Poll: Wide Agreement That Joe Biden Is "Too Old to be Effective in a Second Term"

How about the first one?

Americans actually agree on something in this time of raw discord: Joe Biden is too old to be an effective president in a second term....

In the poll, fully 77% said Biden is too old to be effective for four more years. Not only do 89% of Republicans say that, so do 69% of Democrats. That view is held across age groups, not just by young people, though older Democrats specifically are more supportive of his 2024 bid.

In contrast, about half of U.S. adults say Trump is too old for the office, and here the familiar partisan divide emerges -- Democrats are far more likely to disqualify Trump by age than are Republicans.

Via Jazz Shaw. He linked this absurd rant by Joe Scarborough insisting that all the liberal newspapers in the bluest state in the nation gave Biden "glowing" reviews during his brief pause in his vacation, and these aren't "Democrat operatives" saying it, it's just "newspaper" "reporters" who are above partisan leanings. He also insisted that the 80-year-old Biden hadn't nodded off into sleep when he clearly nodded off into sleep.

Last week, Washington Post leftist Ruth Marcus said that if Biden can't run, it will open the Pandora's Box of racial infighting in the Democrat Party.

There are problems with Joe Biden's candidacy. There are many Democrats behind the scenes and a few publicly who talk about his age, who talk about other problems with his candidacy. But let's be serious. I'm old enough to remember -- I'm sorry to say, I'm old enough to remember 1980 and what happened in the Democratic Party when it was riven by division.

And if somebody were to emerge and challenge Joe Biden at this stage in the campaign, him having decided to run, his vice president, who, if he didn't -- if he somehow chose not to run, if she were not the nominee, that would create some divisions within the demographics of the party

Biden promised, IIRC, Jim Clyburn that he would nominate a black woman for Vice President in exchange for Clyburn's support. That support won Joe Biden South Carolina, after he'd lost in Iowa and New Hampshire, and won him the nomination. If Joe Biden doesn't run or can't run, and the Democrats choose not to Position Kamala Harris for Success in taking the nomination, then black Democrats will feel that they've been taken for a ride.

Of course, they can't nominate Kamala Harris; she's a walking Superfund Site of Incompetence.

This is the only reason Democrats want to keep this Old Fuck as the nominee: as a cork bottling up the lacerating racial hatreds of the Democrat Party. It's not that Biden has some special ability to play racial healer, it's just that when he's at the top of the ticket, simple inertia keeps people from squabbling over the racial spoils of who should get to run for president. Without Biden, there is no inertia keeping everything in place, and everything gets very chippy.

Or at least that's the theory. I'm not sure about that. Kamala Harris has shown herself to be so charmless and witness even black nationalists must grasp her utter unsuitability as a candidate. And black voters have repeatedly demonstrated a high degree of pragmatism in voting based on electability, not race, at least as far as Democrat primary contestants. Black voters famously supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama for a long while, thinking that she was a potent candidate and he was a closeted downlow-brother n00b. (History would show they were wrong on the first point but right on the second.) They also supported the ailing idiot Joe Biden as being the "most electable" Democrat.

So would blacks demand that the incompetent, graceless Kamala Harris be the nominee? She's not even fully black. No one likes her, including black Democrats.

So I don't see the threat of the Biden stopper coming off the racial grievance jug as very dangerous for the Democrats. If Biden doesn't run, I think they'll quickly rally around Gavin Newsom.

Via David Strom.

posted by Ace at 01:50 PM

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