If President Biden were truly interested in standing up for democracy, he’d agree to debate his two Democrat Party opponents.
After all, what is more democratic than a debate among candidates seeking to lead the greatest democracy the world has ever known?
One opponent is easily written off. That’s fringe candidate Marianne Williamson, an author and spiritualist.
The other is the more worthy candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Asked about challenging Biden to a debate, Kennedy, in a roundabout way, as is his wont, said he would.
Kennedy said, “I have known and liked Joe Biden for many years, but we differ profoundly on fundamental issues such as corporate influence in government, censorship, civil liberties, poverty, corruption, and war policy, among others. I look forward to engaging him in debates and town hall meetings, in a primary election that is honest, civil, and transparent.
“I invite him into a new era of respectful dialog in these times of division,” Kennedy said.
Not that Biden will do it. He is too old and too feeble to stand up to any questioning, let alone standing up to a loose cannon like Kennedy. Biden, frequently confused, can’t answer questions. This is why he doesn’t hold individual press conferences and runs away from reporters as though they are carrying COVID.
Hence his staged video announcement that he is running for re-election. It was a video like those television ads promoting expensive all electric, tax-subsidized Cadillacs and Mercedes with Chinese batteries that people cannot afford and do not want anyway.
And he failed to mention any of the issues facing the nation, like the economy and inflation, his war on fossil fuel, high gas prices, out-of-control crime, open borders, 80,000 missing illegal immigrant children, the free flow of drugs coming into the country, the politicization of the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service, Hunter Biden, FBI spying on parents of school children, China, Russia, Ukraine and so on.
Perhaps it is time for Democrats to say, “Go home, Joe.”
Some 70% of people polled, including Democrats, do not want Biden to run for a second term. (60% don’t want Donald Trump to run either.)
Joe Biden has become the Budweiser beer of American politics.
But he cannot resist running again, nor can Trump, because it is all about ego and power.
As onetime Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once observed, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” One good sniff and you’re gone.
It would be a service to the country if both Biden and Trump went away and did not force the American people to go through a replay of 2020. But that won’t happen.
Biden needs to stay on as president to cope with the heightened Republican House committee investigations into the Biden family’s financial connections to the Chinese Communist Party when Joe Biden was vice president.
And Trump can’t help himself, although he could appeal to a lot of Americans if he could run with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as his running mate.
That also is unlikely to happen given the animosity that has developed between the two one-time allies.
But it might be a mistake to sell Joe Biden short.
If nothing else, he has shown the American people — and the watching world — that he has learned from practice how to evacuate U.S. embassies, like the embassy in Khartoum, Sudan.
The 100 members of the U.S. Navy’s Seal Tram Six and the army’s 3rd Special Forces Group did an outstanding job of rescuing some 70 embassy staffers in a lightning-fast helicopter operation.
Yet, this was the fourth embassy evacuated under Biden, and it won’t be the last. The embassy in Kyiv — since reopened — was abandoned upon the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the embassy in neighboring Belarus was shut down, and the embassy in Kabul was abandoned upon Biden’s shameful and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He knows how to abandon embassies. So things are looking up.
Just remember: This Bud’s for you.
Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.