The question isn’t just whether Joe Biden, who announced his candidacy for president yesterday, can defeat Donald Trump. It isn’t even whether he can win the nomination — an increasingly doubtful proposition in a party that is openly hostile to white men.
The question is whether Biden can overcome his past. His nickname is Creepy Joe because he has a bad habit of grabbing, hugging, and kissing any woman who gets within arm’s length.
But the Biden résumé also includes plagiarism, a fight against forced busing (a position liberals in the Democrat Party would take issue with), silly racial gaffes that would have ended the career of any Republican, and what the hard Left and sisterhood claim is his betrayal of sex-harassment hoaxer Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.
Nonetheless, Biden is in. The polling shows he is the heavy favorite among rank-and-file Democratic voters, but again, the radicals who control the party might stymie his third try for the White House.
Mendacious Video
Biden didn’t bother contesting or challenging President Trump’s foreign, economic, or other policies in his opening video. Instead, he adopted the Left’s usual tactic: name-calling. Albeit without name-calling.
Biden opened with a few words about Thomas Jefferson and Charlottesville, Virginia, then segued into the unfortunate race riot in Charlottesville in 2017.
“Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years,” Biden intoned. “It was there on August of 2017 we saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open, their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, and bearing the fangs of racism. Chanting the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s. And they were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued and a brave young woman lost her life.”
Then Biden said the president’s remarks on the riot “stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation. He said there were ‘some very fine people on both sides.’ Very fine people on both sides?”
Trump also said “we condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” but ignoring that, Biden claimed the president “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”
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Those remarks, Biden said, were an afflatus. “I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation. Well, that’s even more true today. We are in the battle for the soul of this nation.”
If Trump is reelected, Biden said, “he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation — who we are — and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Thus, Biden is running. To save us from Trump.
Biden’s Past
Awaiting this moment were moderate Democrats who fear a repeat of 1972, when Democrats went off the deep end, nominated hard-left George McGovern, and handed Nixon the presidency.
Problem is, moderate Democrats don’t control the party. Radicals do, which is why Biden’s most disqualifying attribute might be his sex and race. The New York Times frankly asked whether a white man could “be the face of the Democratic Party in 2020,” an explicit recognition that the party is, as columnist Pat Buchanan wrote, “no party for old white men.”
That said, as The New American has reported, the Real Clear Politics polling average shows that Biden holds a comfortable lead over his closest rival, communist apologist Bernie Sanders, and a commanding lead over the rest of the field.
The latest voter polls from RCP put Biden over Sanders, 29.3 percent to 23 percent. Harris sits at 8.3, 21 points behind, followed by media darling Pete Buttigieg at 7.5 percent, the leftist media’s only hope they’ll be reporting about a homosexual and his “husband” in the White House.
But that’s the RCP average. A Morning Consult poll conducted among nearly 15,000 registered voters from April 15 through 21 showed Biden ahead of Sanders 30-24, with the rest no closer than Buttigieg at nine, a whopping 21 points behind Biden and 15 behind socialist Sanders.
A Monmouth University poll of 330 registered voters 10 days ago showed Biden ahead of Sanders, 27-20, with Harris and Buttigieg at eight percent.
Photo: AP Images