An “impaired” president and his wife

Since President Joe Biden‘s debate against Donald Trump on June 27, there has been a media feeding frenzy about Biden’s “performance” on TV. First, that kind of framing turns the position of president into something superficial, and leads to having actors and reality TV hosts vault to the top of voter preferences. No wonder Trump got himself elected once.

Fortunately, in the current presidential election, we have actual experience from history indicating that Joe Biden, who is not only the incumbent president but also the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, is once again the best choice to beat Trump again. That experience can be boiled down here to five lessons from history. The first three such lessons  were mentioned in our post from a few days ago, and we can simply repeat them here:

Moreover, changing presidential nominees — or worse yet, presidents — in the middle of an election is a prescription for disaster. In March 1968, for example, with the country in turmoil over the Vietnam War and amid harsh criticism from Democrats, incumbent President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. The result was Republican President Richard Nixon. Likewise, in 1972, a lack of vetting of the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Thomas Eagleton, led to surprise revelations about his mental health. After a tumultuous period, Eagleton was forced off the ticket and hastily replaced. The result was a massive Republican landslide, and the re-election of Republican President Richard Nixon. Then in 1980, Sen. Ted Kennedy launched a vicious primary challenge to incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter. The Democrats lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in another landslide. While the mainstream media may love political instability, American voters do not.

These three lessons can be considered cautionary tales, i.e., reasons not to dump incumbent President Joe Biden just four months before the election. Biden was subject to primaries during the first half of this year, and obviously, that would have been the time to challenge his fitness to serve another term. President Biden won those primaries, and more than enough delegates to capture the Democratic presidential nomination, easily.

Joe and Dr. Jill Biden: a return to decency

The stunning results of this week’s Super Tuesday Democratic presidential primaries indicate that Democratic voters don’t want a revolution. Nor do they want socialism. They don’t want to praise Fidel Castro and his oppressive regime in Cuba. Rather, in voting for Joe Biden in much greater numbers than expected, the voters largely repudiated both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

The red flags for Bernie Sanders were all over the place on Super Tuesday. In Sanders’ home state of Vermont, he only garnered 50.7 percent of the vote. That’s a massive downturn from the 86.1 percent he received in the 2016 Vermont Democratic presidential primary. Sanders also lost next-door Massachusetts to Biden, with only 26.7 percent of the votes compared to 48.7 percent in 2016. Likewise, Sanders lost the Minnesota primary to Biden, a state that Sanders won by over 20 points when it held its caucus in 2016. In fact, Sanders drew a smaller share of voters in all of the Super Tuesday states this year, compared to 2016. Whatever “revolution” he has touted which would supposedly bring out masses of new voters for him simply has not materialized.