The president’s last ditch attempts to woo the Left follow a career pattern of terrible political decision making
Source - Daily Telegraph 18/07/24
When Ernest Hemingway wrote that bankruptcy happens in two ways – “gradually then suddenly” – he can hardly have foreseen that 98 years later, his words would neatly describe the decline of the Democratic leadership of America.
Joe Biden has Covid. This latest indignity comes after a woeful period that started with the toe-curling presidential debate, progressed through the “vice president Trump” and “President Putin” gaffes, and ended with the attempted assassination of his rival, which may have succeeded only in killing Biden’s campaign. On top of all this, even more influential democrats – including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, a close ally of Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries, the party’s top representative in the House – have lined up to pressure him to step down.
Is Biden’s precarious pyramid of power on the verge of collapse? It is starting to look inevitable. If his evident mental and physical decline turns out to be the “suddenly”, the erratic policy platforms over which he has presided have been making themselves felt “gradually” for years.
Take, for example, Iran. Biden’s strategy towards one of the world’s most dangerous regimes has been teeth-grindingly incompetent. Even before he was elected in 2020 – when his advanced age was not yet such a convincing excuse – he made the inexplicable move of telegraphing to the Iranians his desperation to re-enter Obama’s JCPOA deal in an article on the CNN website.
“The good news is there remains a better way,” he wrote. “A Biden administration will make it a priority to set Iran policy right.” After years of labouring under Donald Trump’s painful “maximum pressure” policy, the Ayatollah must have thought his prayers had been answered. Frankly, he wasn’t wrong.
There followed years of what can only be described as appeasement of Chamberlainian proportions. The Iranians strung out fruitless negotiations while pushing ahead with their development of a bomb. Biden’s response? To launch a shadowy programme of turning a blind eye to his own sanctions regime, in the hope that this would make the enemy love him. By last year, the Iranians were exporting over a million barrels of oil daily, a historic high, and had $16 billion of unfrozen funds in their coffers. But they still didn’t seem to love Biden.
Then there was his policy towards Israel, which has been characterised by public displays of confusion and frustration, serving no purpose other than emboldening the enemy. After an admirable start, sending two aircraft carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean, Biden veered between pledging “ironclad” support for the Jewish state and parroting Hamas propaganda about civilian death tolls.
The debacle of the arms supplies – in which his administration threatened to withhold weapons, then did so, then U-turned on the move, then got dragged into a public spat with Benjamin Netanyahu – seemed designed to send a message of incompetence around the world. If there is an opposite of deterrence, this was it.
The underlying tendency has been the same. Weakness. Biden has been pulled hither and thither by the radical wing of his party, Arab American votes in the swing state of Michigan, Gaza protests on campus and the Iranian regime, as the juggernaut of the Trump campaign bears down upon him.
This week, he has been planning wholesale reform of the Supreme Court, involving term limits, an enforceable code of ethics and restrictions on legal immunity for presidents. This is all very well, but it would be a dramatic volte face; Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, rejected these ideas when they were pushed by the liberal wing of his party during the 2020 presidential race. Moreover, this belated attempt to woo the Left would almost certainly fall flat in reality, as it would require congressional approval.
But this confusion is eclipsed by his bizarre proposal to introduce price controls on rent. During a speech at the Nato summit in Washington, he outlined plans to cap rental increases at five per cent annually, which would – quite obviously – warp the market and create economic chaos, as has been the case whenever price controls have been introduced anywhere in the world throughout history.
As the President languishes with Covid, he may have time for reflection. The collapse now seems a certainty. It is only a matter of time. And with the threat of Trump in the ascendance, it looks equally certain that – gradually or suddenly – Biden will take the Democratic party down with him.
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