abortion after the Supreme Court's ruling last year overturning Roe v. Wade.

Buoyed by the midterm results, Biden plans to continue to cast all Republicans as embracing what he calls “ultra-MAGA” politics — a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again" slogan — regardless of whether his predecessor ends up on the 2024 ballot.

In the video, Biden speaks over brief clips and photographs of key moments in his presidency, snapshots of diverse Americans and flashes of outspoken Republican foes, including Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. He exhorts supporters that “this is our moment” to “defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedoms. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights.”

Biden also plans to point to his work over the past two years shoring up American alliances, leading a global coalition to support Ukraine’s defenses against Russia’s invasion and returning the U.S. to the Paris climate accord. But public support in the U.S. for Ukraine has softened in recent months, and some voters question the tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance flowing to Kyiv.

The president faces lingering criticism over his administration's chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of war, which undercut the image of competence he aimed to portray, and he's the target of GOP attacks over his immigration and economic policies.

As a candidate in 2020, Biden pitched voters on his familiarity with the halls of power in Washington and his relationships around the world. But even back then, he was acutely aware of voters’ concerns about his age.

“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said in March 2020, as he campaigned in Michigan with younger Democrats, including now-Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

Three years later, the president now 80, Biden allies say his time in office has demonstrated that he saw himself as more of a transformational than a transitional leader.

Still, many Democrats would prefer that Biden didn’t run again. A recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows just 47% of Democrats say they want him to seek a second term, up from 37% in February. And Biden’s verbal — and occasional physical — stumbles have become fodder for critics trying to cast him as unfit for office.

Biden, on multiple occasions, has brushed back concerns about his age, saying simply, “Watch me.”

During a routine physical in February, his physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, declared him “healthy, vigorous” and “fit” to handle his White House responsibilities.

Aides acknowledge that while some in his party might prefer an alternative to Biden, there is anything but consensus within their diverse coalition on who that might be. And they insist that when Biden is compared with whomever the GOP nominates, Democrats and independents will rally around Biden.

For now, the 76-year-old Trump is the favorite to emerge as the Republican nominee, creating the potential of a historic sequel to the bitterly fought 2020 campaign. But Trump faces significant hurdles of his own, including the designation of being the first former president to face criminal charges. The remaining GOP field is volatile, with DeSantis emerging as an early alternative to Trump. DeSantis' stature is also in question, however, amid questions about his readiness to campaign outside of his increasingly Republican-leaning state.

To prevail again, Biden will need the alliance of young voters and Black voters — particularly women — along with blue-collar Midwesterners, moderates and disaffected Republicans who helped him win in 2020. He'll have to again carry the so-called “blue wall” in the Upper Midwest, while protecting his position in Georgia and Arizona, longtime GOP strongholds he narrowly won last time.

Biden’s reelection bid comes as the nation weathers uncertain economic crosscurrents. Inflation is ticking down after hitting the highest rate in a generation, but unemployment is at a 50-year low, and the economy is showing signs of resilience despite Federal Reserve interest rate hikes.

“If voters let Biden ‘finish the job,’ inflation will continue to skyrocket, crime rates will rise, more fentanyl will cross our open borders, children will continue to be left behind, and American families will be worse off,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement.

Presidents typically try to delay their reelection announcements to maintain the advantages of incumbency and skate above the political fray for as long as possible while their rivals trade jabs. But the leg up offered by being in the White House can be rickety — three of the last seven presidents have lost reelection, most recently Trump in 2020.

Biden’s announcement is roughly consistent with the timeline followed by then-President Barack Obama, who waited until April 2011 to declare for a second term and didn't hold a reelection rally until May 2012. Trump launched his reelection bid on the day he was sworn in in 2017.

Biden is not expected to dramatically alter his day-to-day schedule as a candidate — at least not immediately — with aides believing his strongest political asset is showing the American people that he is governing. And if he follows the Obama playbook, he may not hold any formal campaign rallies until well into 2024.

On Tuesday, Biden named White House adviser Julie Chávez Rodríguez to serve as campaign manager and Quentin Fulks, who ran Sen. Raphael Warnock's reelection campaign in Georgia last year, to serve as principal deputy campaign manager. The campaign co-chairs will be Reps. Lisa Blunt-Rochester, Jim Clyburn and Veronica Escobar; Sens. Chris Coons and Tammy Duckworth; entertainment mogul and Democratic mega-donor Jeffrey Katzenberg; and Whitmer.

On the heels of the announcement Tuesday, Biden was set to deliver remarks to union members before hosting South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for a state visit at the White House. He plans to meet with party donors in Washington later this week.
___

Big giant shrug. Who else was going to run?

[TopHatter]

Disclaimer: This is a post from a random political blogger, posted as an example of the widely-touted "Demise of DeSantis". Please don't read too much into it.

The Ron DeSantis Bubble Deflates
You know it's hard out there for a Florida governor...

Remember six months ago? The Republican Party had just massively underperformed in the midterm elections, and a lot of GOP power brokers were grousing that the blame lay with one Donald J. Trump. Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, romped to a 20-point re-election victory despite the occasional jab from Trump. This led many folks to believe that this time, Trump had finally met his match: a MAGA-style conservative who actually knew how to operate the levers of power.

In the half-year since then, Donald Trump launched a lackluster first phase of his presidential campaign. He was indicted in one state, will likely be indicted in another state and could be indicted by federal authorities. He’s also still Donald Trump, a bigoted man-child who mismanaged crisis after crisis, fomented a violent uprising and is proposing far worse and more militaristic actions in his second term.

DeSantis has launched a book and orchestrated (by conservative standards) a productive legislative session. He has learned how to say “woke” a lot. True, his foreign policy musings leave something to be desired, but there were reasons to understand why party elites might prefer him to Trump.

And yet, it’s hard not to draw two conclusions: a) Trump is cleaning DeSantis’ clock; and b) in doing so Trump is exposing all of DeSantis’ myriad flaws as a presidential candidate.

Trump is winning on three levels in his shadow primary against DeSantis. First, to the extent that polls matter this early in the race, Trump has widened the gap between himself and DeSantis since the start of 2023.

Second, Trump has out-hustled and out-maneuvered DeSantis on endorsements from elected officials. FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich recently weighed in on this:
.

Last week, it turned into a flood: Seven U.S. representatives from Florida endorsed former President Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. It was a dominant show of support in the home state of Trump’s presumed main rival for the nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and it came the very week DeSantis traveled to Washington, D.C., to court members of Congress. Instead, though, he mostly just got bad press: Members of Florida’s congressional delegation publicly complained about how little they had heard from DeSantis until recently.

Trump’s Florida endorsement haul is impressive not only for 2024; it’s impressive by historical standards too. According to FiveThirtyEight’s historical database of endorsements in presidential primaries, Trump’s 11 congressional endorsements from Florida are the most for any presidential candidate from a rival’s home state at this point in the primary calendar² since at least 1972 (excluding primaries in which an incumbent president was running for reelection)….

Ultimately, the sample size of campaigns where one candidate got a ton of endorsements from an opponent’s home state is probably too small to draw any meaningful conclusions from. But it’s not a good sign for DeSantis that his fellow Floridians prefer another guy to be president.

Third, in outworking DeSantis on endorsements, Trump is also making it easy for the press to explain in excruciating detail all of the ways in which DeSantis is blowing it. My favorite is U.S. Representative Greg Steube going on the record to tell Politico’s Playbook exactly why he chose to endorse Trump over DeSantis:
.

[Steube] told Playbook in a brief interview last night that DeSantis has never once reached out to him during his five years in Congress nor replied to his multiple attempts to connect. He recalled a recent news conference dealing with damage from Hurricane Ian where the governor’s aides initially invited him to stand alongside DeSantis, only to tell him that he wouldn’t be part of the event when he showed up.

Trump, on the other hand, was the first person Steube remembers calling him in the ICU to wish him well after he was injured in a January tree-trimming accident. “To this day I have not heard from Gov. DeSantis,” he said.

Things suddenly changed last week, Steube said, as Trump started rolling out his Florida congressional backers. ”For the first time ever, I hear from DeSantis’s political person,” he said.

It is worth taking a beat here and pointing out just how difficult it is to be less empathetic than Donald Trump. The 45th president was notoriously awful at demonstrating empathy when he was president. For DeSantis to be even worse at this basic political skill would seem to be impossible, and yet that is what the reportage has consistently revealed.

Indeed, DeSantis’ inability to interact with people well has come back to haunt him during his fledgling campaign. As Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley report, he has left a trail of embittered ex-staffers ready to stab him in the back:
.

Donald Trump loathes Ron DeSantis for the Florida governor’s “disloyal” challenge to Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party. The former president’s ire, however, is dwarfed bythe intense desire harbored by some of Trump’s key aides and allies to see DeSantis politically ruined.

These advisers, lawmakers, and operatives personally know DeSantis or used to work for him. Now, some of them are working to reelect Trump and have brought their intimate knowledge of DeSantis’ operations, and also what makes Trump’s likely 2024 primary rival tick. Just as importantly, some of the Team-DeSantis-turned-Team-Trump contingent have talked to the ex-president about how best to relentlessly mess with DeSantis, assuring Trump that the Florida governor is uniquely “insecure” and “sensitive,” and that it’s easy to get in his head, two such sources who’ve spoken to Trump tell Rolling Stone.

It’s one of the reasons why the open political warfare between Trump and DeSantis is only expected to get nastier in the coming months. “If Ron thinks the last couple months have been bumpy, he’s in for a painful ride,” says a third source, who used to be on Team DeSantis and is now in the Trump orbit.

This person continues, “The nature of the conversations among the people who used to work for Ron is just so frequently: ‘OK, how can we destroy this guy?’ It is not at all at a level that is normal for people who hold the usual grudges against horrible bosses. It’s a pure hatred that is much, much purer than that … People who were traveling with Ron everyday, who worked with him very closely over the years, to this day joke about how it was always an open question whether or not Ron knew their names … And that’s just the start of it.”

A recurring theme in DeSantis coverage is the degree to which DeSantis burns through staff and generated resentment among them. It’s little wonder, therefore, that polling shows that by GOP voters give Trump a 14 point edge over DeSantis when asked which politician cares more about voters.

Not even DeSantis’s ability to govern is working for him right now. GOP state legislators are grumbling to Politicoabout how DeSantis is exhausting them. CNN reports that his presidential aspirations contrast with his inability to do normal governor stuff:
.

DeSantis has also faced scrutiny for his response this month to torrential storms – described as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event – that left Fort Lauderdale and surrounding communities underwater. Amid the severe flooding, DeSantis took his book tour to Ohio and spoke at a fundraiser for New Hampshire Republicans – returning to Florida in between trips for a late-night, closed-door signing of a six-week abortion ban – and said little publicly about the storms.

What is amazing about all of this is that polling also suggests Republican voters might prefer DeSantis’ political message. According to Axios, that WSJ poll revealed that, “most Republican primary voters say fighting ‘woke’ ideology in schools and businesses is more important to them than protecting Medicare and Social Security from cuts.” That is a DeSantis message far more than a Trump message. And yet, other polling shows that GOP voters love Trump way more than they care about any particular policy platform.

What does this all tell us? It’s worth remembering that at this point in 2003 John Kerry was flailing. Similarly, in 2007, John McCain was flailing. DeSantis has time to turn things around.

At the same time, what also seems clear is just how badly Trump has screwed up the GOP. He is popular among Republicans and reviled by everyone else. GOP elites who want to move past Trump thought they had their dream candidate in DeSantis. Under the hot glare of the media and a bare-knuckled primary opponent, however, DeSantis has melted into the consistency of pudding. It seem hard to believe that any of the other entrants into the race will pose a serious threat to Trump.

It seems increasingly likely that the Republican Party will nominate for the third straight time a man incapable of winning the votes of a majority of Americans. His closest challenger looks weaker by the day. So does the GOP.
________

Another blogger predicts DeSantis' demise. Mm, for now, maybe. But DeSantis is still the most popular Trumpiest authoritarian on the scene that isn't Trump. His stumbles will be forgiven and forgotten...I mean, look at what Trump was able to get away with: Bragging about sexually assaulting women, slandering POW's, there was no limit to his depravity. The cult will need a Leader once Trump is gone and they've shown that they'll forgive or ignore (or applaud) literally anything.

[rj1]

The Real Reason Trump Might Win the Nomination

The media and the Democrats want him to. It maximizes Biden's chances of winning reelection. So with Biden not going to face a primary unless Gavin Newsom chooses to become persona non grata in the party unless he wins against all odds (due respect to RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson, but they'll be ignored like Bill Weld and Joe Walsh were), they can spend money in the primaries "promoting Biden" by talking about the evil things Trump is to give a leg up to Trump against all his primary opposition to help ensure he wins. It's what they did in 2022 in a lot of races where Democrats spent money during primary season to ensure "Stop the Steal" candidates won.

Reason #6,983 the politics in this country are complete shit.

To your most recent post, who the f#ck is Daniel Rezner?

[TopHatter]

The media and the Democrats want him to. It maximizes Biden's chances of winning reelection.

Like I've said a few times in the past, the only person that could finally get Biden in the White House was....Donald Trump.

I'm not a Democrat or in the media, but I'd love to see Trump defeated yet again at the ballot box. On the other hand, the Electoral College has demonstrated several times that the ballot box doesn't mean fuck all when it comes to deciding who is and who isn't the president. Maybe Trump's cardiovascular system will weigh in on matters, who knows?

So with Biden not going to face a primary unless Gavin Newsom chooses to become persona non grata in the party unless he wins against all odds (due respect to RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson, but they'll be ignored like Bill Weld and Joe Walsh were), they can spend money in the primaries "promoting Biden" by talking about the evil things Trump is to give a leg up to Trump against all his primary opposition to help ensure he wins. It's what they did in 2022 in a lot of races where Democrats spent money during primary season to ensure "Stop the Steal" candidates won.

Well...these days, sitting presidents usually don't face a primary. And because the Dems have - yet again! - failed to get someone warming up in the bullpen, Biden as sitting president is the default.

To be fair, Biden hasn't had an Iran Hostage Crisis or a Watergate scandal, and overall he's been a pretty decent president, especially when you stack him up against his predecessor....although that's hardly a tall bar to clear. So, there's not exactly a grew hue and cry to replace him in 2024 (at least, not yet).

To your most recent post, who the f#ck is Daniel Rezner?

Dunno. Like I said, just another blogger predicting DeSantis' demise. I posted him as an object lesson, not much more.

[TopHatter]

Trump questions why he should participate in GOP primary debates



Former President Trump on Tuesday raised the prospect of skipping the two Republican White House primary debates that have been announced thus far, suggesting he should not have to subject himself to such scrutiny given his commanding lead in the polls.

“I see that everybody is talking about the Republican Debates, but nobody got my approval, or the approval of the Trump Campaign, before announcing them,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “When you’re leading by seemingly insurmountable numbers, and you have hostile Networks with angry, TRUMP & MAGA hating anchors asking the ‘questions,’ why subject yourself to being libeled and abused?”

Trump also took issue with plans to hold the second planned GOP debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, noting that Fred Ryan, publisher of The Washington Post, is chairman of the board of trustees at the Reagan library.

The first GOP primary debate is set for August in Milwaukee. The date of the second has not yet been announced.

It has become commonplace for Trump to threaten to skip debates dating back to his time as a candidate for the Republican nomination during the 2016 primary.

He threatened to skip a primary debate in early 2016 because he felt then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly would not treat him fairly. Kelly at an earlier debate had pressed Trump on his previous derogatory comments about women.

In March 2016, Trump threatened to skip a CNN town hall interview, citing his perception that the network had treated him unfairly.

In 2019, Trump suggested he may skip the presidential debates the following year if they were hosted by Fox News as he took issue with the network’s coverage.

And in the lead up to the 2020 debates between Trump and Biden, Trump repeatedly raised the prospect of boycotting the debates over issues with the nonpartisan Presidential Debate Commission.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has not yet laid out the criteria for participating in this summer’s primary debates, though Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has said those who wish to participate will have to agree to a pledge to support the eventual nominee, something Trump did not do during the 2016 primary.

The potential for 2024 general election debates remains in question: The RNC last year voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, accusing the group that has run the debates since 1988 of bias against its candidates.

Trump is one of several declared candidates in the GOP race, along with Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy. Others, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and former Vice President Mike Pence, are expected to decide whether to run for president in the coming weeks.
________

Well, he makes a good point. This is his Party and has been for years. And in MAGAland, things like polling numbers and campaign rally attendance are what decide winners and losers.

Also he's an unabashed autocrat - he doesn't even want to deal with the hassle of an election let alone debates

[TopHatter]

Joe Biden Is Old. Get Over It.




Joe Biden is old. He has, in fact, been old for quite some time. It is time we learned how to deal with it honestly.

As Biden commences his run for reelection, multiple observers are suggesting he is too old for the office. They are worried about his frailty. Or they are trying to overstate it for political gain.

If reelected, Biden will be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025. He will be 86 when he leaves office four years later. He is already the oldest man ever to serve as president.

But what does that really mean? How do we put that in perspective? How should voters assess that fact in a rational way that leads them to make the right decision at the polls?

On the one hand—let’s be honest—Biden is not going to be Hollywood’s idea of a president. For example, he will probably not be able to single-handedly defeat terrorists if they take over Air Force One, as Harrison Ford did back in the movie named after the presidential aircraft, or as Jamie Foxx did in “White House Down.” He will not look as good as Barack Obama did in a bathing suit (according to my wife). He will not be able to cheat at golf as often as Donald Trump did.

There are limitations that fall on each of us as we age. The question before the American electorate—and Biden himself has said that voters need to weigh this issue for themselves—is will these limitations negatively affect his ability to be president? Also relevant is the question of whether Biden, at his age, is better or worse equipped to be president than whomever his opponent might be.

Objectively, Joe Biden was not negatively impacted by his age during his term of office thus far. In fact, purely in terms of legislative record, Biden has accomplished more in his first couple of years in office than any other president since Lyndon B. Johnson.


Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2023, in Washington

His handling of difficult foreign policy challenges puts him in the first tier of U.S. presidents on that front. Did he stumble over his words occasionally? Yes, but he used to do that when he was much younger. George W. Bush did it when he was president and he was 54 when he took office. All people do it.

The reality is, Joe Biden’s age has been an asset so far. His experience has enabled him to advance an ambitious domestic agenda and to revitalize the world’s most important alliance in ways many thought would be impossible.

Furthermore, if those concerned about Biden’s age were honest, they would acknowledge that from a health perspective, thus far Joe Biden is much fitter and showing far fewer limitations than many of his predecessors.

Donald Trump, nearly as old and obese, couldn’t walk down a ramp without assistance and had trouble drinking from a glass of water. A conversation with a friend who used to serve in the Obama White House indicated staffers close to him were concerned about the dangers associated with President Obama’s smoking. (Genetics matter too. Obama’s father was 48 when he died, his mother was 52 when she passed.)

Ronald Reagan was weakened by the assassination attempt on him and was, according to reports of his own cabinet members and to observations of medical professionals, in decline during his last years in office. Richard Nixon drank to excess at times and took narcotics to sleep, a bad combination. Lyndon Johnson, chain smoker, had his first heart attack when he was 47. It is thought he had five such cardiac incidents including the one that killed him, five years after he left office, at age 65.

John F. Kennedy, whose assassination proved that age and actuarial table are not always useful ways to predict the longevity of presidents, also concealed his own serious illnesses. As a PBS investigation into his health put it, “long before he died at age 46, Kennedy was a very sick man.” A sickly child, he was initially denied entry into the military because of back problems he struggled with his whole life. As a consequence of back surgeries while he was still in the Senate, he grew so weak, last rites had to be administered. Further, he suffered from Addison’s disease, a life-threatening illness, the treatment for which also had negative side effects.

Dwight Eisenhower, too, suffered from a variety of serious illnesses, his health made dramatically worse by a massive heart attack he suffered in 1955—the year before he ran for reelection. Voters were largely unfamiliar with the extent of

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s medical challenges, including his paralysis from polio, suffered when he was 39 years old. When he ran for reelection in 1944, they had no idea he was already a dying man.

Biden—unlike Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Kennedy or Trump—has not hidden his health from the public. He has regularly been pronounced fit throughout his term of office. Further, of course, there have been no hints that Biden’s medical team lied about his fitness as did Trump’s doctor, now Congressman Ronny Jackson.


Joe Biden is greeted by Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine as he arrives at Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Airport in Hebron, Kentucky on January 4, 2023.

Sen. Mitch McConnell and Biden are roughly the same age. Three other senators are older. The average age of members of the Senate is 67 years. When Sen. Robert Byrd died he was in his ninth term in office and was 92. If Biden is reelected and serves his full second term, he would still leave office younger than two current members of the Senate. Chuck Grassley, just reelected last year at age 89, will be 96 when his current term expires.

There is of course, reasonable debate, about how age impacts political leaders, as the current debate over Sen. Dianne Feinstein illustrates. But it is worth noting that Feinstein is currently older than Biden would be at the end of his term. Further, it is also true that being president is quite different from being a Senator.

While in many respects it is a more demanding job, the president is not alone in running the executive branch. Many presidents embrace their role as a kind of corporate CEO, delegating key assignments to their White team, the cabinet and others in the executive branch. The reason so many past presidents were able to manage while facing serious health challenges—none of which Biden shows any sign of—is because they rightly viewed themselves as part of a team and surrounded themselves with capable people.

Even if the years take a further modest toll on Biden, which they are likely to do, with the team he has around him, he should be well able to handle the job as it is, not as it is depicted in Hollywood or as we have mythologized it in the past. Indeed, given changes in modern medicine and healthcare, he is likely to be far more physically and mentally capable than many of his predecessors. (And just for the record, actuarial tables suggest that a man of Biden’s current age can expect to live 9.1 additional years…and that is not taking into account the resources available to a president or Biden’s excellent health. Also relevant on the genetics front: Biden’s mom lived to be 92.)

This brings us to one final key point about Biden’s age in which prudence obligates us to think about the unthinkable.


Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris stand on stage together after delivering remarks at the DNC 2023 Winter Meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 2023.


Should Biden become incapacitated or otherwise be unable to finish his term in office, he, like any candidate, should have a running mate who could assume the office. Vice President Kamala Harris certainly fills that bill. She has extensive government experience, experience as a manager running a large state agency, experience on Capitol Hill and she has worked tirelessly as vice president on a wide range of issues of critical importance.

She has traveled the world and met with world leaders on issues from Ukraine to China’s growing influence in Asia, from Africa to the Americas, and the response of those leaders to her has been great. On domestic issues, like a woman’s right to choose or America’s gun problem, she has been a leading and effective voice. She not only aided Biden in his election in 2020 but she has vital support across core Democratic Party constituencies. Tune out the buzz of Beltway know-it-alls and recognize that among America’s recent vice presidents she is among the best prepared and most capable.

Of course, none of the above would matter if Joe Biden did not deserve to be reelected. As noted above, his record is excellent. But he also possesses one vital attribute that makes him the very best choice for the Democrats: He has won before.

Biden has led the party in two elections in which the Trump-led GOP has suffered major setbacks. Polls show he is the Democrat most likely to beat Trump should he be, as seems likely right now, the GOP candidate.

That fact is not only important in terms of the sheer politics of it, though.

The man most likely to be the GOP candidate led a coup attempt against the U.S. He has talked of suspending the Constitution. He is a racist. He is a wannabe authoritarian. He was deeply corrupt. He was disloyal to the United States. He is facing wide-spread, well-deserved legal challenges. The man second most likely to be the GOP candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is also a wannabe autocrat who is equally contemptuous as Trump of democracy and the Constitution. The GOP is seeking to impose white male minority rule on the U.S. and to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.

Of all the people in the United States, the one best equipped to stop them right now is Joe Biden. For that reason, he not only should run…he really must be the candidate. Indeed, if you care about the political voice of future generations, if you want them to even have a voice in a functioning democracy, it is essential that right now that the oldest president in U.S. history not only run now but that he wins reelection in 2024.
___________

If the choice is between gerontocracy and autocracy. I'll take the old guy who hasn't attempted to over the government.

[rj1]

Like I've said a few times in the past, the only person that could finally get Biden in the White House was....Donald Trump.

I'm not a Democrat or in the media, but I'd love to see Trump defeated yet again at the ballot box. On the other hand, the Electoral College has demonstrated several times that the ballot box doesn't mean fuck all when it comes to deciding who is and who isn't the president. Maybe Trump's cardiovascular system will weigh in on matters, who knows?

If you hate Trump, why do you want him to have roughly a 50% chance at winning the presidency? We played this game once where the media clearly biased the deck for Trump in the 2016 primaries, and they share the blame for why he became President.

To be fair, Biden hasn't had an Iran Hostage Crisis or a Watergate scandal, and overall he's been a pretty decent president, especially when you stack him up against his predecessor....although that's hardly a tall bar to clear.

So I love history, find me his historical predecessor. The closest parallel to Trump in my opinion is Andrew Jackson. Guy that came in from completely outside the political mainstream, angry about the game was rigged against him (1824 election where Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams made "the Corrupt Bargain"), was never accepted by Washington political elites, and routinely had fractious relations with his Cabinets. These anti-Jacksonians formed a loose coalition called the Whigs that with the benefit of hindsight were never able to form a solid identity of who and what they were. Where the comparison breaks down is on 2 fronts:

1.) Jackson had Martin Van Buren who became Jackson's successor elected to President in 1836 (political geek note: Van Buren was the last Democratic Party Vice President elected to the Presidency in his own right instead of inheriting the position until...Joe Biden 184 years later). Van Buren was a coy and able political operator and is a real political giant of the Antebellum Era (post-Founding, pre-Civil War). No such person for Trump exists.
2.) The Anti-Jacksonian Whigs are more the Never Trump Republicans than they are the Democrats.

Biden was picked to be the boring, safe, "return to normal" alternative. (That and Democrats organized to deny Sanders the nomination.) Looking through history:

-the aforementioned John Quincy Adams (great statesman and servant to the country, but the Presidency turned out not that great)
-Warren G. Harding ("run the hell away from Wilson idealists", incredibly corrupt regime)
-Franklin Pierce (that didn't turn out well)

You could also go into some "third term" presidents: William Taft, Herbert Hoover, George H.W. Bush. All of whom had their issues.

Dunno.

Reason #6,984 the politics in this country are complete shit.

(I can go find a blog stating literally anything you could imagine. It's the internet, it's a large place. Do you want me to write 1500 words on a Substack, copy it here in a post, and act like my opinion is authoritative on the matter?)