In just less than nineteen months, we will know whether Joe Biden, our octogenarian Commander-In-Chief, will have endured yet another election campaign in his more than half-century political career, and retained his current job as President of the United States. The record-setting number of ballots he received in the plague year of 2020, campaigning to modest crowds sitting in socially-distanced circles, or in cars in a parking lot, are in the past.
(photo illustration by yours truly)
He’s the incumbent, claiming credit for full employment as a result of letting the economy reopen after the disastrous lockdowns urged by public health authorities and politicians, and enforced by governors with a controlling zeal to determine who was “essential” and would be allowed to work. He pledged to “shut down the virus, not the country,” and that he had a plan for combatting the pandemic. It seems so long ago that he was condemning President Trump’s response, and saying that being responsible for 220,000 deaths from COVID made him unfit to remain President.
The current graph of weekly COVID deaths as reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looks like this.1
(Graph via Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center)
The Biden plan, whatever it was, seems to have not “shut down the virus,” despite the wide availability of COVID vaccines developed in the Trump Administration, and the widespread use of coercive mandates to enforce compliance. Politically, COVID policy seems to be a “wash” for whatever candidate wants to use it to attack his opponent. To the extent that the vaccines helped reduce COVID deaths2, Biden would be claiming credit for the weapons that President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” provided. And given his 2020 campaign rhetoric, Joe Biden probably doesn’t want to draw any attention to his COVID policies, and their results. His media allies’ succeeded to a degree in burying the story, but with the recent announcement by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that he’ll be running for the Democratic Party nomination, some criticism of Biden’s results as a COVID fighter is probably inevitable. Whether or not the official figures overcount COVID deaths is a matter of debate, but what is undeniable is that hundreds of thousands more Americans are reported to have died of the disease during the Biden Administration than the 220,000 that Biden blamed President Trump for while campaigning.
Economy
Unemployment, jumping more than ten percent between March and April 2020 to a high of 14.7% as COVID and pandemic lockdown policies took hold, has officially declined to 3.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and President Biden is happy to take credit.
Inflation, which Biden Administration Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notoriously predicted would be “transitory,” is instead stubborn, and supply chains remain sporadically disrupted for some items. For those who can afford a restaurant meal, the quality of service has in many instances not recovered to the level it was pre-pandemic. Food price inflation, one of the categories usually reported as “volatile” (along with energy prices), was up 9.5% in the previous 12 months ending in February 2023. Overall inflation is still officially around 6%.3
These things are all quality-of-life issues that voters experience directly, even if they pay little attention to the news. There are certainly other economic factors I could draw on, but shortages and high prices are not to be underestimated in Biden’s re-election calculus, especially when the psychology of the people who make up the economy is such important feedback to whether an election year recession is in the offing.
Censorship
The release of the Twitter Files following Elon Musk’s purchase of the microblogging social media platform has revealed a widespread constitutional tort against Americans’ First Amendment rights committed by the federal government via major tech companies, but unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that there’s much legal redress available for it. The permanent bureaucracy under both the Trump and Biden Administrations are reportedly responsible, but it appears to have intensified in the Biden Administration. As with COVID policy (to which it’s related), it’s an important issue, but it may appear to be kind of a “wash.” However, correct me if I’m wrong, but President Biden hasn’t even addressed it, which makes him appear culpable, particularly when one of the biggest censorship and disinformation efforts was over the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which played an important role in getting him elected in the first place.
Taxes
At an event February 28th in Virginia Beach, VA, President Biden previewed his budget priorities, saying “I want to make it clear— I’m going to raise some taxes.”
Undoubtedly, this clip is a gift to Republican ad makers, much as was the remark by then-challenger Walter Mondale in his 1984 acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination: “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." Raising taxes during a period of slowing growth and inflation and in the face of a possible impending recession doesn’t sound like an economic policy that makes any sense, but fortunately, the Biden Administration’s budget proposal was pronounced “dead on arrival” by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans. If President Biden wants to campaign for re-election on raising taxes, Republicans will no doubt welcome it.
Student debt
One of the central promises of Biden’s 2020 campaign, besides fighting COVID, was student debt forgiveness, a position favored by his 2020 primary challengers Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Lacking enough support in Congress for legislation, Biden chose to use unilateral executive action, which appears soon to run afoul of the “major questions doctrine” at the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to litigation led by Republican state attorneys general, among others. A holding that strikes down the plan this summer could prompt Biden to run against the Court —both on this issue, and last year’s Dobbs case that sent abortion regulation back to the states, overturning the 1972 Roe v. Wade decision, and could renew calls by leftist Democrats to “pack” the Court and undo the most enduring part of President Trump’s legacy that Biden has so far been unable to touch.
Cultural Revolution
The extremism of today’s Democrats on cultural issues has gone beyond late-term abortion, and been on full display with the Biden Administration’s vocal championing of gender ideology and “transgender” rights, along with other “sexual minorities.” Most prominently, transgender activists insist that the genetically male must be accepted as women, and Biden has appointed a few gender-benders to visible positions in the administration, including a cross-dressing “nonbinary drag queen” whose fetish for women’s apparel is apparently so strong that “they” allegedly stole the luggage of a Tanzanian fashion designer, among others, resulting in his termination in December. “Transgender” activists, such as the Biden Administration’s Rachel Levine, insist upon the availability of hormonal treatments for early adolescents, leading in some cases to surgical procedures. This, combined with educational efforts in schools and popular culture to normalize gender ideology and other sexual topics, has raised concerns among parents about inappropriate activism targeting minors, and “social contagion” driving psychologically vulnerable children to “identify” as “transgender.” Last month’s mass murder of six people (including three children) at a church-run Christian school in Nashville, TN by a 28-year-old woman police say identified as “transgender” appears to have been a “suicide-by-cop” and a likely terrorist attack.4 The killer’s reported “manifesto” has been turned over to the FBI, and the shooting is now being used by Democrats, including President Biden, to push for a revival of the federal “assault weapons” ban which expired in 2004.
Gun Control And Crime
President Biden’s advocacy for further gun control, while popular with some Democrats in the base, is probably even more of a politically losing issue with the general public today than it was in 1994. President Bill Clinton has attributed the Democrats’ historic loss of the House of Representatives in the wake of the “assault weapons” ban to it, though other factors, such as Newt Gingrich’s strategy to “nationalize” the congressional election with the Contract With America, and the failed push for “Hillarycare” were also important. The majority of U.S. states (26) have now legalized “constitutional carry,” decriminalizing carrying concealed weapons for lawful self-defense without a permit.5 And the hard-fought recognition of the Second Amendment at the U.S. Supreme Court as protecting a right of the people, consistent with the neighboring parts of the Bill of Rights, has changed the legal landscape, making outright bans likely to be overturned as unconstitutional. It suggests a weakness in needing to shore up his base for Biden to campaign on the issue.
Conservatives and Republican lawmakers have pointedly contrasted the Metro Nashville police’s forceful response to last month’s school shooting with that of Uvalde, TX law enforcement to the May 2022 attack on Robb Elementary, in which nineteen fourth grade students and two teachers were murdered as police stood by. Reinforcing school security, with armed school resource officers guarding against intruders, would be the best way to ensure that a would-be school shooter is deterred or stopped immediately, in the minutes it would inevitably take for police to arrive on the scene. In Uvalde, a town about fifty miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, “bailouts” of illegal aliens from crashed vehicles following police chases caused frequent school lockdowns, with the repeated false alarms believed to have contributed to the lax security at the school.
Border Security
U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics in the past two years show massive record-breaking increases in foreign nationals illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, some multiple times. In fiscal year 2022, the agency reported 2,378,944 “encounters,"6 a new record, exceeding the previous record of 1,734,686 which was set in fiscal 2021. Meanwhile, the Biden Adminstration is spending tens of millions of dollars to store border wall materials, rather than complete President Trump's signature project. Tons of deadly fentanyl opioid pills (and much larger quantities of methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana) are continually smuggled in. Such neglect of border security can only be purposeful.
Energy
Beholden to the environmental left, the Biden Administration almost immediately reversed President Trump’s policies which favored American energy production and energy security, ostensibly to make fossil fuels less available and affordable, in favor of “green” energy, in order to address the “climate crisis.”7 Gasoline prices, though down from their peak last summer, have increased markedly during the Biden Administration, and are, like overall inflation, a likely political liability.
To moderate the effect of their energy policies, the Biden Administration has also drawn down and sold off much of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in dramatic fashion.
This reserve was established in 1975 by the “Energy Policy and Conservation Act,” following the 1973 OPEC Oil Embargo, to help ensure that foreign suppliers could not so easily disrupt the nation’s economy again. The SPR is authorized to store up to a billion barrels of oil, but it has never reached that level. At current rates of use, ~18.7 million barrels/day, the oil available from the SPR would last about 20 days, as of January 2023. If replacing only the oil imported from OPEC, ~798,000 barrels/day, the oil available from the SPR would last ~1.25 years. Given the current global tensions, it seems foolish to be depleting the SPR, especially for mere political benefit. But this policy, too, seems calculated to weaken the United States.
Foreign Policy
Conventional political wisdom suggests that foreign policy is usually not a deciding factor in electoral politics, except in wartime. The ongoing war for the defense of Ukraine against Russia has been used somewhat unconvincingly by President Biden as an excuse for inflation (“Putin’s price hike”), but otherwise has not directly impacted Americans in the way U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan did. But Biden’s foreign policy failures are numerous, despite his being added to the Obama / Biden electoral ticket in part to provide foreign policy expertise the young Illinois Senator lacked. Former Obama administration defense secretary Robert Gates famously slammed Biden in his 2014 memoir as having “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” He’s continued that streak into his own presidency, with a catastrophically executed exit from Afghanistan, seeming to acquiesce to a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine, abject capitulation in an unsuccessful attempt to revive the “Iran nuclear deal,” ambiguously promising to “bring an end to” the Nordstream pipeline in response to a Russian invasion, Iran and Saudi Arabia (among others) expressing interest in joining the BRICS group dominated by China, North Korea resuming missile launches and overflying Japan, etc. Quite a contrast from the America First policies of the Trump Administration, and their historic efforts toward Arab-Israeli peace with the Abraham Accords, and with keeping North Korea quiescent.
President Trump has been positioning himself as a “peace candidate,” and calling for a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine-Russia war, in order to avoid a direct conflict with nuclear armed Russia —harkening back to the somewhat isolationist tendencies of the Republican Party in the post-WWI period. For Americans concerned with the expense of supporting Ukraine, and depletion of our own munitions stocks, the “peace” message could be appealing, though not decisive, unless the global situation deteriorates further.
Corruption
Though the story was suppressed prior to the 2020 election, the files contained in Hunter Biden’s abandoned “laptop from hell” are now effectively conceded as authentic. In a rather bizarre move, back on March 17, attorneys for Hunter Biden sued the owner of the Mac repair shop where he left his laptop in 2019 for invasion of privacy, while at the same time trying to avoid admitting that the data on it was his. At around the same time, on March 16, the House Oversight committee reported it had obtained bank records in response to congressional subpoena which revealed that Biden family members (and an as yet unnamed fourth Biden) had received a total of over a million dollars from an energy deal in China, which Joe Biden has denied. Prosecution or impeachment of Joe Biden is virtually impossible, but any evidence of influence peddling during and after Biden’s vice-presidency will continue to be exposed. The efforts of Democrat-aligned prosecutors to “dirty up” and indict his political rival seem calculated to even the playing field about what’s coming.
You Know The Thing
Finally, though the 2024 election is over a year away at this point, the rigors of an actual campaign for Biden, who is already showing frequent signs of mental and physical decline, could prompt his replacement on the ticket in favor of a younger Democrat. His 2020 “basement” campaign relied on infrequent and carefully controlled public appearances, and he had powerful help from tech companies, whose suppression of negative information will not be so complete this time. If, like Hillary Clinton, he were to collapse and be bundled into a van during the campaign, it would be much harder to dismiss. A similar risk exists for President Trump of course, but he is a few years younger, and that could make all the difference.
—end—
I’m sure my astute readers will notice that two of the three peaks of COVID mortality which are reported by the CDC to have occurred in the last two years are larger than the initial 2020 pandemic peak, and the third one nearly as large as the original. The absolute peak of weekly reported U.S. COVID deaths roughly coincides with the start of the Biden Administration, and as of this writing, 1,123,836 Americans are reported to have died of the disease since the start of the pandemic. The biggest peak is largely pre-vaccine, and arguably “inherited” from the Trump Administration, but the two others are all on Biden’s “watch.”
Reducing severity of illness seems to be the only claim left standing for the efficacy of the COVID vaccines, as the virus successfully evolved to evade vaccine-induced immunity and infect the vaccinated, even in individuals who received the recommended booster doses.
Using previous methodology, overall inflation could be near 10% or even higher.
The possible role of cross-sex “transition” hormones in contributing to the actions of one of America’s few female mass killers is uncertain, because it has not been publicly reported whether she had been treated with testosterone. It’s a well-known criminological fact that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by males. One of the few publically available clues that the murders were intended as a terrorist attack is the killer’s choice to wear a plain red baseball cap, evocative of a MAGA hat, during the rampage, creating the appearance on surveillance video and published still photos derived from it that the killer was a male Trump supporter.
Most recently, in the state of Florida, which led the nation in 1987 by adopting the first “shall issue” concealed-carry reform law, prompting anti-gun activists to condemn it as “The Gunshine State,” Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation last week making it the 26th “constitutional carry” state in the nation.
The difference between the media reported numbers and the CPB website’s numbers is presumably due to the CBP reporting “encounters” according to the govenrment’s October-through-September fiscal year, in contrast to the calendar year.