With Super Tuesday now in the rearview mirror – and the nominees of both parties all-but firmly set by Tuesday’s results – it’s time to take perhaps the first look at the “official” general election matchup to come.
Up to this point, after all, there remained a smidgen of a smidgen’s chance that either Republican Donald J. Trump or Democrat Joe Biden would be knocked off their lofty perches as heavy, heavy favorites to win their respective party nominations. Biden was originally thought to be vulnerable because he appears to have trouble remembering what day of the week it is much less what he had for dinner the night before, so it was speculated, by a few, that Democrat primary voters would hanker for an alternative.
But liberals didn’t like Marianne Williamson, which wasn’t a huge surprise, but compared to senile Joe, Marianne seems to be a rocket scientist. And Democrats also didn’t take to that no-name congressman from Minnesota or Robert F. Kennedy’s son (RFK Jr.), either, so much so that the legacy Democrat up and left the party last year and is now officially an independent.
Likewise, Republicans weren’t enthralled by Trump’s competition, either, wholly rejecting the field of challengers, many of whom wisely bowed out months ago and endorsed Trump. Nikki Haley stuck around, keeping her vow to stay available as an “alternative” to Trump through Tuesday’s primaries. Nikki almost went oh-for-Super-Tuesday – she scratched out a win in Bernie Sanders-land, Vermont -- just as she’d swung and missed in all the so-called “early voting states” and Michigan last week.
Bye, bye, Nikki. It wasn’t all that great knowin’ ya, but it could be said that at least you made the latter stages of the campaign a tad more interesting to follow. News reporters everywhere are grateful to the native South Carolinian for saying enough delusional things and making sufficient way off-base predictions to engender numerous invitations to appear on establishment media Sunday morning gossip programs, where she’d regularly utter even dumber remarks.
But all that’s in the past now. It’s hard to believe, but the 2024 general election campaign will have a full eight months to flesh out everything that could possibly be said or explained in this particularly vitally important year.
However, one way or another, Joe Biden’s fitness – or lack thereof – will still be a main theme. Some call it a referendum on the broken-down, cognitively faltering old goat. In an opinion piece titled “It’s still a Biden referendum. That’s not good for him”, establishment-to-the-core political prognosticator Stuart Rothenberg wrote recently at Roll Call:
“Biden’s prospects would brighten if voters started giving him credit for the economy. But so far, that hasn’t happened, and the only issue on which Democrats have a strong advantage is abortion. Does this mean that Donald Trump has the presidential election locked up? Of course not. But critics of Trump should not kid themselves that it will be easy to change the shape of this year’s election.
“Nor should Democrats believe that they can easily turn the 2024 election from a referendum on Biden’s presidency into a choice between Biden and Trump. Even if they do, it’s not yet clear that Biden benefits enough from that choice to remake the contest.
“The fundamental problem for both parties is that conservatives and Republicans distrust Biden while liberals and Democrats distrust Trump. They view events through those partisan and ideological lenses, which makes it difficult for voters to change their minds about who they support. As the South Carolina exit poll showed, most voters made their minds up very early. For the moment, if the election is either a referendum on Biden or a choice between the two nominees, Biden finds himself in deep trouble. He needs November to be about Trump — and specifically about Trump’s most outrageous comments and most dangerous beliefs.”
Here again, the bias of someone like Rothenberg bleeds through in his commentary. While I’ll give Stuart a pass for remarking that some of Trump’s comments are “outrageous” -- at least by normal standards of commonly accepted American political vernacular -- what beliefs does Trump advance that are “dangerous” to the country?
Herein lies the difficulty in taking anything that longtime establishment pundits like Rothenberg write as serious and worthwhile in the struggle to assess the merits of the candidates in the coming election. Trump’s beliefs, as embodied by the Make America Great Again agenda, aren’t revolutionary or “dangerous” by any stretch of the imagination.
Trump’s views on immigration, far from being hazardous or volatile, closely parallel the laws already put in place by the United States Congress, which basically tasked the president with maintaining the country’s borders, dealing with aliens, overseeing legal immigration, negotiating trade pacts and conducting negotiations with foreign nations, all of which Trump handled splendidly when he was president just four years ago.
The southern border has completely fallen apart since those times, with millions upon millions of uninvited foreigners, including hundreds on the terrorism watchlist, plus tens of thousands of military-aged male Chinese nationals and thousands from terrorism hot spots around the globe – getting through, apprehended and then being released into our country.
Then there’s the hundreds of thousands or millions of “got aways” who are never caught and processed by the authorities. Who knows where they are – or what they’re up to.
Why? Because senile Joe Biden, upon assuming the duties of the presidency, reversed Trump’s border policies on his first day in office. The resulting invasion of “migrants” was heartily foreseeable, with the newcomers overwhelming the federal agents tasked with monitoring the line, relegating the highly trained officers to little more than adult babysitters who need to see to the essentials of thousands every day.
What could be more “dangerous” than that?
Aside from Rothenberg’s bias, he makes a good point about the Democrats’ uphill challenge to try and make the election about Trump versus the incumbent, a man who can’t seem to stay out of the headlines for flubbing something on practically a daily basis. Both men have been indelibly branded with public opinions that are so resistant to change that they may as well be etched in stone.
Senile Joe Biden, a long time ago, was gifted with a “brand” as a middle-of-the-road “moderate” politician who supposedly got along with everyone because he allegedly was relatable and likeable. You know, the back slappin’, hair sniffin’, child repellin’, female staffer molestin’, nude swimmin’, prodigal son protectin’, married woman pursuin’, union worker attractin’ guy from Scranton could do no wrong with the so-called common folk, right?
It was a façade Democrats worked very hard to foster and perpetuate even though the real-life Biden was a truth-bending intellectual lightweight with a penchant for exaggerating his own exploits. In reality, senile Joe Biden was the same jerk observers witnessed ruining the reputations of great and accomplished men such as Judge Robert Bork and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.
Perhaps it took Biden being elected president before Americans got a thorough enough look at senile Joe to comprehend what he’s really like. Democrats hid senile Joe away during the 2020 campaign to keep his updated “brand” from being well-established before the country went to vote. With state legislature after state legislature breaking their own laws by allowing poorly vetted mail-in balloting, the anti-Trump result was essentially pre-ordained.
In 2024, senile Joe is having a much tougher time getting folks to accept without objection that he’s a great guy who cares about the problems of “average” Americans.
Rothenberg writes that Biden is swimming against the popularity tide despite a strong economy (based on economic growth, unemployment and the stock market), a false fact that baffles Democrat strategists who apparently don’t notice that the current president’s policies caused runaway inflation and the FED to jack up interest rates so high that first-time homebuyers can forget about purchasing a house.
Rather than restoring the soul of the nation, big spender Biden delayed the realization of the American Dream, all in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion and stamping out COVID by sustaining lockdowns and vaccine mandates for people who don’t need it or want it.
Trump, on the other hand, has a brand so strong that the left’s multitude of attempts to dent it have bounced off him like tennis balls on a tank.
The punditry, including Rothenberg, persists in the widely held leftist notion that Trump is so solid with his backers because he has some sort of mesmerizing power over them like a cult leader over a commune full of drug influenced mindless zombies. Do they actually listen to what Trump says at his rallies? Packed in between real policy heft is a consistent anti-establishment theme, which Americans are hungry for.
By contrast, does anyone think senile Joe Biden is anti-establishment? Heck no. Biden is the swamp personified. That’s what senile Joe is battling – the accepted idea that he represents everything that is wrong with Washington. That’s his fresh “brand”.
It’s not necessarily that Biden is too old, too “out of it” or that his speech is too slow or his gait too stunted for people to see beyond the surface limitations. If senile Joe were a good president, then forgiving Americans would be willing to let him continue with what he’s been doing.
This is the primary reason why Democrats can’t alter the present downward trend of Biden’s approval ratings. Senile Joe got elected on a lie – that he was an average Joe who could make lives better – and now that the ruse has been exposed, there’s no getting back to square one.
The unofficial start of the general election race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden comes as no surprise to anyone, the culmination of a rematch some have waited for since senile Joe’s inauguration day just over three years ago. Both campaigns will leave no stone unturned to make the election all about the other man; but only one will be successful.
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