September 9, 2024
Anybody home at the White House?
Anybody seen Joe Biden lately?
He’s not on vacation today, which is unusual, having spent 40% of his entire presidency plopped out on a lawnchair on a Delaware beach.
That’s a nameless, faceless, oligarchy, composed of big Democrat campaign donors, old dinosaurs in Congress, and former Obama operatives burrowed deep in the permanent government that’s running the country as Joe Biden lays out like a beached whale. Kamala Harris is nowhere to be found.
Victor Davis Hanson notes that this is unprecedented in the history of this country:
Is it Biden again at the beach or closing up shop at noon for his nap and early bedtime?
Or is it Vice President Harris, far from the White House, out campaigning and confused over who she really is or wants to be, what, if anything, she plans on doing if elected president, and how to avoid any unscripted moment?
Or are our real rulers the stealth cabal of Democratic grandees and billionaire donors who arranged the Biden presidency by forcing out his 2020 primary rivals, staged the conspiratorial silence about his real disabilities for well over three years, ambushed him, and forced him off the Democratic ticket, and are now frantically reinventing Kamala Harris as capable and centrist when just a few months ago they had written her off as incompetent and a hopeless wannabe California radical?
As a result, a confused but also encouraged world of enemies watches the listless United States and wonders whether to try something stupid.
Harris, who ought to be stepping in to support the disabled and absent Joe, is out campaigning for president as an ‘outsider,’ which is comical stuff, given that her job is to be the insider in the wake of Joe’s senility and show some kind of leadership in his absence. She actually has a golden opportunity to do it – except that she knows she might lose votes if voters see her in action.
That’s why she hides.
She’s still on the outside, though, but not for reasons she’d like to discuss – which is that, as Hanson notes, she’s generally been kept away from the levers of power based on perceptions about her general level of irresponsibility.
Vice President Kamala Harris, until Biden’s forced abdication, was judged by these same backroom fixers as too incompetent to ever be commander-in-chief and thus for three years a good reason why Biden apparently was not forced out earlier.
Now nominal Vice President Harris is on the campaign trail nonstop, while Biden has taken the most vacation time off and worked the shortest workweek in presidential memory.
Instead, she’s been relegated to first lady tasks throughout the first three years of her vice-presidency, and she is now visiting spice shops that hate Republicans as her trusted campaign stopovers for gladhanding and drawing fawning media coverage:
But never fear: Her aide says she’s as busy as heck and can’t answer questions.
It’s sad stuff, and must make many Americans wonder when we might get a president again. There is no president now, with Joe Biden essentially abdicated and taking a permanent vacay. He’s out there like a beached whale now, which is a terrible metaphor for U.S. leadership in these troubling and terrible times.
