CrimsonPhantom
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RE: Biden officially became launches 2024 bid, betting record will top age worries
Joe Biden Unveils His New Basement Strategy, and It'll Probably Work
Quote:Joe Biden is in. That was the news on Tuesday after the embattled president announced a bid for re-election that would put him at 82 years old by the start of a second term. To say our geriatric political class is shameless would be an understatement. 330 million people reside in the United States and voters decided the best they could come up with is a mentally deficient compulsive liar.
How Biden announced his run was instructive. He didn’t give a big speech in front of supporters. Instead, he released a video with shots of January 6th interspersed throughout, marking a return to a strategy he’s perfected over the years. Namely, doing the bare minimum and hoping most people don’t notice how terrible his record is.
Sure enough, the president is prepping a new basement strategy for 2024 (The New York Times).
Despite his heavily anticipated re-election announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden has no immediate plans to barnstorm the key battlegrounds. Decorative bunting is nowhere to be found, and large rallies will come later.
Instead, Mr. Biden’s next steps look much like his recent ones: leveraging the White House to burnish his record with ribbon-cuttings, and willingly ceding the stage to a Republican presidential primary that is already descending into a dogfight between Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, even before he has entered the race.
The first 24 hours, a heavily scripted period in any campaign, serve as a Biden road map for the months to come: a video announcement and an array of text messages to spur online donations; the behind-the-scenes hiring of his campaign team; an official White House event that doubled as a campaign opportunity; and a rally focused on abortion rights, headlined by the vice president, at a historically Black university.
Of course, he has no plans to barnstorm this country. We are talking about a man who has spent 40 percent of his presidency on vacation. His sundowning has become infamous, and when he does speak in public, he never fails to produce a multitude of viral clips for all the wrong reasons. After the last several years, can you blame him for hiding out in the basement most of the time?
And you want to know the sad part? It’ll probably work. Biden may be senile, but he and his team have learned a valuable lesson regarding politics: The less people think about you, the better.
Republicans have become so self-absorbed, including the very public way in which they feud, that the American people can’t help but see all their flaws. Every election becomes a referendum on who the GOP candidate is. Meanwhile, Democrats can run whoever they want, barely campaign, not debate, and still come out victorious. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a deliberate strategy that they keep getting away with because Republicans are too stupid to counter it.
Why? Because the counter would require some actual discipline and shelving of one’s ego. Believe it or not, Republican candidates for office don’t have to comment on everything. I know that seems pretty silly for me to say given I do that for a living, but I’m not running for public office. There is value in not making one’s self the center of attention all the time. That’s because it allows the focus to shift to your opponent.
Biden has continually done this. In 2020, he held a few events with small groups of people seated in circles, but for the most part, he didn’t even campaign. In 2022, he sat around pretending to be a diligent statesman instead of inserting himself into races he knew he’d hamper. Is that strategy all manufactured nonsense? Sure, but it’s effective.
Republicans would do well to make 2024 a referendum on Biden, perhaps the worst president in the last century, instead of doing his bidding by sucking up all the oxygen in the room. I know, it seems counterintuitive. Candidates want to be the star and the person with all the unearned media. But if Biden isn’t the story, Biden wins.
Biden’s reelection announcement is a continuation of a panicked and exhausted politics
Quote:On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced he will run for a second term as president of the United States. He claimed his campaign will serve as a “bridge” to new, younger leadership in the Democratic Party . Instead, his move only continues the Old Guard’s increasingly desperate attempt to keep power.
Biden’s announcement means he will be the Democratic nominee absent a health problem intervening. On the Republican side, former President Donald Trump has a strong chance to be that party’s standard-bearer, setting up a rematch of 2020. Trump is of the same generation as Biden. While Biden already has passed his 80th year, Trump will do so in the second year of the next presidential term. Thus, while the Democratic Party has a broader age problem, both sides remain wed to octogenarian rule.
This hold contributes to a broader, sadder set of circumstances. Politics today seems like a strange mixture of panic and exhaustion. Rhetorically, we have raised the stakes of every contest so as to paint a loss as an extinction-level event. I am not old but have lost count of how many “most important election in our lifetime” my lifetime already has included. After each one, of course, life goes on, sometimes a bit better, sometimes a bit worse for the electoral and subsequent policy results. The general stasis following the panic helps breed the exhaustion. Until the next cycle, in which the new panic acts as a temporary shot of adrenaline prior to a resetting of fatigue.
The Old Guard’s unending grip on political office aids and abets our cycles of panic and exhaustion. It aids the panic because that generation faces the twilight of its own existence: much less influence. Used to power, it cannot let go and sees the end of that power as a tragedy, if not the very destruction of the country.
This grip contributes to exhaustion in part due to the limitations of strength that come with age. But more than that, our politics is exhausted because the older generation’s ability to face our nation’s problems has generally passed. The problems it sees increasingly are not the problems of the country as a whole but of a subset. The solutions it has to offer seem increasingly tired, rote, and beside the point. Much of it stems from a longing for a return to some idyllic past that partly never was and certainly never can again be. In fact, the generation both Biden and Trump represent have much to answer for in our current economic, social, and political condition. Its vices triumphed much more than its virtues. Now, that generation seeks to make its vices permanent and recast them as goods.
This diagnosis of our politics does not mean that a shift of power to younger generations will fix all that ails us. Youth, even middle age, has its own vicious tendencies, its own blind spots to truth, justice, and the common good. Still, we must take up that role. We must make our own contributions, both good and mistaken. We must build our own future. Perhaps even our vices might moderate those of our fathers and grandfathers. But we might even have our own virtues that meet the moment in which we live. We might have it in us to realize the reforms needed to place the country on better footing economically, socially, and spiritually.
That is, if we are given the chance. That is up to the past generation. But it also is up to us.
In his first inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy declared that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” More than 60 years later, Biden, and even Trump, refuses to pass the torch again. Our panicked and exhausted politics is poorer for it. Let us hope and work for better.
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Biden officially became launches 2024 bid, betting record will top age worries
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(AM) states ya in the face …. yet, some believe “hope” is still a ‘federal’ option…
![[Image: joe_biden_runs_again-2024-1536x1075.jpg]](https://grrrgraphics.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/joe_biden_runs_again-2024-1536x1075.jpg)
