Doubt. Second guessing. Hindsight is 20/20. The morning after. Regret. Monday Morning Quarterbacking. Backseat driving. Waking up and realizing that Kamala Harris is your presidential nominee… and “Tampon Tim” Walz was her veep choice when Pennsylvania
governor Josh Shapiro’s name was still on your fantasy politician draft board.
No doubt, there are lots of times when we wish we could take something back. Nobody’s perfect. No matter how hard you try, there will be regrets. Depending on your golf group’s game rules, there very well may be do-overs during a match, but it’s not true in life and certainly not in politics.
Earlier this summer Democrats – or should I say, Democrat elites – decided they needed to replace their presidential nominee. Ancient and senile president Joe Biden had caused a stir when he completely bombed his presidential debate with Donald Trump. The Republican is only a few years younger, but Biden’s shaky performance and subsequent precipitous drop in opinion polls sent liberals into a panic.
They reacted in haste, figuring even if Biden were “convinced” to leave the race voluntarily that they’d need enough time to find a substitute to mount a credible campaign. Vice president cackling Kamala Harris was senile Joe’s convenient replacement of choice, so she had a leg-up on any potential fill-ins. Long after the primaries had concluded but before the party convention, the affirmative action hire suddenly made the most sense.
So Democrats seemingly forgot everything they’d learned about cackling Kamala in the past four years and tried cleaning her up and dressing her so as to appear to be the best thing since sliced bread. The ruse worked, for a while, but now with Harris’s prospects for winning the election apparently in the doldrums, some observers are speaking up, suggesting that maybe senile Joe Biden would have been the best alternative after all.
Regret is a bad thing in politics. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth. In an opinion column titled “What if Joe Biden was the better candidate all along?”, author Harlan Ullman wrote at The Hill last week:
“Trump is only three years younger than Biden. He is certainly not immune to the vagaries of health, as his vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) understands. But Biden is not running. And with the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Biden now has an opportunity to help conclude a peace agreement in the Middle East. That would be Biden’s legacy. One hopes he will pursue that opportunity.
“As I have previously written, Americans may not know the winner right away, given the likelihood of contested districts and recounts. Yet, when the 47th president is decided, at some stage, people may wonder whether the best choice was not Harris or Trump.
“In retrospect, perhaps America would have been better served if the 46th president Joe Biden won a second term.”
Not to get too far off point, but if there is a peace agreement forged in the Middle East, it will not have come from the guidance and wisdom of senile Joe Biden. Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was consummated through the brilliance and perseverance of its leader, Bibi Netanyahu, not because broken down senile Joe or feckless cackling Kamala had much to do with it.
If anything, the Democrats have been trying to pump the brakes on the Israelis to no avail, a circumstance that has Muslim Democrats actively running towards the Green Party’s Jill Stein – or Trump himself. Democrats bought themselves a truckload of trouble by turning their backs on their Jewish supporters and friends. You can’t appease everyone, something Democrats are learning in a very hard (for them) way.
And while Ullman’s should-have-kept-Biden point is well-taken, it’s extremely hard to fathom how Democrats would’ve been better off keeping senile Joe as their nominee. Yes, he’d earned their votes during this year’s party primary race, but his mental and cognitive shortcomings were plain for all to see then – and now. Senile Joe’s enjoyed a smidgen of a popularity resurgence of late but it’s mostly due to the fact he’s no longer in view and fickle Democrats who are wary of cackling Kamala are yearning for the old days when Biden’s purported electoral prowess was still in evidence.
Senile Joe was, at best, everyone’s second choice throughout his career. He only got the Democrat nomination in 2020 because Bernie Sanders was such a kook, and Barack Obama was term-limited out of eligibility. Obama wife Michelle didn’t want the responsibility of being president, so she opted out in order to free herself to vacation without hindrance.
Plus, Democrats realized far too late that it was impossible to hide cackling Kamala’s considerable shortcomings, starting with the fact she appears unable to even put two coherent sentences together without someone shouting “word salad, pass the dressing!” in her presence.
When they initially tapped Harris to fill-in for senile Joe, she looked like a potential winner. Over two decades younger, better looking (when all made up) and sporting a phony but pleasant smile, cackling Kamala was the logical choice. She was a woman! The party’s fervent single female, abortion-loving base would go nuts over her. So would everyone else, right?
But it didn’t work out that way.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is cackling Kamala regularly tells people she’s “been clear” on her positions, or that “the choice has never been clearer” on the history of certain matters, basically upending and insulting each voter’s sense of perception and common sense. Kind of like, if it’s obvious to every good Democrat, why are you so obtuse and don’t get it? Don’t you see how clear it is?
Donald Trump never says such a thing. He’d much rather restate his own position no matter how many times he’s already said it. That’s the way to clarify your views.
Harris has been insulting her own voters since she became the nominee a few months ago, and her boss, senile Joe Biden, has berated Americans for not seeing things the way he does, too. It’s not just Trump supporters, either, as if a regular citizen doesn’t get onboard with the way Democrats see the immigration crisis, they’re either not paying attention – or uninformed.
Watch an episode of “The View” and you’ll see what I mean. Each of the crows sitting around their table with the cameras rolling basically spouts opinions non-stop while ignoring the opposite point-of-view and belittling their adversaries for being stupid. Even the partisan conservative media, perhaps best embodied by Fox News’s evening advocacy show line-up, backs up their points-of-view with video clips. Democrats just expect people to go along with them, and when they don’t, they start insulting the viewers.
It was like that with their Harris-for-Biden switcheroo, too. Granted, Democrats were in a rush to find an alternative to Biden and they didn’t have excess time to waste. They didn’t consider that Biden may have made a comeback to his performance in the second debate and it may have marked the return of the Joe Biden who could lie effectively and flash anger whenever it was needed.
Or they might have just figured Trump would implode at some point. Democrat prosecutors were after him, and the ranks of the Never Trump Republicans hadn’t exactly shrunk. It had happened before (at least according to them). To Democrats, Biden nearly became a great president. It was Congress that prevented him from accomplishing what he’d set out to do.
Democrats were giddy when the 2022 Republican “wave” election didn’t materialize – and there were many, many chuckles and guffaws as the new House majority party took forever to vote in a new Speaker, but the success of the GOP in that election, and Trump’s connection to it, spelled doom for the balance of senile Joe Biden’s and cackling Kamala’s administration at the congressional level.
Recall how Democrats had taken generous advantage of having Speaker Nancy Pelosi steering the House ship those first two years, with liberals proposing and passing massive spending legislation (hat tip Mitch McConnell on some of the biggest bills that squeaked through) and fell just barely short of cramming through “voting rights” proposals that would’ve cemented a permanent Democrat majority and presidencies as far as the eye could see.
It was fate – not votes – that stalled senile Joe Biden’s agenda. Didn’t Pelosi herself brag about what a consequential president he’d been and that Joe’s chiseled jaw belonged etched into Mt. Rushmore because of all he’d done (to) for the United States?
For her part, Kamala’s campaign events with Liz Cheney have featured “Country Over Party” signs, which is supposedly what Biden did by taking himself out of contention in 2024 and allowing Harris to go on and wage a “New way forward” campaign. Or “turn the page” or whatever slogan Democrat spinmeisters invent to make it seem like Kamala isn’t anything like Biden.
Those who look back and now wonder whether they removed Biden too early, they have to remember just how bad senile Joe was as a candidate. Democrats have tried to hide Kamala from the media, and when they finally turned her lose, she’s done something embarrassing at every turn.
Harris has tried everything – to be the “joyful” presidential runner, reinventing her record and positions on issues, injecting race into the equation, to make the contest all about Trump and more recently, to emerge aggressive and angry, just like her boss. Unfortunately, Democrats haven’t found a formula that truly works for them.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment Democrats realized they’d made a mistake in replacing Joe Biden with the truly awful Kamala Harris. But it’s far too late to go back, and they’re stuck with what they’ve got. Biden is senile and Harris is pathetic. Sounds like a good summation of the Democrat party itself.
Joe Biden economy
inflation
Biden cognitive decline
gas prices,
Nancy Pelosi
Biden senile
Kamala Harris candidacy
Donald Trump campaign
Harris Trump debates
J.D. Vance
Kamala vice president
Speaker Mike Johnson
Donald Trump assassination
Donald Trump
2024 presidential election
Tim Walz
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