How Does President Kamala Sound?

POSTED 5am (AEST): Surely it ends in a few hours. Surely?

Around 8.30am (AEST), two hours from now, Joe Biden will take centre stage at his first full-blown press conference since November. No modern president, not even Ronald Reagan during his second term’s last troubled year managed to keep hard questions at bay for so long. The Gipper, though, could draw on an actor’s residual skills to finesse his part in the Iran-Contra mess, itself a symptom of a declining leader’s ill advised reliance on the likes of Oliver North. As the Great Debate debacle demonstrated, Biden has only the rule book working in his favour: his 3000-odd convention delegates are his and his alone. If he wants the nomination, which despite everything he clearly does, it should by rights be his for the taking.

Or maybe not.

That’s the funny thing about rules — if you break a few, why not smash ’em all? According to several reports overnight, frantic Democrat operatives are phoning individual Biden delegates to remind them that they are pledged to support him regardless of whatever reservations they might have come to harbour about their champion’s fitness to serve now and in the future. Those calls are driven by rumours that at least several state committees have been unofficially exploring legal stratagems to unbind their delegates. There have been as yet no concrete moves in that direction, but the fear they might be in the offing is palpable. And fear is everywhere on the blue side of American politics.

And fear is everywhere on the blue side of American politics.

It shouldn’t have come to this, not according to the master plan.

First, the Democratic National Committee once again goosed the primaries, making it all but impossible for potential rivals to get on the state ballots or gain traction if they did. There is nothing new about this. Biden owed his 2020 candidacy to just such abuse of the rank-and-file’s prerogatives. Back then, the DNC was beside itself with concern the nominee would be red-raggin’ Bernie Sanders, all other contenders having dropped out. Given that she might be president at a moment’s notice, it’s worth noting that Kamala Harris was the first to go, not even making it to the Iowa primary and never commanding more than 3 per cent support. That left only Biden, last and far from the sharpest tool in the box, to frustrate the Vermont socialist’s ambitions. So the DNC’s wallahs gamed the rules with their customary aplomb and stiffed Sanders just as they had done in 2016 when clearing the way for Hillary’s presumed coronation.

The palliative for placing the party’s hopes on the shoulders of a self-aggrandising old man with a record of plagiarism, blatant lies, mental lapses and, after the laptop from hell emerged, the stench of pay-for-play corruption was the implied promise that he would be a strictly one-term president. As packaged and presented, Biden would wash Trump’s spore from the White House, restore decency and retire from the field. He would be, in words heard often back then, “a transitional” president cleaning house for a rising generation of Democrats.

Biden had other ideas. Two years into his term he announced how much he fancied extending his lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And why shouldn’t he! Democrats defied the polls under his leadership at the 2022 congressional midterms, turned back the red tide and came within spitting distance of controlling the House. The mainstream press was onside and more, even to raising but muted objections when played for obliging suckers. They knew, to cite but one instance of reporters not reporting, that certain of their number were stooges asking planted questions and getting prepared answers. There were even photos of the cue cards in Biden’s hands, each complete with a picture of the reporter who would provide him with the setup lines. It was only a month ago, before the catastrophic encounter with Trump, that all footage less than flattering of the President was dismissed as vile inventions of vile Republicans. Those same Briefing Room hacks knew it was rubbish but dutifully tugged the forelock and broadcast it anyway.

The second element of the Democrats’ cunning scheme was unstuck by the good sense of the American public. By now, had all gone well, Trump would be a political leper, possibly even in jail, and to be fair, the multi-faceted plan to charge, convict and bankrupt him initially went rather well. Sex assault, bank fraud and the ‘hush money’ trial’s 34 criminal convictions — New York’s obliging Democrat lawmakers had rewritten entire statutes to make those civil and criminal prosecutions possible. Who could possibly vote for a swindling sex monster? They got precisely the headlines they sought.

Trouble was, the American public — a significant portion of it — registered disgust at justice and the law being so debased. Until the surge of donations after the Biden debate, the surge in small-dollar support for Trump after the hush-trial convictions was by far the largest in his campaign’s history.

Meanwhile, for Biden the money has stopped flowing. Donors don’t like backing losers, which means tonight’s press conference is Biden’s last, best and only hope. If he performs well, even just reasonably well, he might blunt his own party’s expanding efforts to winkle him out of the Oval Office.

And if he blows it … President Kamala stands ready to take the oath.

And if he blows it … President Kamala stands ready to take the oath.

POST 7.30: They’re calling this, ridiculously, a “big boy press conference”, which is to be expected because what is not alarming in this saga is just plain asinine. Big boy indeed! It’s a tacit confirmation that Ol’ Joe has faced nothing like the routine scrutiny endured by previous presidents. This time, folks, it’s for real. We’ll soon see about that.

It’s the fashion just now for pundits and editorialists, especially those of the Left, to begin their suggestions that Biden make himself permanently scarce with expressions of admiration and profound regret that such frank talk is necessary. Do you hear the soft patter of crocodile tears? George Clooney, evidently the Democrats’ philosopher prince, says Biden must step down and — oh, but it pains him to do it — to relate how his most recent encounter with the President was a deeply unsettling affair.

“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” he wrote in the New York Times, which obligingly placed its Opinion page at his disposal. It emerged no more than a few hours ago that Clooney had submitted his essay to Obama for prior approval.

The currents, the swirls, the anxious choosing of sides and then the retreats, uttering the fudges of qualification, evasion — Nancy Pelosi insisted a House corridor wasn’t the place  to address Biden’s future — has been going on since desiccated synapses exposed Biden to the world. Mentally, he still claims to be armed for bear and eager to rumble. Twenty minutes or so from now, and with no TelePrompter in sight, he’ll have to prove it.

8.18: Just a passing thought, but if two candidates of merit were contesting this election there might be a thrashing out of just where America is heading. At what used to be called Fort Bragg but is now Camp Liberty, the US Army and other interested parties have just conducted a training conference/training course that listed Right to Life as a “terrorist group”.

It would be nice to learn who and why was responsible, why the military is being indoctrinated and directed at domestic “enemies”.

10.30: Opinions will vary, but you couldn’t say Biden triumphed or, for that matter, that he failed. Rather, he was just Ol’ Joe with all the weirdness that involves. There were moments when he became suddenly shouty, hollering and finger-pointing at one point about children and guns, although his exact point played second fiddle to the eruption of  theatrics There were moments when, for no apparent reason, he leaned into the microphone and whispered as if imparting some deeply guarded secret. Sentences ambled off into fog and were lost and “but anyway” became a form of sentence-ending punctuation. Names and proper nouns were jumbled, so that “Vice-President Trump” popped up a couple of times which continued the theme of the day. Earlier, at the NATO summit, he introduced Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “Vladimir Putin”.

Biden, stand down? Never!

He is the DNC’s candidate and creation. It looks like, tonight at any rate, they’re struck with him.