BIDEN’S HUBRIS - A MOVIE RERUN

The 2020 USA Presidential election was a referendum on Donald Trump. The hope has been to repeat that scenario in 2024. However the race is turning to a poll on Joseph Biden as a result of the fears he realized in a debate between the two geriatric candidates. The majority of voters don’t want either. It stands to reason that if any reasonable candidate from either party were to run the remaining geriatric in the race would be at a distinct disadvantage. In that regard it won’t be a candidate from the Republican Party as Trump is the Party. The Democrats could grab the narrative from the smirking authoritarian sociopathic 45th President who is even more impaired.  Biden, through his hubris is ignoring history where leaders fail to recognize the destructiveness of their own perceived omnipotence. This is not the Biden of yore. Jay H. Ell has seen this movie before in his native South Africa and fears a rerun. 

JOE BIDEN  - RERUNNING THE MOVIE

Joseph Biden’s insistence, for whatever reasons, that he is the only one who can run against Trump and beat him is a movie Jay H. Ell has seen before. Apartheid, the post holocaust crime against humanity, would never have happened in South Africa if a forgotten leader with similar national and international credentials as Biden, hadn’t exhibited the same arrogance and lack of insight at an inflection point in South African history. As frail as Biden is he is aware enough to know that the debate he delivered, way past his admitted bedtime, disqualified him in the current crossroads in American and world history as a candidate to easily beat the existential threat to mankind, Donald J Trump.

 The majority of Democrats want him out of this race and 53 percent of the electorate believe that his age is a bigger disadvantage to the Presidency than the 43 percent that argue that Trump’s criminal convictions are. Seventy - five percent of the electorate claim he is too old. Biden challenges the polls that say that no president with his low approval rating, 36 percent, has ever been re elected. In 2020 he was way ahead of Trump in July now he is behind.

DENIAL IS THE COIN OF THE REALM FOR POLITICIANS AND EVERYBODY ELSE

It is myth to believe history will judge a self centered Biden harshly rather they will just forget about him. Denial is a mechanism not only of politicians who want to romanticize even recent history, but of the electorate as well. Trump’s whole schtick is predicated on denial and lies. He claims he will “Make America Great Again”, Again, referring to a mythical past that he didn’t define or achieve last time out. Everyone in the “GOP” appears to have forgotten that he promised in 2016 in to build a wall that Mexico was going to pay for. Memory even fails recalling the 1,200,000 Covid deaths and the greatest increase in the deficit in any presidency in history, close on 8 trillion dollars. 

Although World War 11 is in the living memory how many Americans are aware of the massive Nazi presence in the country during that war and for years after? If you asked a focus group whether they could articulate why Senator McCarthy was infamous how many would know? (For the record he was an active Nazi sympathizer who sort to cover up major Nazi atrocities in addition to his witch hunt of anyone left of center. All this is detailed in Rachelle Maddow’s “Prequel” and her podcast “Ultra”.

 Biden if he remains on the ticket, whether he ekes out a victory against Trump, which will be challenged creating another constitutional crisis to be resolved by the hairy Supreme Court, or loses ,will be erased from memory notwithstanding his transformative presidency and his stellar career as a public servant. Lyndon Baines Johnson would have been forgotten if he would have attempted a second term after his disastrous handling of the Vietnam war. He knew when to hold em and when to fold em. Rather he is revered for his landmark transformative Civil Rights legislation. 

So the movie has been played over and over. But back to Jay. H. Ell’s experience of how apartheid may have been avoided had the South African Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, not ignored what his advisors were telling him. 

WHO WAS SMUTS AND WHAT WAS HIS MOVIE?

Are you aware of the shocking result of the 1948 South African election that heralded the apartheid era? Let Jay H. Ell remind you. As a seven year old child he witnessed it all being a member of a politically conscious family and it is indelibly sketched in his memory. Smuts lost a 1948 election he could have easily won and then threw away an opportunity to still remain in power all due to his hubris.  But first who was Smuts? He is not remembered like Mandela or even Bishop Tutu or De Klerk who were three of South Arica’s four Nobel Laureates for Peace. In fact history has regarded him unfairly as an agent of apartheid.

The 77 year old Field Marshall Jan Smuts was a remarkable guerrilla and conventional warrior, politician, statesman and philosopher who failed his most crucial historic test through arrogance and, who knows, elderly cognitive dysfunction not recognized in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century. However he too like Biden certainly was enough in touch with reality to make informed choices. For the whole sorry saga on this catastrophe see, “Jan Smuts, The Man Who Might Have Prevented Apartheid”, I Write What I Like, January 22, 2014.

Smuts towered over South African history in the first half of the twentieth century but more significantly in the British Commonwealth which was the most powerful entity of that period. He was the most influential member of the British war cabinet in WW1. In WW11. Churchill informed King George that should anything befall him Smuts should be made leader of the allied world in his place. In other words a South African was to head the British war cabinet. Albert Einstein wrote to him in 1936 confiding that his book “Holism and Evolution” was the most influential work in his thinking. He was the only statesman to have been involved in the founding of The League of Nations and the United Nations Organization. 

Most significantly in 1948 he was about to lead South Africa and set an example for the world in fighting segregation. Yet through arrogance he lost the opportunity and is confined to the dustin of history. He allowed the introduction of apartheid and the authoritarian and abrogation of the rule of law that was inherent to its application. As someone whose life was overshadowed by that decision and who was white and not subject to the harsh lash of discriminatory policies it was a living nightmare. It is a movie that Jay H. Ell would not want to see again. So how can it be prevented?

WHAT HAS BEEN THE FALL OUT OF THE DEBATE

It took 8 days for a Biden response. Eight days as the punditry descended on the Biden candidature like a hurricane. He did have a rally in North Carolina the day after where the faithful cheered, but for the rest a stoney silence.  His most loyal backers such as Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times more in sorrow than in anger said he had to hang up his Presidential badge and call it quits. There was also justifiable rage as to how his enablers had misled the electorate that he was alert and with the program. Stories abounded that manifestations of his debate behavior had been on the increase. 

So before damage control began in earnest he met with his wife Jill, son Hunter and the rest of the family. The latter never advised him to go back to Delaware like he said he would when he decided to run in 2020  -“You were always going to be transitional”. In so doing they would have gently ushered him out. But no way. Wife Jill had even after the grossly impaired debate publicly congratulated on him exclaiming, “You did such a great job. You answered every question”. So having got the go ahead from the family who had put his feelings ahead of America’s democracy and the free world’s future, they handed him over to his other enablers to face the world.

An interview without a teleprompter was scheduled with George Stephanopolous of the ABC  network. Biden’s answers were in many ways incredulous. He simply disagreed with the polls and his rock bottom approval ratings. They just weren’t true. He wasn’t going to undergo neurological and cognitive testing that might well assuage public opinion.  Besides denying reality and arguing that he had the best chance of beating Trump, there were two answers that produced a sense of shock. When asked whether he had watched the debate, that vacant look of the debate night flashed onto the screen and with hesitancy he muttered, “I don’t think so”. He didn’t know whether he had watched the most consequential encounter in Presidential debate history. If that was true then his team were guilty of gross negligence. Then he responded that he wouldn’t feel bad if he lost to Trump as long as he had given it the good old college try!

The Democratic candidate then took to the road and held donor meetings and a couple of rallies where he was cheered on by the faithful as he stated bizarrely, with no apologies to Trump, that “the party elites” were trying to run him out of his candidature. In an attempt to put a lid on the simmering Democratic legislators calling for him to drop out, he wrote a public letter telling them to shut up.He said the quiet part aloud telling them if they didn’t like the idea of his persistence they could challenge him at the Democratic Convention The leadership were in no hurry, also being anxious on the eve of him hosting a NATO  meeting not to render him impotent. 

Meanwhile from Trump there was an eerie silence. He had in one of his word salads way back offered that he was going to lose the debate on purpose to prevent the Democrats from dropping ”Sleepy Joe” and substituting another candidate. Meanwhile his team are busy preparing ads with clips from the debate and the interview.

So how might this end?

HOW MIGHT THIS END?

The two campaign chiefs of the last two Democratic Presidents, James Carville and David Axelrod both believe that Biden will lose to Trump  The two Democratic politicians that are central to the 46th President’s fortunes are Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn. Both have been very circumspect. Significantly the pair, have suggested that “Should Biden drop out there should be a mini Primary’ or words to that effect. They fear that the conventional wisdom to hand the candidature to Vice President Kamala Harris would have the impression that a candidate was been foist on the Party. Without Clyburn Biden would have not been President so the fact that he is publicly even hinting at the possibility that Biden might not see it to election day is dramatic. 

The Democratic candidates for down ballot elections are fearful that Biden might kibosh their leads in the polls. A crucial factor in American politics that doesn’t enter into other countries’ electoral processes, are the money donors. Without them a presidential candidate is sunk - not the grass roots type  but the ‘heavies’. A number of the latter have called for Biden’s ouster. Carville believes that they together with the Democratic elders pressure will drive Biden out. It is not a question of if but when. 

This is being written before Biden’s press conference and his interview with Lester Holt of NBC but nothing can change the reality that with Biden at the top of the ticket Trump  and his party can clean sweep the Legislature and the Presidency. George Clooney saw it months ago. Jeffries, Schumer, Pelosi and Clyburn need to take Biden on if necessary and threaten a Convention challenge. 

AT THE END OF THE DAY

While Jay H. Ell will pull the lever against Trump whoever the candidate might be, Biden could help his PTSD by not rerunning the movie .