Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Joe Biden: most memorable comeback in history?

If the 2020 presidential election plays out as I hope it will — and I will not take my preferred outcome for granted — then we are going to witness a truly historic political event.

We are going to witness what I believe could be the most astonishing political comeback in U.S. history.

Joe Biden will be nominated soon by the Democratic Party to take on Donald Trump, the Republican incumbent president of the United States. The winds are blowing briskly at Biden’s back … at the moment. I pray they will carry him to victory, enabling him to repair the damage Trump has brought to our republic.

How in the world did Biden get to this place?

He was elected to the Senate in 1972; then his wife and daughter died in a horrific auto accident. Young Joe Biden thought about quitting, as he had two young sons — both of whom were injured badly in that wreck, but who suddenly were without their mother. His Senate colleagues talked him into staying.

He sought the 1988 nomination. He was proud of bellowing about his working-class background. Oops! Wait! It turned out he was lifting comments, almost verbatim, from a British politician, Neil Kinnock, who came from similar hardscrabble beginnings. Biden was caught copying those remarks. He dropped out, embarrassed and possibly ashamed of himself.

Two decades later, he ran again for president. He got thumped in the early primaries by a young Illinois senator, a fellow named Barack Hussein Obama. Biden called it quits in the 2008 campaign. Obama then won the nomination, but before that he tapped Biden on the shoulder and asked him to join him on what the two of them would call “an incredible journey.” The Obama-Biden ticket won that race and served two successful terms at the top of the political chain of command.

Now comes 2020. Biden decides to run again for president. He gets shellacked in the early primaries. Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t go well … at all! He would bide his time. Biden waited for a key endorsement from a South Carolina political godfather, U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Clyburn gave Biden a ringing endorsement. Biden won the South Carolina primary. He then won practically every other primary after that.

The man whose campaign was thought to be on life support then turned into a raging juggernaut.

He now stands on the precipice of becoming elected to the nation’s highest office. His entry into the Senate was nearly doomed by tragedy; his first run for president got derailed by the candidate’s own rhetorical carelessness; his second presidential run was steamrolled by a charismatic young pol; and his third presidential campaign needed a key endorsement by a leading African-American politician to get new life.

Do you get my point? Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been left for political dead more times than he cares to recall. I suggest that even if he loses to Trump, his comeback still will look impressive.

A victory, though, would put this working-class hero in a league all to himself.

national news

‘130 million to zero’? If only …

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A Facebook friend — a gentleman I don’t know well, but likely will get to know better — put out a message that I found refreshing.

He wonders why the next presidential election won’t produce a vote result of “130 million to zero.” That would be with Joe Biden getting every ballot cast this coming November, with Donald Trump getting none of them. My friend estimates a nationwide turnout of 130 million votes being cast.

Man, that is a serious pipe dream, but as I survey the wreckage that Donald Trump has brought to the presidency, it does astound me that there could be any Trumpkin who voted for the carnival barker/con man in 2016 would stay with him this time around.

Of course they will. No one believes Joe Biden can pitch a shutout, although many of us — even those of us who live in Trump Country — certainly wish he could.

I keep seeing the polls that tell us Biden is leading Trump. Fox News has just published a survey that gives Biden a 12-percentage point lead over Trump. That lead likely won’t hold up, because the “smart money” suggests a close contest is on the horizon.

What does boggle my noodle, though, is how Trump continues to maintain the level of support he does. It stands at about 42 percent, give or take a point or two. How in the name of political incompetence can this guy continue to hold onto that support?

I wonder about all this recognizing fully — and acknowledge with all the candor I can muster — that I was terribly wrong about the outcome of the 2016 election. I was among those who believed Hillary Clinton would win. I wrote on this blog that I thought she’d win big.

What I must point out, though, is that public opinion polling that put Clinton up by 3 percent over Trump turned out to be correct. Trump, though, pulled what they call an “inside straight” by pilfering enough Electoral College votes to win the election. Therein lies the greatest threat to Joe Biden’s bid to oust the incompetent nincompoop who continues to demonstrate every single day that he presents an existential threat to the nation he governs.

130 million to zero? I wish.

national news

Wanting to banish 2020 … be gone!

I am not one to wish away entire years.

Usually I take them as they come, slogging through the events as they transpire. I then wait for the ball to drop in Times Square and welcome the new year.

This year is vastly different. 2020 has been a serious downer, as in uber serious, man.

Right around the first month of the year we began getting word that some folks in China had been stricken by something called a “coronavirus.” Then … just like that it became a pandemic.

Donald John Trump, the “very stable genius” who runs the executive branch of our government, blew it off. It’ll disappear like a miracle, he said. Fifteen cases and — poof! — it’ll be gone. Well, it hasn’t just vanished. It has killed more than 115,000 Americans. Many more will die. The economy shut down, sending us into a recession. Trump resisted the seriousness of it. Then it dawned on him: Hey, we’d better do something; I mean, I’ve got a re-election campaign to run and those jobless numbers won’t look good as I campaign for another term.

And then came George Floyd’s death. The Minneapolis cops killed him after arresting him for trying to pass a counterfeit bill — allegedly. His death has ignited a firestorm of protest and recrimination. It’s still blazing out of control.

I want the year to end. First things first, though. We have this election coming up. I want Trump to be defeated by Joe Biden. I want POTUS gone from the White House. My preference would be that he escorted by the cops, maybe even the Marines who guard the White House.

I do have a serious concern about that election. It is that the coronavirus pandemic is going to frighten folks, keep them from voting. That plays in Trump’s wheelhouse. He proclaims a phony belief in “rampant voter fraud” if we vote by mail, which is his way of covering his a** against a big turnout that would boot his sorry backside out of office.

States should enact policies that enable voters to cast their ballots in a safe and secure manner. Texas isn’t likely to be one of them, as we are governed by Trumpkin Republicans who are faithful more to the man than to the Constitution they all swore to protect.

We’ll get through it. I just want the election to turn out the way I prefer. The rest of the year? I want it gone.

State news

Is there a landslide in the making?

I am not predicting anything, but I do want to share an idle thought that crossed my mind on this sweltering North Texas day.

I have seen a number of reputable public opinion polls that say the same thing: Joe Biden is well within striking distance of Donald Trump among Texans in the 2020 presidential election. A couple of these surveys have the former VP at a percentage point or perhaps two behind Trump. That is a statistical dead heat, a tie, it’s anyone’s race to win.

So … here’s the deal. If Joe Biden picks off Texas, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat since 1976 when Jimmy Carter defeated President  Gerald Ford, then we’re looking at a serious landslide victory for Joseph Biden Jr.

Biden’s strategy? Campaign hard in Texas and he must remind Texans that Donald Trump is a pathological liar who doesn’t give a rat’s a** about them.

Just thinking — and hoping — out loud. Be cool, man.

national news

Biden wonders: Will Trump go quietly?

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has offered an opinion on a subject that has been in the back of minds of many millions of Americans.

Indeed some of us, such as this blogger, have questioned openly whether Donald J. “Psychopath in Chief” Trump would leave office quietly and with dignity were he to lose the November election.

At issue is how Donald Trump would accept the election results if he loses the presidency to Biden. I have wondered aloud about whether Trump would accept the results or whether he would challenge them as “rigged” or “phony.”

Biden, in an interview with late-night comic Trevor Noah, has given additional voice to the notion that Trump might not go quietly.

I am in no position to predict that Trump would resist the results. However, I am willing to declare that nothing would surprise me when it involves Donald Trump. I didn’t hear Biden actually predict a Trump resistance to leaving office; instead I thought I heard Biden suggest that he wouldn’t be surprised, either, if Trump tries some funny business in seeking to cling to power.

Donald Trump has a history of making absurd, unfounded and ignorant claims of voter fraud and corruption. He said in 2016 that millions of voters cast ballots illegally for Hillary Clinton; Trump never produced a shred of truth to it. He has hollered about the threat of voter fraud if Americans are allowed to cast their ballots by mail this year, again with no evidence to back up his specious and dubious assertions.

Now he is facing the distinct possibility — and it’s by no means certain — that he will lose his re-election effort. The man who could defeat him, Joe Biden, is suggesting that Trump’s thirst for power and dominance might not allow him to follow a tradition that began with the election of John Adams in 1796, when the nation’s second president took over from the first president, George Washington.

President Adams established the norm of “peaceful transition of power” that has worked well ever since. Then again, Donald Trump took office in 2017 pledging to be an “unconventional” president. How far he takes his unconventional tenure might become evident if he ends up losing the next presidential election.

national news

Apologize for poll? Seriously, Mr. POTUS

Knock it off, Mr. President.

Your demand that CNN retract and apologize for a public opinion poll that puts you 14 points behind Joe Biden is ridiculous on its face.

It’s also a bald-faced, hardly veiled ploy to fire up your shrinking base of supporters who just cannot accept your failure to lead in the wake of the COVID pandemic and your ghastly response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

CNN says it stands by its polling. Your damn right it does. It certainly should stand by it. Your childish claim that CNN’s polling is faulty deserves to be laughed out of any room where it is brought up.

Let’s get real, Donald. You very well might lose your re-election bid. Sure, I get that you pulled your chestnuts out of the fire at the last minute in 2016 and surprised everyone on Earth by defeating Hillary Clinton. I suspect you surprised even yourself, as it has been reported over the years that you were so sure you’d lose that you hadn’t done any pre-transition planning prior to declaring victory on Election Night 2016.

Well, that was then.

I doubt the former VP is going to get sucked into the trap that swallowed up Hillary four years ago.

As for the polling, you’d better just live with it, accept the grim numbers and seek to turn them more in your favor.

Oh, and just for the record … I hope you fail in that effort. I will do my part to ensure you get drummed out of the office you had no business winning in the first place.

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We vote in secret for a good reason

I guess it’s almost becoming a sort of parlor game.

We are watching and waiting for key Republicans to throw Donald Trump under the bus while declaring their intention to vote for Joe Biden this fall in the presidential election.

It’s futile, folks.

One of those Republicans, former President Bush, has said a recent New York Times story proclaiming he wouldn’t support his fellow Republican, Trump, is “totally made up.” He won’t engage in the political debate, but a spokesman for Bush said the former president hasn’t told anyone how he intends to vote this fall.

That is as it should be.

Colin Powell said he is voting for Biden. Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee for president, is likely to cast Trump aside. It’s being reported that Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, is going to support her good friend Joe Biden in the fall.

So what? Does any of this matter? I say “no!” … with emphasis.

My hope is that when conscientious Republicans — be they officeholders or just plain folks — cast their ballots that they vote their conscience. Were I one of them I would be hard-pressed to vote for someone — even if we share the same party affiliation — who has denigrated the highest office in the land the way this clown has done.

And so, whether these public pronouncements — or denials of reported pronouncements — mean anything remains to be scene.

It does produce some tittering among the gossipers out there.

The founders got it so very right when they said we could vote in the privacy of a polling booth. No one has to know anything about the choices we make on Election Day. It’s a good way to protect citizens against political pressure or coercion.

We’ll keep playing the parlor game, though, for the next several months as the election draws near. It’s good to keep this in mind: Politicians have every right to change their mind once they walk into the polling booth.

Let’s not, then, place too much stock on what they say this far out.

national news

Tempting to put faith in polls, however …

It is so tempting for those of us who want Donald Trump to get his head handed to him at the ballot box this November to place faith in all those polls showing him trailing Joe Biden by double digits.

Then again, these polls only serve to remind us of a painful truth about Trump, which is that he might be the luckiest — even with his utter incompetence and unfitness — politician in U.S. history.

I am forced to remind myself that Hillary Rodham Clinton also held big leads against Trump in the early summer of 2016. She enjoyed the backing of every major newspaper in the country. Pundits across the board predicted not just a Clinton win, but a possible landslide win at that!

Then it happened. Trump committed an act of proverbial political thievery by capturing three swing states that had voted twice for Barack Obama: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He won all three by a combined vote of 77,000 ballots and with them earned enough Electoral College votes to be elected president of the United States.

So, as tempting as it is to believe that Trump is in trouble politically in 2020 as he seeks re-election, I must reel in my enthusiasm.

I want Joe Biden to win this election. He wasn’t my first choice among Democrats. My initial hope was that the party would find a “sleeper,” a new voice among the huge field to back for the nomination. It didn’t pan out.

The former VP is now the presumptive nominee. He is beginning to clear his throat and is speaking with clarity and conviction about why we need to evict Trump and his cabal from the People’s House.

Circumstances have handed Biden some tailor-made issues on which to run: the pandemic, and George Floyd’s tragic death have produced hideous responses from Donald Trump. The economy has flat-lined as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. Trump has failed miserably to rise to the level of leader. He is unable or unwilling to assume the role of Consoler in Chief. He has become instead the Numbskull in Chief with his idiotic posturing on the pandemic and then on how he favors unleashing “thousands of heavily armed” active-duty military personnel to put down peaceful protests against police brutality.

None of that guarantees a Joe Biden victory. Indeed, the former vice president has to pay attention to the political landscape and avoid giving away an election as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

The polling data looks promising. However, it is far too early in this game to get excited about what it is telling us.

national news

Biden faces biggest decision of his political career

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)

There’s no way on Earth to overstate the importance of Joe Biden’s pending decision on who to select as a vice-presidential running mate in his campaign against Donald John Trump and Mike Pence.

When given the opportunity to speak of Biden, former President Barack Obama says often that his selection of Biden as VP in 2008 was the “best decision” he ever made as president.

So it will be for the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee in 2020.

Biden has pledged to select a woman to run with him. That wipes out roughly 50 percent of all the qualified individuals from whom he can select. The remaining field of VP candidates, though, is a rich one indeed.

Here is where it might get a bit sticky for the former vice president: He has this crisis involving the death of an African-American man at the hands of police officers who roughed him up, then suffocated him on a Minneapolis street. There is pressure building on Biden to select an African-American woman to run with him.

Make no mistake at all, the field — even if Biden is narrowing his choices even more — remains packed with talent, with accomplished individuals who have stellar public service records.

I will not get into trying to name the possible VP candidates Biden should consider. I would forget someone. I won’t go there.

However, it is no small task facing the former vice president — who President Obama has called the “best vice president we’ve ever had.” Whether he is the best ever or whether Obama was just saying so to brag about his executive appointment skills, what matters now is whether Joe Biden can find someone who will enhance his chances of defeating Donald Trump.

More critically, though, he must find someone who is able to serve as president of the United States. I mean, let’s stare reality in the face: Biden will be 78 years of age in November of this year; he has suffered some potentially serious health issues in the past.

Joe Biden has to hit this pitch out of the park.

national news

Get ready for the worst ever

I am steeling myself for what I expect to be the most disgusting, disgraceful, disheartening campaign in history for the U.S. presidency.

Joe Biden is waiting in the wings to take on Donald Trump.

If only I could harbor a glimmer of hope that somehow these two men will be able to discuss issues, debate them intelligently and leave it to voters such as you and me to decide who between them is the better fit for the presidency.

If only …

That won’t happen. Donald Trump will not allow it. He wants to drag this campaign into the sewer, which is where he tossed his moral compass long, long ago.

The coronavirus pandemic is worthy of campaign discussion. Namely the president’s shameful initial response to it and, indeed, his ongoing fecklessness in dealing with it. Joe Biden can make the case that he would have handled it differently. He’ll try to make the argument. Trump will deflect it and turn it all toward something else … likely a tirade about “Sleepy Joe.”

Well, I cannot begin to list the myriad ways that the Boor in Chief will turn this campaign into a mud fest. He showed us his chops in 2016 when he hammered Hillary Clinton into submission. Yes, he lost the “popular vote,” but won the presidency because he won enough Electoral College votes. That was the preliminary to the main event that is about to unfold.

I am not looking forward to this bloodbath.

You will hear it again on this blog, but I’ll say it once more right now: Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency.