Thank You For Your Service, Joe
I have always liked Joe Biden. His politics are left of mine, and I really don’t know the man. But he has devoted his life to public service, and when he was running the Judiciary Committee way back when, he impressed me as trying to do a good job. That’s high praise for a politician. It never bothered me that he stumbled on words or, frankly, that he was not the brightest bulb in the fixture. He appeared to be what I would want an American political leader to be — a decent man with a commitment to serving his fellow citizens.
But Joe’s best years were years ago. He is President now only because Donald Trump is so awful. The Democrats should have run a better (read, younger) candidate than Joe in 2020. But they didn’t have one. Bernie was too far out of the mainstream, Liz Warren is an unlikable scold, and I forget who else also ran. So, given the choices, I was happy that Biden went up against the Orange Turd.
If I were king of the Democrats, I would have run Biden/Obama (not Obama/Biden) in 2008. As Biden’s VP, the skinny kid with the funny name would have been heir apparent in 2016, and the country would have been spared Hillary’s worst campaign imaginable. But the party’s obsession with identity politics, as opposed to economic politics, made it feckless. The progressives (who called…