Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of the conservative National Review, thinks Republicans are “delusional if they think Biden will be easy to beat.” Here is a taste of his piece at Politico:
At this juncture, no one else in the country is as likely to be president of the United States come January 2025 as Joe Biden.
Republicans telling themselves otherwise are engaged in self-delusion.
There was a palpable sense during the midterms that Republicans were playing with house money — in other words, that the political environment was so favorable that they could afford to make poor choices and still succeed. That was a mistake last year, and absent something terrible befalling Biden or the country over the next two years, is a mistake when thinking about 2024.
Biden is not a dead man walking; he’s an old man getting around stiffly. Biden is vulnerable, but certainly electable; diminished, but still capable of delivering a message; uninspiring, but unthreatening.
No one is going to mistake him for a world-beater. In the RealClearPolitics polling average, he leads Donald Trump by a whopping 0.8 percent. If his job approval has been ticking up, it’s still only at 44 percent. He walks as if he is only one step away from a bad fall, and an NBC poll earlier in the year found that just 28 percent of people think he has the mental and physical health necessary to be president.
That said, he’s in the office, and no one else is. Incumbency bestows important advantages. The sitting president is highly visible, is the only civilian in the country who gets saluted by Marines walking out his door every day, has established a certain threshold ability to do the job, and can wield awesome powers to help his cause and that of his party.
Since 1992, Trump is the only incumbent to have lost, failing to join Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as re-elected incumbents.
Biden was never going to be the next LBJ or FDR as a cadre of historians had seemingly convinced him early in his presidency. But he punched above his weight legislatively during his first two years, getting more out of a tied Senate and slender House majority than looked realistically possible. He’s set up to have the advantage in this year’s momentous debt-limit fight, since it’s hard to see how congressional Democrats aren’t united and congressional Republicans divided.
Biden’s age is a liability for him, but comes with a significant benefit — he does not look or sound like a radical any more than the average elderly parent or grandparent. This has enabled him to govern from the left — he would have spent even more the first two years if he could have — without appearing threatening or wild-eyed. He hasn’t restored normality to Washington so much as familiarity as the old hand who has been there since 1973 and made his first attempt at national office in 1988.
Read the rest here.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Mar-a-Lago evangelicals are back with something called the “National Faith Advisory Board.” Let’s break it down! 
Poll: Republicans want to move on from Trump 
What If Pro-Choice Politicians Acknowledged That Abortion Is a Moral Problem? 
What are evangelicals thinking about our country these days?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.