Biden Had A Letter Written...

Joe Biden has sent a letter to congressional Democrats. "I want you to know," writes an unnamed Biden underling in his name, "that despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump." He wants to tell the legislators of his own party "clearly and unequivocally" that "I wouldn't be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024."

This is the spokesman for the Biden whose approval rating went into majority-disapproval only a few months into his regime and has stayed there.

It's the Biden who has, in an unbroken line, been losing to Trump--to Donald Trump--in the head-to-head polling averages since mid-September.

It's the Biden who has been losing nearly every swing state since last Fall and every one of them since December. Recently-leaked polling from OpenLabs, a shady Dem firm that polls for Biden's main super PAC, showed Biden not only losing across all 7 of the major swing states but also in states that he comfortably won in 2020 (including Virginia, New Mexico and New Hampshire), while other states he won are now in play for the Republicans.[1]

Supermajorities of his own party said, for years, they didn't want him to run again, didn't want the party to renominate him.[2] The same is true for even larger supermajorites of Americans.

For over a year, supermajorities of Americans have also said Biden is too old--by which they mean too cognitively impaired--to run for reelection, too old to serve another term. For something over a year, supermajorities of Biden's own party's voters said the same.[3] In fact, a supermajority of Biden's own 2020 voters say he's "just too old" to be an effective president. Only 34% of voters even believe Biden could complete a 2nd term, if reelected.

Biden has been polling at sub-Jimmy Carter levels since last year. He's in far worse shape, insofar as his standing with the public is concerned, than any first-term president at this point in his administration in the history of polling--the most disliked president in 7 decades. Every incumbent in that history who ran for reelection on comparably low numbers--although all had better numbers than Biden's--lost. Hillary Clinton, who wasn't an incumbent, had numbers significantly superior to Biden at this point in 2016 and lost.

Biden's letter-writer is insisting that Biden, this historically-unpopular candidate, who is also regarded as too impaired to even hold the office he has, is going to pull off an upset that no president in history has ever managed. If Biden had written that and sincerely believed it, it would only be a question of whether he was too stupid, too cognitively impaired or too much of both to be president.

The really obscene part comes when the letter-writer tries to wrap his boss in the flag of democracy:

"We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,000 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.

"This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.

"Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?

"I decline to do that. I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year. It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters--and the voters alone--decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party? I cannot do that. I will not do that."

As the letter-writer knows, whenever an incumbent president decides to run for reelection, the party apparatus closes ranks around him, and that's exactly what happened in this cycle. With a large majority of Dems saying they wanted to see primary challenges to Biden, Biden and the DNC literally would not allow any meaningful primary contest to occur, and none did. In order to advantage himself (and future conservative "Democratic" candidates), Biden insisted the DNC rearrange its primary schedule to make South Carolina--a double-digit Republican state that hasn't voted Democratic in nearly 5 decades--the first Democratic contest (it was the first state Biden won in the 2020 primaries after embarrassingly losing the first 3). With 8 in 10 Dems saying they wanted to see Dem primary debates in 2024, the Democratic party said "it will support Biden's reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates." And didn't. The DNC and the Democratic parties of all 50 states and Washington DC integrated with Biden For President from the beginning of the campaign.[4] The Democratic parties of both Florida and Delaware engineered the cancellation of their states' primaries, simply giving all of those states' delegates to Biden, while in North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Alaska and Mississippi, only Biden was allowed on the ballot. This automatically gifted Biden with 569 delegates--nearly 30% of the 1,975 delegates needed to win--before a single vote was cast; Biden only needed to take 41% of the remaining delegates from the other states to win; any competitor would have had to win 60% of the remaining delegates to beat him.

In such circumstances, no ambitious politician is going to launch a pre-doomed challenge to a sitting president, and none did. With only 3rd-stringers with no name-recognition as opposition, Biden went on to "victory," the one his writer tries to make sound like an accomplishment, running, in effect, unopposed in no-turnout "primaries," drawing only 14 million votes--significantly less than even the 19 million he did back in 2020 when he had 20 name-brand opponents splitting the vote between them.

This is the process Biden's letter-writer describes as "open to anyone who wanted to run," the one he's treating as if it's worthy of those saccharine bromides of sacred reverence toward democracy. "[W]e are standing up for American democracy," says the mouthpiece for the president who insisted on launching a destructive, democracy-ending reelection campaign when most of his own party had made clear they didn't want him to run again and hadn't for ages. It's the process by which Biden's writer is now claiming a democratic mandate for his candidacy. Here's some more on what protectors of democracy Biden and the Dems have been under his watch--among other things, spending millions of dollars to try to keep competitors off the ballots.

Biden's letter-writer doesn't have any use for democratic dialogue on how to move forward either, if it involves questioning the wisdom of making his employer the Democratic nominee:

"The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now. And it's time for it to end... Any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It is time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump."

Biden's problem is that Americans are already pretty unified on one point: they don't want Biden running for president.

--j.

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[1] Illustrating the extent to which Biden is a drag on Democratic candidates (and threatens to swamp the party), Biden is trailing--usually quite badly--the Dem Senate candidates in all 5 swing-states holding Senate races this year.

[2] Democrats have softened on this in some of the more recent polling, with only about half or sometimes just under that saying they don't want Biden back. But given the longterm nature of their opinion on this, it would be foolish to read that as growing approval of Biden's candidacy. It seems, rather, more like voters acquiescing to what many of them must feel as the inevitable after they've had a candidate they did not want rammed down their throats--a recipe for resentment, indifference and low Dem turnout.

[3] Coming to this conclusion later than most Americans, more recent polling show Dems softening on this too but the same dynamic as outlined in footnote #2 applies here too.

[4] In a Sept. 2023 interview with ABC News, Jaime Harrison, the corporate lobbyist Biden placed in charge of the Democratic National Committee, made the position of the DNC clear.

"[Biden has] said that the job is not done, that he, Kamala Harris and Democrats in the House and Senate still have more work to do, and we're gonna do everything that we can to make sure that they get that opportunity to do that work and finish the job."

ABC's Linsey Davis noted that a supermajority of Democrats didn't want their party to run Biden again and repeatedly tried, in vain, to get Harrison to address the fact that Democratic voters wanted a competitive primary process, rather than a coronation. Harrison wouldn't budge: "As it relates to the primary, listen, we are following the tradition; never have we had a debate during, when we've had an incumbent president... and so we're not starting in 2024 under my tenure as DNC chair."