Many Republicans seem confused by President Joe Biden’s presumed Democrat Party nomination for 2024.
I hear many people question how someone can stumble across a stage, randomly say “God Save the Queen,” be confused at times, and be nominated as the oldest president in American history.
Republicans and many independents are watching the inflation rate, the humanitarian disaster at the southern border, rising crime in our biggest cities, extreme social policies, massive deficits, and the clear decline of America’s prestige and power around the world. They wonder how an administration that has produced all these failures could be renominated.
Then those same Republicans look at Vice President Kamala Harris and wonder how a we could have a vice president who is so hopelessly incompetent. After all, a second Biden term raises the real statistical possibility that it will turn into President Harris’ first term.
Then, many Republicans and independents look at the Biden Cabinet. Its members range from incompetent to invisible. How can the Secretary of Transportation regularly ignore transportation disasters? How can the Secretary of Defense prioritize being woke over being combat ready? How can the Secretary of the Treasury be overwhelmed by inflation, international financial instability, and inability to get things done with the Congress? How can the Secretary of Homeland Security preside over a disaster on the border and stand by as millions of people enter the country illegally?
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Further, Republicans look at the reports of corruption involving Hunter Biden, the President, and the entire Biden family. They see reports of FBI corruption. They witness the FBI’s clear double standard for attacking former President Donald Trump and his allies while protecting Hillary Clinton and the Bidens. Republicans assume the American people will be repulsed by the corruption and the use of government to attack political rivals.
The more I watch the polls and follow the methodical steps of the Biden team, the more I am convinced that we are underestimating Biden’s strength.
A great deal of our underestimation comes from a deep misunderstanding of the nature of the modern Democrat Party.
The Democrat Party in its modern form (at least as far back as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) has always been a coalition of different interest and ideological groups. FDR held together Southern segregationists and African American Congressmen from Chicago. He attracted hard core anti-Communists and Communist sympathizers (like his second Vice President Henry Wallace).
While the Republican Party has relied on issues and speeches to hold itself together, the Democrats have relied on their allies’ blatant self-interest. Like the movie “Jerry McGuire,” their battle cry is “show me the money.”
Coalitions are created on the principle that one group will support another group’s goals – so long as there is reciprocation.
Trial lawyers, labor unions, environmental activists, racial activists, and sexual-gender activists, have all been comfortable being part of a large coalition. They don’t require unanimity of thought or word. They require some mutual sharing of the spoils of government.
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Everyday Republicans tend to be the party of free enterprise, small business, and people who just want to be left alone. They don’t tend to have a real appreciation of the power of trillions of dollars in spending which holds together a coalition unbound by principle other than greed for tax dollars.
So, seen from the values and interests of the left, Biden has been an outstanding President. He is not inept or incompetent. He’s faithfully exercising the liberal agenda. He is spending far more on the environment than any previous president. He is shoveling money to union contracts and changing regulators and government agencies to favor unions and undermine management.
He is pouring money into the pockets of the teachers’ unions and driving the values in which they most believe. He has used the Department of Justice to protect his allies and harass conservative Americans.
He has packed his administration with advocates of radical lifestyles and extreme, absolutist policies.
The Biden administration’s foreign policy and national security agenda also aren’t weaknesses to the left. They do not want a strong America bullying the rest of the world (as their worldview would describe it).
Finally, high gas prices hurt working Americans. Only pain at the pump will push them into buying electric cars.
Republicans may be right about Biden’s weaknesses in a general election, but they are clearly underestimating the President’s strength in his own party.
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