With the latest polls showing Joe Biden increasing his lead over his rivals for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, even new evidence of his negative baggage is failing to shrink his advantage.
According to Real Clear Politics, which averaged the four latest opinion polls of Democrat voters, Biden’s lead is now nearly 20 points ahead of his nearest rival, socialist Bernie Sanders. Capturing support from more than 38 percent of those polled, Biden is leaving his competition in the dust. Sanders scored just 18 percent, while every other announced candidate remains way behind, in the single digits.
Revelations that Biden successfully pushed for a Ukrainian prosecutor to be relieved of his position because he was investigating corruption in a company whose board included his son, Hunter, seemed to have no effect on Biden’s widening lead over his rivals.
That Hunter was discharged from the Navy after testing positive for cocaine in 2014 and left further evidence of drug use in 2016 has either been forgotten or is being ignored by Biden’s rivals and the compliant/complacent media.
That the launch attending his official announcement for the presidency over the weekend was poorly attended doesn’t seem to matter either. The 6,000 people who showed up in Philadelphia on Saturday were less than a third of those who welcomed Kamala Harris’s campaign launch in January. It was half the number of those who attended Bernie Sanders’ launch in February, and a full 3,000 people fewer than those who attended Amy Klobuchar’s kickoff two months ago.
During his kickoff, Biden promised his supporters that “no one’s going to work harder, no one’s going to campaign longer to win your support.” But then he disappeared from sight, taking a few days off apparently to bask in his lead. As Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote in the liberal Atlantic magazine, “Biden’s competitors might be keeping more punishing agendas that he is, trying to convince as many voters as possible that they, and only they, can beat Trump. But none of them yet have the poll numbers to show that their way is working better than Biden’s.”
Longtime Democrat campaign strategist Joe Trippi agrees. Trippi told Reuters that more than a dozen of Biden’s opponents have come to him for advice on how to slow his runaway train. Trippi said, “I’ve told every one of them that Joe Biden is going to be more formidable that they thought, and it was going to be tough for anyone to emerge from this field.”
His lead is widening despite attacks from the New York Times which questioned his electability. Wrote liberal feminist Jill Filipovic, “It’s white women … who are the most promising swing voters for Democrats in 2020 … [and that] it is women of color who are the backbone of the Democratic Party”, adding that “women are more electable than men are — especially … with Democrats.” But she added that she is baffled over Biden’s poll numbers as he is “an older white man tightly associated with sexual harassment and racism.” She reminded her readers that “a white male Democrat has not won the White House in more than 20 years [and] a white male Democrat has not won a majority of American voters since at least the 1970s.” (While Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 and 1996, he didn’t actually win a simple majority of votes, since third-party candidate Ross Perot received 18.9 percent and 8.4 percent of the votes, respectively, in those two elections.)
Biden’s lead is widening despite his long history of lying. His first wife and one of his children were killed in a car accident more than 40 years ago by a drunk driver, according to Biden. In a speech in 2007 he retold the story, blaming their deaths on a drunk driver. But Curtis Dunn, the man driving the truck that broadsided Mrs. Biden’s vehicle, was never charged with drunk driving, and investigators concluded that Biden’s wife pulled into the intersection without seeing Dunn’s truck heading toward her.
Biden lied again about his academic record while in law school. He claimed that he had gone “to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship.” He claimed further that he “ended up in the top half” of his graduating class, graduating “with three degrees.”
Not one of these claims is true. He earned two degrees — one in history and the other in science — at the University of Delaware where he graduated 506th in a class of 688. He attended law school on a half scholarship that wasn’t based on academic achievement, but on financial need. And when he finally graduated, he was 76th in a class of 85. Biden explained his lies: “I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”
His lead hasn’t been slowed in the slightest with his support of the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest labor union, which gives him a 91 percent rating. Nor has it been hurt by his belief that global warming is real and is caused by industrial and automotive emissions.
Nor has it been fazed by his stance on abortion, despite being a Roman Catholic. He voted against a bill that would have attached criminal penalties to the killing or injuring of a fetus while carrying out a violent crime on a pregnant woman. He voted against parental notification laws and against punishing those who transport minors across state lines to get an abortion. Five separate times Biden voted against bills that would prohibit the ghastly procedure known as partial-birth abortion.
He no doubt has been applauded for receiving an “F” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) for his consistent anti-gun record while a senator. He also voted in favor of eliminating protection from gun makers against frivolous and financially damaging lawsuits.
His lead was probably enhanced by his vote in favor of continuing to send federal funds to sanctuary cities and his vote against photo ID laws, calling them evidence of “hatred” and “zealotry.” His support for open borders has earned him an eight-percent rating from the U.S. Border Control lobby.
His lead wasn’t damaged in the slightest with his continual call for higher taxes on the wealthy, nor was it affected by his role as a key player in ending the confirmation of Reagan appointee Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He also sought to derail the nominations of other conservative nominees such as Clarence Thomas, William Rehnquist, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.
Nor was his lead negatively impacted by his atrocious voting record while serving as a U.S. senator from Delaware from 1972 to 2008. The Freedom Index published by the John Birch Society revealed that during his tenure he voted against the Constitution more than four times out of five, giving him a lifetime Freedom Index rating of 18 out of 100.
If “80 percent of life is just showing up,” as Woody Allen put it, then for President Trump that just might be enough for him to end Biden’s campaign, based as it is on positions most Americans oppose.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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