Will Republicans really pick the one candidate Biden can beat?
Dan Hannan
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The Democrats have left the goal wide open. Almost anyone could defeat President Joe Biden, whose physical and mental decline can no longer be hidden from the public.
Almost anyone.
BIDEN AND MCCARTHY BUMP HEADS ON THE CEILING
Yet, with a kind of hideous slow-motion inevitability, the Republicans seem determined to pick the one candidate that we know Biden can beat. We can say that definitively, for it is a matter of observed fact rather than conjecture.
It is agonizing for friends of the United States to watch the two parties, in the grip of their weird internal dynamics, plumping for candidates whom they know in their souls to be unsuitable.
Biden’s problem is not his age per se. Winston Churchill was 65 when he formed his first ministry in 1940. The problem is that Biden is visibly deteriorating, shuffling limply, mumbling incoherently, often forgetting where he is. In this sense, he is more like Churchill during his second ministry, formed in 1951 when the great man was 76 and sinking into senility.
Even committed Democrats can see it. “Questions will persist about his age until he does more to assure voters that he is up to the job,” said the New York Times just before the announcement, the closest that paper could realistically get to telling him to back off. “If he runs again, Mr. Biden will need to provide explicit reassurance to voters; many of them have seen family members decline rapidly in their 80s.”
Churchill, at least, had an heir apparent: the clever and handsome Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Biden, by contrast, is saddled with his 2020 diversity hire, Kamala Harris. If that sounds ungallant, I can only point out that this is what Biden himself effectively called her, first promising to pick a female running mate and then boasting that he had chosen from among “four black women.”
Given that Biden would be 82 at his inauguration and 86 at the end of his term, it is not unreasonable to wonder how America would fare under a leader who, this time without the excuse of senescence, muddles North and South Korea and deals with difficult questions by retreating into a bizarre cackling laugh. Seventy percent of voters don’t want her.
All the Republicans need to do is avoid egregious errors. Any candidate who can get onto a stage without tripping over and finish his speech without dropping his pants should win. Any campaign that offers the basics — strong defense, free enterprise, and constitutional government — should triumph.
Instead, as the dog returneth to its vomit, the GOP is groping toward a third Trump run. Never mind Trump’s many character failings: his neediness, his treachery toward friends, his babyish lies. Never mind his insistence, before both the 2016 and 2020 runs, that the only way he could lose would be through fraud, something that alone is enough to disqualify him from serious contention.
Consider, instead, a more basic problem. He is a loser. The Republican base seems to have developed a kind of false collective memory of the 2016 election. As the results came in, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, declared “306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic.” In fact, as well as losing the popular vote, Trump turned out to have been a drag on the ticket, being outpolled by most Republican senatorial and gubernatorial candidates.
The same was true in 2020 when, as in 2016, he was up against an exceptionally weak Democrat. Trump then went on more or less single-handedly to lose the Senate by making the Georgia runoff all about himself. In last year’s midterm elections, the candidates who insisted that the 2020 election had been stolen were noticeably less successful than other Republicans.
Do GOP primary voters truly not get this? Have they convinced themselves that all those elections were rigged? Or do they not care? Perhaps voting for Trump is more declaratory than functional. Perhaps they are attracted by precisely the qualities that, in a healthy political system, should be repulsive: the lies, the insults, the courtroom drama, the conspiracy theories — in short, the showbiz.
Whatever the explanation, the effect is to cheapen American democracy and debase the republic itself. The greatest (or at least second-greatest) country in the world seems determined to settle on two of its least suitable citizens. A fabulist will take on a dotard, Falstaff against Lear. It is like watching Homer Simpson repeatedly electrocute himself as he grabs again and again at a beer can tangled in electric cables. How many more times can it happen before the system itself blows up?