Like antifa, Joe Biden is just an idea, CNN skews its poll even more than usual, more “inappropriate” touching, and Biden refuses to take a position on, well, just about everything. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Wow! How did this happen? I’ll explain:
The poll sampled 35% DEM, 27% REP, 38% IND. So a DEM+8 vs REP.
The last poll sampled DEM+3.
So they changed the weighting by 5 points and now report “OMG BIDEN IS UP ANOTHER 6 POINTS FROM THE LAST POLL!”
It’s a fraudulent industry. https://t.co/cbfc0cYK88
— Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) October 4, 2020
Always check the crosstabs. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Lost in the blinding gaslighting over Donald Trump’s remarks about white supremacists during the first presidential debate was the fact that Joe Biden proved again that he’s little more than a stand-in propped up by a compliant political press.
Biden was unable to answer even the most rudimentary queries about his beliefs, never mind specifics about policy. Apologies to the Twitter expert class, but opposing Donald Trump is neither a moral doctrine nor a policy agenda.
There is plenty to dislike about the president, but you rarely have to guess where he stands. Biden, on the other hand, says “I am the Democratic Party,” and yet, after a half century in American politics, we have virtually no idea what his presidency would look like.
Biden’s already put a lid on his past, and the press has obliged. The same reporters who will comb over 15 years of Trump’s tax returns have shown zero curiosity in nearly 40 years of Senate papers Biden has buried somewhere in a University of Delaware basement. Then again, there’s not a single significant piece of legislation Biden sponsored in his 36 years in Senate that he still supports, so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Thanks to the media, though, I know more about some flaky QAnon candidate in Georgia than I do about the presidential frontrunner’s foreign-policy positions. Or much else. If Republicans were threatening to destroy the constitutional order by packing the courts and throwing out the legislative filibuster — one that Biden’s mentor Barack Obama once argued was an indispensable tool of a representative democracy — there would be massive pressure on the head of the party to stake out a public position.
Biden’s basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the “Harris Admiration,” seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump Agonistês flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.
Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.
Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign — and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.
So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.
Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues — well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another “You ain’t black” revelation.
If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace — if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College — he would lose his new base and with them a close election.
And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.
So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.
And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.
His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.
As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.
As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.
And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.
As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.
As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trump’s road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Biden’s youngsters now laugh off Trump’s calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.
And as in 2106, when Hillary’s social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Biden’s scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.
Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trump’s polls.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:
- “Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
- “On day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.”
- “He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that.”
- “The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”
- “Biden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.”
- “Make climate change a core national security priority.”
These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Biden’s plan.
Plus Green New Deal Supporter Kamala Harris would be waiting in the wings.
The Obama administration oversaw the lowest point in the US-Israel relations since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Biden was party to regular leaks of Israeli intelligence and political attacks targeting Israel on the global stage. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US to mend relations. The prime minister was taken in and out of the White House through a side door with no official media related to the visit.
Biden also worked to pass the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel heavily opposed. There are reports that in a 2014 meeting, Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli fighter jets should they target facilities in Iran. Biden does not get to run on the Obama-Biden record and play coy to these events. It is no coincidence that a month before Netanyahu addressed the House of Representatives, the Obama administration decided to declassify a 386-page report on Israeli nuclear capabilities.
This is the most complete indictment of media bias ever.
Why does CBS think voters in…Australia need to know about these serious charges against Biden, but not voters in…America (where he’s actually on the ballot)?
ONLY explanation is that @CBSNews is covering up for Dems. https://t.co/oLa8g6fr8P
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 4, 2020
I simply cannot believe that #JoeBiden is running for President of the United States and is a complete ghost. Where is this guy? What the hell is a “lid”? Why are you in your basement, Joe? Will somebody please lay out a trail of hundred dollar bills so this guy will get going?!
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 5, 2020
The U.S. has added 11,417,000 jobs in just 5 months under President Trump, recovering 52% of jobs lost.
For context: it took the Obama-Biden Admin 29 months to recover a similar percentage of jobs.
— GOP (@GOP) October 5, 2020
NB:
President @realDonaldTrump has done more for America in 72 hours from his hospital suite than @JoeBiden has achieved in 47 years in government. pic.twitter.com/OtdECEbsyv
— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) October 5, 2020
It's also interesting to note that the Left has switched focus from Trump himself to his wife and family. Looks like they're starting to run out of ammo.
— Doug Powers (@ThePowersThatBe) October 2, 2020
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