The Patriot Post® · Dems Picked Biden; Now They're Stuck With Him
The Democrat Party is in trouble. After starting the 2020 presidential primary with approximately 300 candidates, the herd slowly thinned, eliminating the black, Hispanic, Jewish, female, and homosexual candidates, leaving two wealthy, septuagenarian white men — former VP Joe Biden and avowed socialist curmudgeon Bernie Sanders — as potential standard-bearers for the party of “diversity.”
After the radical socialist Sanders jumped out to a delegate lead in early primaries, the powers that be quickly twisted arms, coercing the remaining candidates to drop out and endorse Biden.
Last week, Sanders suspended his campaign, making Biden the presumptive nominee. Now many Democrats want to dump Biden for a better candidate.
Though arguably the most palatable candidate for the general election, Biden is actually very problematic for Democrats. Some of that is Biden himself, and some pertains to a schism within the Democrat Party.
As for Biden personally, his long history of verbal gaffes and awkward and unwanted touching of women and girls will be under greater scrutiny now that he is the presumptive nominee.
The unwanted touching takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to recent accusations by Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who filed a criminal complaint alleging Biden sexually assaulted her while serving in the Senate. The New York Times finally covered the story but downplayed the accusations, writing that it “found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” After the print edition was published, the online version was stealth edited, removing that reference at the request of the Biden campaign.
Unlike accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for which there was not a scrap of evidence, these allegations against Biden are more damning. For example, the Times admits later in the article that two of Reade’s friends corroborated her account at the time of the assault.
You also have the looming scandal of Hunter Biden (who received $83,000/month from a Ukrainian oil and gas company despite no background in oil, gas, or Ukraine) and his involvement as a director for BHR, a private equity firm backed by several Chinese state-owned companies. Shortly after a 2013 trip to China aboard Air Force Two with his then-VP father, Hunter’s company closed a $1.5 billion deal for the equity firm. Questions have arisen as to what influence Joe Biden may have used at the time to secure the deal. Hunter is still listed as a board member despite promises to resign.
And while the media may downplay or cover up the sexual assault and corruption accusations against Joe Biden, you can be absolutely sure that President Donald Trump will hammer his rival with these accusations during the general election campaign. In fact, he has already released an ad highlighting Biden’s habit of defending the corrupt Communist Chinese government.
Another major problem Biden must address is shoring up support among Sanders supporters, who make up a sizable and vocal minority of the Democrat Party base.
In the days since Sanders dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden, Biden has worked hard to attract Sanders supporters, who see Biden as a corrupt establishment moderate. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the darling of the radical socialist faction, has openly expressed contempt for Biden.
In order to lure radical progressives, Biden has tacked hard to the left, coming out in support of Bernie’s “Medicare for All” plan, elimination of student-loan debt, a $15/hour minimum wage, and other far-left fantasies that come with astronomical price tags and no plan to fund them.
This is highly problematic for Biden, as the radical policies he needs to embrace to secure his left flank will hurt him during the general election, when he is trying to win over moderates and independents.
Finally, Biden has raised questions about his mental fitness in recent weeks. With Trump constantly on TV, holding daily press briefings while managing the national emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden has struggled to remain relevant. He’s been relegated to doing interviews from his basement, and the result has been disastrous. He has often seemed disoriented, and his responses to even softball questions are often rambling and incoherent, prompting many to openly suspect that Biden may be dealing with progressing dementia.
At other times, when he is more lucid, he has shown a complete lack of leadership. His “plan” for dealing with the coronavirus has been essentially to say that he would have done what Trump has already done, only better.
Despite relentless media hostility, President Trump is dead even with Biden in recent polling, wiping out a nine-point deficit in just two weeks. Regardless, at this point Democrats are almost certainly stuck with Biden as their presidential nominee.