Joe Biden Was Always Just A Stop Gap

Now we need a rousing inspirational fighter to defeat MAGA-Fascism

July 10, 2024

By Marc Cooper

Now that the residents of the Capitol Hill rest home have ambled and shuffled back from summer break, it seems like the Democrats just love the Emperor’s new coat, as a good friend of mine sharply noted.  It’s all good. Nothing to see here. Biden is a sharp as diamond drill bit.  And only he can beat Donald Trump.  And if he doesn’t, and Trump wins, it’s still all good for Joe because he will have given it his best.  If the country succumbs then to dictatorial rule, well, so it goes.  At least the mighty Democratic Party and its intrepid leader gave it their all.  And pay NO attention, please to Tuesday’s Benedixen poll that shows Kamala Harris beating Donald Trump by a point with Biden trailing by two. Media propaganda!!

The current fecklessness of top Democrats who said they were gonna switch out Biden last week but now apparently stand in adoration, gives us some good insight into why during all these years the Republicans could not stand up to Trump.  The Democrats are aping the GOP in refusing to tell Joe Biden what is dead obvious and what, in the end, will cost them their own jobs.

The current trend lines are all red and pointing down and the possibility of a Republican trifecta 4 months from now is just about an even money bet, or better.  The Democrats are not stupid. They are merely a collection of individuals who place their careers over the fate of the country.

If you are a ranking House or Senate member, you are an ambitious person with lots of plans for the future and you are too chickenshit to take what might be a correct stand but one unpopular with party nomenklatura who you just do not dare wish to alienate.

It’s an open secret that huge numbers of elected Dems, especially those running in current races, now see Biden as a net negative but do not have the cojones to make their objections public.

As has been noted before by me and hundreds of others, this election is not just between two old men but rather about the fate of democratic rule of law in the United States – a nice little and rather rare gadget in this world which threatens to break down in November.  Since Biden’s complete and total collapse during the debate and his abysmal follow up in the ABC interview, the fate of the US Senate is now much more volatile than a month ago. As is that of the entire nation.

 I don’t want to be a downer but my job is to tell the truth, not to amuse the DNC.  The one seat Senate majority the Democrats currently hold is in code red danger.  Manchin quit the party.  Red state Democratic Senators Tester and Brown are running uphill and against the odds for re-election.   Several blue states including New Mexico and New Hampshire are now in danger of falling to the MAGA-Fascists.  In turn, what quite recently was considered more or less a slam dunk for the Democrats to take back the House (currently with a 4 seat GOP majority) has also started to dim.  If Trump can win even a few previously “blue states” the House and the White House will be his.  So will the Senate.

For their part, the Maga-Fascist majority of the Supreme Court has already staged their D-Day and have established a solid pro-dictatorial beach head smack dab in the middle of our body politic.  While their ruling on absolute immunity has been given plenty of coverage, it has still been insufficient and has cheated the public of the very loud alarms that should be blaring ‘round the clock.  Like most, I am reticent to make too many comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis.  But I have zero problem saying that if Trump is elected and not if but when he takes advantage of the unbounded power bestowed upon him by the Vichy Court, history will put the SCOTUS decision into the same heinous category of the Enabling Act by the German Parliament after the Reichstag was burned. And if you don’t know what the Enabling Act is, I suggest you read up.

The combination of the court ruling and the looming Project 2025 to remake the US government are deadly god-damn serious.  Together they are the two principle ingredients for a presidential dictatorship and they are both already in the cupboard ready for concoction.

BIDEN AS ONLY A STOP GAP

I think this the proper moment to reveal my full spectrum of feelings regarding Joe Biden, his past, his present, his future.  Here’s the money sentence:  Biden was never a popular politician and has been mostly a useful stop gap. 

He made me grimace when, during the ABC interview, he made this race all about himself, about how he is going to feel, how he feels sure he can beat Trump. In fact, he says he is the only one.  I found Biden’s ABC performance to be absolutely rife with unfounded egotism and radical disassociation with reality.  Biden went into the debate losing; that’s why HE demanded the early debate.  He came out of the debate with less support than more. A complete backfire.  And he totally lost the respect he had earned from me over the last handful of years.

He is now so desperate that his rhetoric is attacking the “party elite” when, in fact, Joe Biden has always been the poster boy for the party elite.  That’s some irony!  Biden was always in the center-right, very moderate wing of the party, never dissenting from the Official Line. He performed abysmally during the Anita Hill hearings.  His 1988 presidential campaign advised by my departed and bat crazy friend Pat Caddell collapsed after Biden cadged a speech from a British labor leader.

In 2008, he ran for president against Obama, Edwards, Hillary Clinton et al.   I was up close and personal with him in the first primary that year, the Iowa Caucuses.  How did Joe do?  He came in FIFTH behind Bill Richardson and winning a total of 23 delegates (.09%) compared to the 940 picked up by Obama and the 744 and 737 by Clinton and Edwards respectively.

That sort of anemic result, and at that time in his late 60’s that should have been Biden’s political requiem, at least for anything more glorious than AMTRAK Senator Delaware and Credit Card Paradise (You might not be old enough, but before his rise to VP, Biden was routinely mocked as Senator Credit Card for the legislative favors he routinely performed for the myriad banks who based themselves in Delaware precisely for that reason.

After Iowa, Obama plucked Biden out of what would have been certain future obscurity to serve as ballast for those worried what a young black president might do if there were not an aged and experienced veteran white man at his side.  So Obama picked the rather lackluster Biden knowing he would be stolid but would not upstage him.  Biden improved his image with some of the Obama good vibes rubbing off on him, and he was sort of an innocuous curiosity, sort of a hep old guy with a big mouth but a decent heart.

Turned out, that Biden’s stint as VP did NOT win him that much renewed support. When the 2020 cycle opened, Biden’s initial showing was horrific.  He got his clock cleaned by Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Caucuses and the following week in the New Hampshire primary.  The party elite went into panic over the possibility of a Sanders nomination.  I don’t know, but I think if the party elders wouldn’t have lifted a finger for Biden he might have still eventually won the nomination; I’m no way sure Sanders would have had a national majority.

We will never know because with Biden in the shitter after New Hampshire, the party elite DID put its finger on the scale and in a coordinated effort almost all the other Dem candidates dropped out and threw their support to Biden in the third, upcoming, primary in South Carolina.  South Carolina’s Black congressman and total party hack Jim Clyburn took the lead to whip the state’s significant African-American population to line up behind Biden (which they probably would have in any case, but Clyburn sealed the deal).  Biden won. Sanders lost. And the party went with Biden in his quite Covid-truncated non-campaign.

Of course I supported Biden against Trump but with low expectations about what a Biden admin would bring. Like many others, I was incredibly delighted and very surprised to see Biden perform suddenly as a Center-Left pol, proposing and passing a bundle of progressive legislation that he correctly deemed necessary to offset the damage wrought by the pandemic.  He worked closely with liberals, progressives, even The Squad, to pass historic infrastructure and climate control legislation, along with a number of other improvements in the social insurance programs (“entitlements”).

This surprisingly progressive agenda period lasted for just about the first year of the Biden tenure.  His legislating then hit a brick wall when opposed not only by the entire Republican mass, and then blocked by reprobate Democratic Senators Sinema and Manchin who decided they were actually more comfortable working as stooges for big corporate interests.  Problem is, Biden pissed away another year embroiled in a deluded fantasy that his good old pals on the Republican side of the Senate were secretly for bi-partisanship and we needed not only to bring them along, but also needed to differentiate between “normal” Republicans and MAGA. LMAO.

There was never any elected Republican resistance to Trump and since he has become a convicted felon, the collection of imbeciles, liars, zealots, lost souls, mean motherfuckers. Trump pet poodles, xenophobes, racists, Christian Nationalists, militia sympathizers, various species of fascists  and even the berobed Trump lackeys on the Supreme Court are now solidly in his corner.  They are salivating over the real chance that come next November, thanks to SCOTUS and in tune with Project 2025, Trump can kick off his second term by turning the FBI into a partisan political police, and can federalize the National Guard of blue states to use them in red states to round up illegals to populate the “mass camps” he vows to build.

Excuse me for bringing up this exotic thought, but I think the time has come for the Democratic nominee to AGGRESSIVELY prosecute the political case against Trump and the very real and imminent threat of dictatorial rule.  This has to be at full volume 24/7 from now till election day or you can forget about it.  If this is a referendum on Trump we win. On Biden? We get blown to smithereens. 

Now, do you really think Biden is making that inspirational, mobilizing prosecution of Trump? Because he isn’t.  Do you really think he’s going to start magically doing so? I don’t. He’s already blown two weeks since the debate debacle appearing unscripted before the public for a grand total of 32 minutes. AYFKM?

I understand the sympathy for Biden.  I understand a certain degree of loyalty and deference.  But like Donald Trump, Joe Biden is not a King.  He is not a great American icon, say, on the level of Lincoln or FDR.  He’s been a pretty good president.  But he was a stop gap in 2008 and again in 2020.  We don’t a need a stop gap this time around.  And being somebody who is mentally fit, who is not fading, who is comfortable in complicated responses, by the way, are not sufficient qualities this time around.  We need a candidate who can rouse people to their feet, who can energize them, who can lead them into direct confrontation and battle with the rising MAGA/Fascist forces. We need somebody with at least a third of the political skills of a Barack Obama and right now Joe is running at about 10%.

His debate blow up is a golden opportunity. Losing political campaigns rarely, if ever, get a chance to completely reboot once the campaign started. They know they are losing and they know they are going to get whacked but there is nothing to change the course.   How many political consultants and losing candidates out there wish they had had the opportunity to change candidates when they could?

Three-fourths of voters say Biden is too old for president. A full half of Democratic voters want him to leave.  Does that give you confidence??

We owe Joe Biden a thank you for whipping Trump in 2020 and for his worthy accomplishments.  But that’s it. We do not owe him the future of the United States under a MAGA dictatorship. ++

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