Is Maureen Dowd a slow learner – only now discovering Joe Biden is not who he pretends to be -- or has the liberal media suddenly been given a green light to criticize the president? Are Democrat leaders conspiring to push him out as scandal envelopes the White House and the president’s approval ratings drop to levels not seen since Jimmy Carter?
New York Times columnist Dowd caused something of a commotion over the weekend by criticizing Joe Biden, a rare event for the Left-leaning press.
In a piece titled "It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President," Dowd berated the president, correctly, for ignoring his seventh grandchild, Navy Joan Roberts, born to Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts. She (and her Republican sister Peggy, apparently a fan of the president) are shocked that Biden, a self-declared family man, would be so unkind to Hunter’s out-of-wedlock daughter.
Dowd writes: "Joe Biden’s mantra has always been that "’the absolute most important thing is your family.’ It is the heart of his political narrative." She excoriates him for "scarring" little Navy’s life, by refusing to acknowledge her.
Joe Biden the dedicated family man? Did they miss all those videos of Biden getting handsy with young girls and sniffing their hair? Or Ashley Biden’s diary, in which she wonders whether she was sexually abused and opines that showering with her dad was "probably not appropriate?" Did they honestly think that was normal?
The Dowd sisters have finally cottoned onto what millions figured out long ago: Joe Biden is a fraud. The president’s big flashy smile and corny language have conned voters for years, but Americans are figuring out that the president is not at all who he pretends to be.
For example, he is not the genial, grandfatherly fellow he pretends to be. On Monday, Axios published a scathing piece titled "Old Yeller," about Biden’s bad temper, "rages" and "moodiness," including his copious use of vulgar language.
The author writes: "The private eruptions paint a more complicated picture of Biden as a manager and president than his carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle who loves Aviator sunglasses and ice cream." Actually, not complicated at all – merely disagreeable.
More fundamentally, please remember the core promises of his 2020 campaign: that he would govern as a political moderate and work to bring the nation together. He tossed those pledges out the window the minute he occupied the Oval Office.
To win the 2020 election, he did a deal with then-rival Bernie Sanders, more or less adopting the progressive senator’s agenda in return for his followers’ votes.
The Biden-Sanders agenda spawned the $4.6 trillion tsunami of new spending that awakened the inflation bear and has caused middle-class real incomes to drop for 26 straight months. Joe Biden was not a tag-along; he began drinking the progressive Kool-aid even before the votes were cast, as NPR reported, "talking more and more about a presidency that approaches Franklin Delano Roosevelt's, with bold progressive ambitions."
Joe Biden has also from day one in the Oval Office worked ceaselessly, and purposefully, to divide the country, delivering blistering attacks on Republicans and unleashing the hounds of the Justice Department to squash dissenting parents and observant Catholics.
Biden promised to return decency and honesty to the White House. With transvestites baring their bosoms on the South Lawn, cocaine appearing in the West Wing and, worse, scandal enveloping the president, we can agree that pledge has been broken, too. Biden is accused, credibly, of taking bribes and receiving payoffs from foreign companies while serving as vice president; the majority of voters now think these charges are true.
Instead of responding to these horrifying allegations, the president brushes aside the mounting evidence of apparent wrong-doing as "malarkey" or, worse, challenges the press by asking "Where’s the money?"
Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma and the country's former Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine, claims to have forked over millions in bribes to Hunter and Joe Biden; he says the money went into so many shell corporations "it will take ten years" to trace; my guess – we’ll get there eventually."
When he took the oath of office, more Americans thought Joe Biden was honest than disagreed, by a margin of seven points; that advantage has disappeared. Biden’s overall approval ratings, according to 538, are underwater by 14 points, worse than any president at this point in his term going back to the Truman era, but for Jimmy Carter.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER
So, Maureen Dowd and her sister are either late to the party or the attack on Biden is purposeful. Increasingly, journalists on the Left are daring to question whether Biden should run again; several have gently suggested his age is an issue even as they pretend that up until now he has been a terrific president. (Note: terrific presidents do not typically earn historically-dreadful approval ratings.)
Foreign policy guru Eliot Cohen published a piece in the Atlantic in recent days, thanking Biden for having prevented Donald Trump for occupying the White House for another four years but also writing "The president has no business running for president at his age."
In a fawning interview over the weekend, CNN’s Fareed Zacharia flattered the president before asking about Biden’s "hardened supporters" who think "the next thing [you] should do is step aside and let another generation of Democrats take the baton."
This seems like a sea change. Up until now, it was only Republicans who noted the president’s declining mental acuity and questioned whether the obviously challenged president should run for another four years.
The change could have been triggered by this: the Real Clear Politics average of polls shows Joe Biden losing to Donald Trump in 2024, a possibility Democrats cannot tolerate. Unless Biden enjoys a major reversal of fortune, look for more defectors, and more attacks from former allies. They cannot afford to wait too long; nobody wants Kamala Harris to be their candidate.
