“My dog ate it”.
At the time of issuance, one could never be sure if this brief but prevalent excuse was real or simply made up by a grade schooler seeking a believable pretext to relay to his or her teacher how their homework from the previous day failed to materialize in the instructor’s in-box the next morning. No doubt everyone who grew up in the United States in the days before smart phones and AI understands why a kid might’ve concocted such a longshot lie to try and get themselves out of a tight spot.
Last week, the president of the United States, who is definitely not a juvenile in any manner (except for his childlike tendency to invent gigantic lies at the drop of the proverbial hat), relayed a story at a campaign event whereby he allegedly lost an uncle in World War II to cannibalism. The horrific event allegedly occurred in New Guinea, with the twenty-first century commander-in-chief suggesting that his uncle’s body was never found after a plane crash in the 1940’s. And Joe heavily hinted that the vanishing was because the native population ate him.
You can’t make this stuff up. Who knows, maybe senile Joe was shown a video of a trip around Disneyland’s decades-old and non-woke “Jungle Cruise” attraction that morning and compared his dreamed-up experience to the cannibals depicted in the ride narration.
At any rate, senile Joe’s latest fantastical fib probably didn’t have much bearing on his overall opinion poll numbers, since everyone who’s paid attention to Biden’s career in the recent past knows the old goat has a tendency to ramble on about nothing and most of his recollections bear no relation to the truth or anything resembling verifiable happenstances.
Regardless, according to a handful of surveys, Biden’s numbers have appeared to improve – some – the increase coming despite the current president’s apparent inability to string two sentences together that seem coherent and factual. It has Democrats worried.
In an article titled, “Democrats experience hope and fear as Biden nips at Trump’s heels”, W. James Antle III reported at the Washington Examiner:
“The hope for Democrats would be that Biden’s modest uptick in the polls is just the beginning of a political recovery that will erase Trump’s lead entirely months out from the election. The fear will be that they have already hit Trump with everything — abortion, indictments, claims he will cut entitlement programs if returned to office, contentions he will even end democracy itself — and can’t do better than a draw nationally, a bit worse in the battleground states.
“For almost eight years, Democrats have attempted to substitute fear and loathing of Trump for enthusiasm for their own candidates. The gambit succeeded in 2020. It worked well enough in the midterm elections. But it failed when tried by Clinton and is no sure bet for Biden, who has an unpopular record of his own to defend.
“Biden is in better shape than he was before the State of the Union. More improvement is probably needed, at least relative to Trump, to secure a second term.”
Antle’s final claim is an understatement. A number of recent polls have suggested that the overall 2024 race has tightened – some – with the mumbling, doddering octogenarian president seemingly having crawled up a point or two to within whispering distance of his Republican challenger. This narrowing has apparently given Democrats hope that senile Joe’s message regarding economic prosperity and the promise of more of the same if he’s reelected has reached the ears of the voting public.
I’m not quite sure I buy the tightening of the horserace, but if such a thing is happening, I doubt it’s either a harbinger of good tidings for Biden or dark clouds on the horizon for Trump. Last time I checked there’s another week left in April and, with the election set for early November, we haven’t even reached the six-months-to-go mark yet. No presidential election was ever decided more than a half year from the actual vote counting.
Trump’s visibility these days is almost exclusively due to establishment media reports of the former president’s court appearances or him contesting various bogus charges, the salacious lawfare providing the journos and talkers seemingly all they’d ever wish for to attract eyeballs and readers without needing to say anything positive about Trump. Polls offering subjects other than the straight head-to-head matchup continue to come down strongly in Trump’s favor. Whenever someone is asked which of the candidates they’d prefer handling issues such as the economy or illegal immigration, the margin spreads further away from poor ol’ Joe.
Therefore, Democrats’ tried-and-true reliance on smearing and besmirching Trump is all they’ve got. Senile Joe can’t go to campaign events and talk about inflation being wiped out or peace in the Middle East or China being contained or his successful efforts to stem the flood of illegal aliens, etc. Whenever Joe’s left to his own imagination, he starts rambling about cannibals and Corn Pop and how well he did in school or how many long-dead world leaders that he’s talked to in the past few months.
If, indeed, that Trump is beginning to lose control of a few percentage points of voters – again, I don’t believe it – it’s likely due to the inevitable gravitation of low-information fence-sitters towards the center. It confounds human nature to see so many bad things happening to Trump – court proceedings – without the brainless low-propensity voters deciding that maybe senile Joe ain’t so bad after all.
In his piece, Antle mentioned that Republican race de facto runner-up Nikki Haley still hasn’t endorsed Trump and that she continues to get a measurable percentage of Republican primary votes (are they still holding those?) more than a month after officially calling it quits on her challenge to Trump. Nikki is no doubt still enjoying the status and attention, but given the choice, few would want her on the ballot in place of the other two.
Haley could’ve had the “No Labels” nomination for the asking if she’d really thought she had a realistic shot to win. Instead, Nikki is hanging around in the background of Republican politics, probably constantly watching a rotary dial phone to see if it rings. Either that or she’s palling around with Liz Cheney and the big anti-Trump holdouts living large on somebody else’s dime. Never before has it been so lucrative to simply oppose one politician.
But Biden hasn’t crawled up a notch in the 2024 race because of merit or earning it. His incremental resurgence isn’t due to taking credit for something that is suddenly stirring the masses. It could be that Trump himself instituted a slight reshuffling in his own voter base by releasing his abortion position a couple weeks back, causing some single-issue Evangelicals to lose heart and temporarily begin waffling about his devotion to the pro-life mission.
Or it might be, as I argued last week, that Democrats have done well in hiding Kamala Harris from plain view, so Americans have temporarily forgotten that she’d be a heartbeat away from acting as the next president if senile Joe somehow surrendered to Father Time before folks figured he would. Why don’t the pollsters ask respondents about how they’d feel about a Kamala presidency?
Another possible reason for a slight Biden resurgence is the fact Democrats have given up hope that senile Joe n’ Kamala could be replaced by Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton or some other leftist stand-in who could take over and save the world just as Barack Obama did sixteen years ago. Bumbling senile Joe is the last of his generation of so-called “centrist” Democrats, the Obama/Biden people about to be supplanted by the kook fringe of the party, if they haven’t already.
Or, another possibility is the polls are flat out wrong. Every poll depends on recording the opinions of a reliable cross-section of voters from different states and regions and then reordering them to reflect an accurate prediction of what the electorate will look like in November of this year. Needless to say, this type of guestimate is extremely challenging to assemble, this year’s particularly so to pin down.
That’s it – every poll you hear about is simply the work of some numbers cruncher figuring a formula and plugging hard data into it to produce a result. I’ve never quite understood what “margin of error” truly means, but no poll or survey gets it right on. Adding to the test of truth is whether the participants were reached via landline (increasingly rare), cell phone, online or face-to-face. Are there more methods? Probably. No one knows for certain.
While it could be said that Democrats have been buoyed by Biden’s slowly rising head-to-head poll numbers, their joy could easily turn into a sense of dread when they realize that senile Joe will never improve as a candidate, and the best they can do to help him is hide him from view. There won’t be any Obama-like mass rallies, no barnstorming bus tours, no public expositions with thousands of cheering fans swaying to his every word.
No, all they have is Biden himself. And whenever the man messes up there will be a team of damage control operatives in place to explain what the president really meant – or Karine Jean-Pierre denying that anything was wrong in the first place.
At that point, saying “My dog ate it” may not be such a bad excuse alternative for liberals.
Democrats are obviously searching for new and creative means to package their 2024 presidential candidate in ways that distract from the realities surrounding senile Joe and his running mate. Following the party’s 2016 and 2020 playbook – making it all about Trump – is risky and won’t always work. Sooner or later, Democrats will need to show their true cards.
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