If you’re a professional sports player or manager or ever just had a private sector job where appeasing the boss was vital to maintaining your position (and when is that not important?), you’re no doubt familiar with the concept of “receiving a vote of confidence”.
Such a “vote” typically involves the powers-that-be issuing a companywide memo to the rank-and-file employees – or a general statement to the press – expressing confidence in such-and-such’s ability to do his (or her) job and letting it be widely known that said person’s head isn’t on the proverbial chopping block -- and that there’s no danger he or she will be replaced in the near term.
By saying so, the team owner, chairman of the board or company president opens up a proverbial can of worms by getting everyone gossiping and talking about how the poor soul in question’s position may be in danger. “If that weren’t the case, why would [the owner/boss/decisionmaker] have even bothered saying something in the first place? Sure, his/her performance has been a little off lately, but that’s no reason to call into question his/her competence and staying power?”
Politicians aren’t usually subject to such high-level scrutiny, primarily because they aren’t really accountable to anyone but the voters who, statistics show, only turn out incumbents at a pathetically low rate. This lack of worry and anxiety among most politicians is the primary reason why America faces a leadership crisis of epic proportions in 2024.
So when incumbent senile president Joe Biden turned in his cringeworthy debate “performance” last Thursday night, the commentary class for both parties speculated that there would be a mass call for the obviously faltering Delawarean to do the right thing and walk away from the Democrat presidential nomination that he’d won fair and square during the primary nominating process and instead leave an open lane for a new face who could perhaps fare better against the hated Donald Trump.
In its place, Biden received what amounted to a weak vote of confidence from senators in his party’s upper chamber delegation. Are Democrat senators really that dumb? In an article titled “Senate Democrats circle wagons around Biden”, Alexander Bolton reported at The Hill earlier this week:
“Senate Democrats are President Biden’s bulwark in the Democratic Party and are sticking with him firmly, despite his disastrous debate performance in Atlanta. Senate Democrats believe Biden, even with his shaky performance, is a stronger general election candidate than Vice President Harris, who would have a good shot at the nomination if Biden withdraws from the race.
“And Democratic senators have privately acknowledged for months that there’s no way to replace Biden on the ticket unless the president himself agrees to step down. He’s built up a massive lead in pledged delegates who are obligated to support him at the convention in Chicago. Democratic lawmakers worry that even if Biden were to drop his reelection campaign, the battle to replace him as the party’s nominee would be a messy affair and only divide their party, hurting them in the general election…
“Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, signaled [the day after the debate] that Senate Democrats will stand by Biden as long as he decides to stay in the race, and that it would be up to him alone whether to continue his bid for a second term...Asked about Biden stepping aside, Reed said: ‘That’s the president’s decision.’”
Sounds like rock-solid support and confidence in senile Joe, doesn’t it? If I didn’t know better and the identities of some of these Democrat senators wasn’t included for quotation purposes, I would’ve thought that Bolton was using warmed-over recycled words from Republican establishment senators regarding Donald Trump in late 2016. When you say, “we’re behind him 100 percent” in one breath and conclude with “it’s up to him on whether to get out” in the next, it sounds a little funny.
Kind of like a transparent, substance-less vote of confidence?
The very public post-debate vote of confidence that prominent Democrat senators handed out reaffirmed, once again, that they know nothing about the concerns of average working people or job creators who care about leadership bona fides as well as issue positions rather than trusting that a cantankerous, corrupted, lying, memory challenged swamp creature like Joe Biden could limp past the reelection threshold in November. Then, presumably, raise his right hand to take the oath of office next year.
Everyone knows that presidential administrations are made up of thousands of people tasked with administering laws and following-up on policy dictates from the White House. The buck stops at the top, at least when there’s a thinking person with a beating heart and functioning brain behind the Resolute Desk. For Democrats to be so brazen as to swear allegiance to Biden (vote of confidence?) after all that’s happened since the hair sniffin’, nude swimmin’, prodigal son protectin’ corrupt-o-crat assumed office… well, it doesn’t say much for the spine strength of Democrats.
Heck, even the editorial staff of the New York Times called for Biden to leave. How much softer and obtuse can you get than that?
But Democrats don’t give a hoot about effective governance, especially when it comes to considering the alternative – which is any Republican, but especially Donald J. Trump. Many conservatives still harbor doubts about Trump’s ability/willingness to keep his damaging, politically life-sucking statements in check, but they don’t doubt for a moment that Trump’s policy chops are intact.
And that’s all that matters.
Bolton’s report does contain the anonymous views of a few House Democrats who, like many in the “real” universe, see no viable path for Biden to win reelection after he flopped so badly in front of the world. These truth-tellers wouldn’t find shelter in Hakeem Jeffries’s or Nancy Pelosi’s offices, however, but at least there are some Democrats out there who acknowledge the writing on the wall.
(Note: For the record, a handful of House Democrats emerged this week to say that Biden should get out for the good of the party – mostly a vote of no confidence!)
Either that, or they’re merely engaging in their own form of butt-covering self-preservation, figuring that the Biden fish rots at the head and the body will be the next to go putrid when judgment day comes calling for them in November. Democrats know full well that there are serious down-ballot considerations from having Biden make a unilateral decision to remain in the race.
So they’ve got to say nice things about him in public. But what must they really think when the media’s microphones aren’t in their faces and Chucky Schumer isn’t monitoring their offices for quotes that may run contrary to the established party line?
If Democrats were being real, they’d cop to being as worried about the party’s future as the leftist commentariat class and some House Democrats have admitted to being. But again, there’s very little choice for senators to try and pull together to salvage the Biden candidacy. They’re correct in saying that senile Joe won’t be pushed aside by anyone but himself. They may be “super delegates” at next month’s nominating convention, too, but under the rules, pledged delegates are bound to vote for Biden on the first vote.
Imagine pledged delegates bucking the party elders and going rogue on their own to favor someone else. It just isn’t going to happen. And even if there were pledged delegates entertaining the possibility of voting for an alternative to Biden, who would that Democrat be? Scott McKay at The American Spectator pointed out that the Obamas would never throw-in for California’s Gavin Newsom – because they can’t control him – so a movement with Newsom at the center would have to originate from somewhere else.
Such a “White Knight” replacement effort isn’t going to come from nowhere. And isn’t it strange that the Republican party’s Never Trump contingent predicted that it would be Trump, not Biden, who would be the subject of replacement rumors if the party’s voters chose the 45th president for another go ‘round this year? Didn’t Karl Rove say, over and over again, that Trump’s championing of the January 6 political prisoners was a losing proposition?
2024 hasn’t turned out like the bluebloods planned, which leaves them only with substance-less votes of confidence and defending the defenseless for Joe Biden. Democrat senators would never admit it, but they’re kicking themselves for ever allowing the ruse that Biden was “with it” and “sharp” to ever get far before it was too late.
There’s also another aspect at play here. By the tone of the senators quoted in Bolton’s article, it’s clear that liberals are counting on the flakey nature of American Democrat-type voters to give Biden another chance and save them from having to toil under Donald Trump again. Democrats seem to believe that abortion and championing “LGBTQ rights” will rouse enough young leftists to put down their campus protest signs and rally, again, to Biden’s side.
With public opinion surveys showing senile Joe Biden losing the confidence of some traditionally Democrat constituencies – young voters, African-American men, Hispanics, etc. – they’ll rely all the more on the remaining strong Democrat backers, primarily single women. That’s one reason why Democrats are hitting the abortion issue so hard and attempting to paint Trump as extreme.
Expect senate Democrats to heavily criticize the most recent end-of-term Supreme Court decisions because they believe it opens the justices – and Trump – up to smears of “extremism” on cultural issues. If all liberalism is based on a lie, which it is, Democrats will need to paint conservatives as villains and broken-down Joe as a hero.
The fact is, Joe Biden could’ve sustained an all-out brain freeze a week ago and Democrats still would’ve defended him. Beside the fact that Democrats only care about power, they don’t have anyone at the ready to step in for senile Joe. And there’s an element of the party that still believes Biden is the most electable of them all – that there’s enough magic left in that deteriorating bloviating hulk for one more win.
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