President Biden muddles along
Hugo Gurdon
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Our president’s fumbling public appearances have become so painful and his inadequacies so obvious that Hillary Clinton, at least, doesn’t bother to pretend his great old age is irrelevant as the 2024 election accelerates.
Speaking to the Financial Times, the 2016 presidential runner-up said, “His age is an issue, and people have the right to consider it.”
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Clinton mouthed platitudes about Biden having a good record and not getting enough credit, but she wanted to inflict pain, so she phrased her comments as non-endorsement endorsements. She was one of those who “think he is determined to run,” which is a long way away from saying she thinks he should run.
Then she shoved a shiv between his ribs, saying she hoped “he stays focused and able to compete in the election because he can be elected…” Look how loaded with venom these words are. Clinton deftly raises the subject of Biden’s weaknesses in a way that allows her to claim nearly plausibly that she’s dismissing them.
Saying he needs to “focus” alludes to what he repeatedly fails to do. She doesn’t say she expects him to remain focused or is confident he’ll remain focused, only that she “hopes” he will. She also “hopes” he’ll be “able to compete.” The word “able” alludes to its opposite — to being unable, incapable, and incompetent.
She doesn’t say she is confident he will be reelected or deserves to be, only that he “can” be. It’s a possibility. This is as far from being a statement of resounding and ringing support as anything can be, short of open opposition.
Clinton stands out because she is willing to wound her party’s champion. But that doesn’t mean other Democrats disagree with her. All that has changed since Obama’s guru David Axelrod said Biden’s age was a liability exactly a year ago is that midterm success persuaded Democrats to rally around the president rather than try to displace him with a younger, better nominee.
Biden’s latest cringe-inducing bloopers suggest he has given up all hope of merely bending the truth rather than breaking it. He is now all-in with fabrications and a contemptuous hope that too few voters will notice it to matter.
Speaking in Japan during the G-7 meeting, Biden twice claimed he was able to “balance the budget.” The fact is that he will run deficits of over a trillion dollars every year he sits in the Oval Office, including if he wins a second term.
Even if one sets aside specific data published by the White House, it is plain that Biden is incapable of governing his instinct for falsehood, let alone of governing the country. If he’d balanced the budget, as he claims, why does he think he is begging Congress to raise the debt ceiling?
Day in and day out, he invokes the looming disaster of the United States welching on its debts. What does he think he is discussing if it is not the fact that the budget is grossly unbalanced? Deficit spending, with outlays far higher than receipts, is what creates debt and requires the administration’s legal borrowing authority to be raised from its current $31.4 trillion.
When Biden is sitting across a negotiating table from Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), trying to reach a deal to get past this crisis, is the cause of the crisis a mystery to him? Just how baffled is our leader? It is disturbing to have a president so gaga over the cascading outflow of greenbacks.
Whoever is pulling Biden’s strings in the White House evidently worries about their boss’s mental lapses. The puppeteers try to minimize his public appearances and usually manage to give him a simple text to follow. He was almost back on script Tuesday when he explained why he is, at this late stage, suddenly demanding that Republicans accept tax increases to fix the budget that he claimed only days ago that he had already fixed.
“We need to cut spending,” he said, “but here’s the disagreement: I think we should be looking at tax loopholes and making sure the wealthy [pay] their fair share.”
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The words “making the wealthy pay their fair share” showed that Biden’s leash had been yanked, and he was back again deploying the most over-used phrase in the Democratic lexicon. But even here, the president surely made his handlers and the wider Left grind their teeth. Was he supposed to admit that spending needed to be cut? Republicans will play the tape again and again.
A gaffe is, notoriously, when a pol accidentally tells the truth. It is refreshing to hear it, especially from a president whose fault is usually the opposite, blundering into four-alarm falsehoods.