On Friday in a column in the Washington Monthly, Lefty pundit, Bill Scher began the grieving process for his fellow Democrats with a fanciful piece, ‘Two Mistakes in 2021 That Led to Defeat in 2024.” It caught my attention because I view Joe Biden as the worst President of my lifetime, so to name only two of his biggest mistakes would have to be tough. Kind of like having to pick the worst two players on the 1962 Mets. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, the Mets lost 120 games that year.
The piece is written as if Scher believes that Joe Biden was a halfway decent President, (and the Mets were good that year). That is part of the denial. I have no doubt that in a hundred years from now Democrats will claim Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter were good Presidents. The reasoning will go something like this, Biden and Carter, kept us out of a nuclear war, save us from another great depression, and preserved the U.S. Constitution – with enough partisanship you can lower the achievement bar as much as you need to.
How bad of a President was Biden? So bad that he could not have possibly been re-elected, even if he were compos mentis. Hoover in 28 and Carter in 80 stood a better chance than Biden in 2024. For all the Democrats attacks on Trump’s disqualifying character, or their refrain that Trump was “a Convicted felon”, deep down they realized that Biden over his term had become unelectable. They looked at old Joe, they looked at the polls, they reviewed focus group findings, and they came to the only logical conclusion a rational person could make – there is no way this guy could beat a convicted felon.
So, what were the two mistakes that Scher picked? The two Biden mistakes. Was it the Afghanistan withdrawal. Remember, commander and chief Biden decided to pull out our soldiers before we pulled out our citizens and allies, and decided to give up Bagram Airforce base, which made the rest of the pullout more difficult, leaving our soldiers more vulnerable. In the process 13 US soldiers were killed. The handling of the pullout was a disgrace to our country and a great moral stain. It signaled to the world that Biden, and perhaps the US military was incompetent. Hard to imagine a worse foreign policy mistake. Harris claimed she was involved in the Afghanistan Withdrawal decision.
Oh, and shortly after that Putin invaded Ukraine. No doubt old Vlad was not impressed with Biden or Harris.
No, Scher didn’t include that. Well, did he pick Biden’s decision to undo Trump’s executive orders on the border, including remain in Mexico, a policy that kept millions of aliens out. Did he include Biden’s decision to grant mass parole to millions of illegals? Parole was once explained to me this way, imagine a foreign national is at the border and his appendix bursts, that person may be granted parole, and taken to a hospital. What Biden did was grant millions of aliens’ parole, as if they were all going through a medical emergency. But it is probably good that they didn’t have to go to a hospital because in many of the border states hospitals are already overrun by illegals.
No Schur didn’t mention those mistakes, as mistakes that hurt Harris’s chances.
Well, I have left you in suspense long enough.
Scher writes, “The first (big mistake) was to snub the offer from a Senate Republican group led by Susan Collins for a $600 billion bipartisan pandemic relief bill, in favor of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed on a party-line vote in March 2021 through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process.
Biden could have tried to split the difference. One Republican senator said in February 2021 that the Collins offer “wasn’t our end point,” and Biden said after the bill passed that he would have been open to a bipartisan deal as low as $1.2 trillion.”
Now two things about this paragraph. Clearly Scher lives inside the beltway, because I am willing to bet that in all the exit polls done on election day not one mentioned the American rescue act. Secondly, Scher is admitting that government spending is inflationary. By implication he believes that if the “Rescue plan” was smaller it would be less inflationary. And by going with the compromise Republicans would be politically compromised by the higher inflation as well. I am so glad Republicans didn’t fall for that trap. Therefore, by Scher’s own logic Biden is solely responsible for the high inflation.
What was Biden’s other big mistake according to Scher? He says that as the predicted inflation came Biden denied it, then called it temporary and transitory, then blamed Trump., but according to Scher he waited too long to blame Trump, “Biden could have raised a louder alarm in July or sooner, immediately blamed Trump and his mishandling of the pandemic for the underlying supply chain problems and pledged to move heaven and earth to contain price increases as fast as possible. But Trump’s name was not mentioned in the July speech, nor was any urgency conveyed.”.
He clearly believes that the high inflation (Bidenflation) sunk Harris. What about the fact that she was a bad candidate. She didn’t do any press conferences, and she claimed she couldn’t think of one thing that she would do differently than Biden and making it worse she admitted that she was involved in “all major decisions” by the administration.
Actually, that reminds me, possibly Biden’s biggest mistake which led to the defeat of Harris this year was a decision Biden made not in 2021 but n 2020. That is, he picked Harris.
Why did he pick her? Was there anything exceptional about her? Anything that cried out this person should be President? No, he picked her for one reason, well two, she was a black woman. That is, she checked two boxes for Democrats, what about the competency box? Democrats have no such box to check.
Of all the mistakes Biden made, not going with a Senator Susie Collins backed hundred-billion-dollar plus spending package is trivial. As far as Biden not blaming Trump for inflation early enough, give him credit. He refrained from calling Trump’s supporters garbage until most people had already voted.
