D’s Should Dump Biden-Harris in 2024
The Moderate Democrat planned a more refined entry into Substack-land. Instead, we’re off to a quick start proposing a winning vision without Joe and Kamala.
I did not want to begin my Substack like this. I wanted a more refined and elegant beginning to my Substack.
But the news this week prompts me to just get going.
The Moderate Democrat proposes that Democrats win in 2024 by nominating a team other than President Biden and Vice President Harris.
They should be dumped.
Republicans are going to nominate a candidate too far to the right, which creates the opening for a Democratic victory. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) is bending to the right and will not be able to crawl back to the moderate mainstream. Former President Donald J. Trump (R) is so consumed with the past that he cannot project a clear vision for the future. He lives in the present moment, not in a desired future.
I learned years ago that Democrats win competitive elections — like presidential elections in the United States — when they field centrist candidates who stay in the mainstream of voters.
I learned years ago that Democrats win competitive elections — yes, like U.S. presidential elections — when they can speak about a positive vision for the future.
At this point, I know what you’re asking.
So I’ll say it: My current team is Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky. (If they ever hear that this new Substack writer wrote this paragraph, they’ll cringe because they will favor Biden-Harris.)
What happened to prompt this launch into the strange world of opposing a sitting president for whom I voted in 2020?
It’s stuff like what happens every week, but today I decided to chuck the science fiction I’ve been reading and write this unpopular proposal instead.
Or maybe not so unpopular.
The Hill, which covers news on Capitol Hill, reports today that President Biden is getting close again to his lowest level of popularity during his presidency.
Olafimihan Olshin reports:
President Biden’s approval rating has slipped to below 40 percent, almost matching the lowest approval rating of his presidency, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The poll, published Wednesday, found that 39 percent of respondents approve of the job Biden is doing as president.
This will remind you of one of the worst days — last July 11 — when Shane Goldmacher of The News York Times reported this:
President Biden is facing an alarming level of doubt from inside his own party, with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll, as voters nationwide have soured on his leadership, giving him a meager 33 percent job-approval rating.
Widespread concerns about the economy and inflation have helped turn the national mood decidedly dark, both on Mr. Biden and the trajectory of the nation. More than three-quarters of registered voters see the United States moving in the wrong direction, a pervasive sense of pessimism that spans every corner of the country, every age range and racial group, cities, suburbs and rural areas, as well as both political parties.
(No, I cannot reconcile the obvious differences in low-water polling by Reuters/Ipsos and NUY/Siena College.)
What else happened this week? How about an op-ed in Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead on Biden’s emaciating foreign policy.
Yes, Biden pulled allies together to support Ukraine — good, in my book — but now it’s all a case of losing steam to China and its sidekick, Russia.
Mead reminds us that the latest Chinese coup was Brazilian President Luis Inácio da Silva’s visit to Beijing a few days ago in which Lula “pledged to work with Xi Jinping to build a new global order.”
Mead continued:
The usual spinners and makeup artists are doing their best to make the disorderly unraveling of the American-led world order look like a visionary triumph of enlightened foreign policy, but former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers expressed a more cogent view. Describing America’s increasing loneliness on the world scene, Mr. Summers said, “Somebody from a developing country said to me, ‘What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.’”
When I think of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, I think of three chief blunders by the president: (1) Botched Afghanistan withdrawal. (2) Out-of-control border immigration. (3) Ceding 70 years of U.S. global leadership to China with Russian assistance.
It’s not far from Biden’s presidential foreign policy now to his vice-presidential foreign policy way back then.
Thanks to First Son Hunter Biden’s erstwhile laptop, we now know that “likely criminal activity” describes the former Veep’s attachment to using public airplanes and official trips to set Hunter into a lucrative post while enriching “the big guy.” Namely, you know who.
Onetime Biden aide-now-turned-critic Mike McCormick runs a Substack elegantly titled “Midnight In The Laptop Of Good And Evil.” (With apologies, I’m sure, to John Berendt.)
This afternoon, McCormick reported on new details concerning a press briefing conducted aboard a June 21, 2014, Air Force Two flight into Kyiv.
It wasn’t just Joe’s shale gas assistance Hunter and Burisma got their hooks into.
Obama’s USAID ponied up American taxpayer dollars for an energy conservation scam, the Municipal Energy Reform Program (MERP,) and Burisma got a big chunk of that too — meaning Joe and Hunter got their kickback share.
…
How do I know that? Because Jake Sullivan said so — only he didn’t think he’d be identified as the speaker outing the scam. But now he is. By me — because I was standing next to him. Here’s the link to the crime-ridden April 21st, 2014, Air Force Two background briefing given by Sullivan.
As I have previously indicated, Hunter Biden surreptitiously signed up to be a highly paid board member of Burisma Holdings three days earlier on April 18th with Joe’s knowledge and guidance.
That means Joe Biden knowingly diverting substantial U.S. assistance to a company which was at the time paying his son to sit on its board — which is why I say without hesitation: Joe Biden is a criminal.
And Jake Sullivan is too. His crime is conveying that information to the press, which makes him a co-conspirator for covering for Joe’s knowledge of Hunter’s business with Burisma then and ever since.
…
(There’re two instances of ellipses in the quote above. They mark places where I omitted McCormick’s insistence that President Barack Obama was also criminally involved. The Moderate Democrat is not ready to climb aboard that bandwagon.)
So what does this recent news and opinion mean for the 2024 Democratic nominations for president and vice president?
It means that Joe Biden is unpopular with the voters and with his own party. We need to nominate a team that offers more chops and more credibility. The Biden-Harris unpopularity is going to be thrown back into their faces. Just hear the coming attack: “Americans don’t trust Joe Biden. Heck, not even Democrats want them in 2024!”
It means Biden is going to be smothered with his own foreign policy woes — Ukraine aside, and even that may whither if the spring offensive in the Donbas against Russia goes bust. Don’t forget: China. Border. Afghanistan. Maybe Ukraine.
It means Biden today — despite much reporting — has not begun to hear his opposition, or a federal court in Delaware, attack his credibility as a law-abiding citizen. Hunter’s laptop is explosive news.
Moreover, without a shred of support here, ill offer that Biden and Harris have walked too far left into the clutch of Democratic Progressives. You cannot run to the electoral sweet spot in the middle of the mainstream of U.S. voters from the far left — not any more than Trump or DeSantis can run to the mainstream center channel from the right.
The moderate middle does not have a champion team to vote for. The Moderate Democrat will continue to discuss why Democrats should wisely seek a new team to win in 2024. Or lose the election. It’s our choice.