We should be grateful that Biden is going nowhere… for now

The question going into Joe Biden’s address to the national from the Oval Office tonight was: will he, having announced that he is dropping out of the race to be president, will he also resign the presidency now? Or would he announce that he was sticking it out till 11:59 a.m. on January 20, 2025? Given the perks of the office, and the appetites of Dr. Jill Biden, I thought it likely that he would choose to stick it out. I am often wrong in my political predictions, but about this I was right.

In his sad, at times maudlin, painfully mendacious eleven-minute speech, Joe Biden told the American people that he wasn’t going anywhere. Circumstances may intervene to change that. All of us are subject to the sudden intervention of fate. But Joe Biden is a simple fall, an increasingly likely cortical event away from oblivion. In which case America would be facing the prospect of President Kamala Harris.

“But aren’t we facing that anyway, since she has won the blessing of the Council of Elders that actually governs the country, if not the voters?” Well, yes and no. Yes, it looks now that Harris will be the nominee. I suspect that, after a few weeks of media boosterism, people will have understood what a disaster she is and the polls will register the awful (to Democrats) truth. Harris cannot win. And then what? Will she be swapped out for some one else? Let’s see. I do not claim to understand how that would happen. It will not, of course, be democratic, though I have no doubt that it will be touted as a victory for “our democracy™.”

In the meantime, I will be interested to see how Biden’s address plays in the media. The thing that struck me were the number of lies it contained. Consider just this one passage, which occurred near the end of Biden’s address. We are, Biden said, “stronger, more prosperous and more secure” today than before, but that is not true. Nor is it true that “today we have the strongest economy in the world.” Wages are not up, as Biden claimed, nor is inflation tamed. Biden claimed that “violent crime” is at “a fifteen-year low,” but in fact it is soaring. Biden even said that he was “securing our border” and that “border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.” 

These are but a few of the gross misstatements — indeed, gross and obvious lies, with which the president regaled the American people in his address, probably his last such address as president. 

The bottom line of this curious — probably unprecedented — performance is that Biden will cling to power as long as possible. He will not — not now, anyway — endow Kamala Harris with the perquisites of incumbency. For that, I suppose, we should be modestly grateful.

We are living at a most peculiar time. Everyone senses it. Everyone is uneasy. The one thing Joe Biden was right about is that the country is now at an “inflection point.” He said that the choice was between “moving forward or backwards.” In fact, the choice is between the vapid and illiberal nostrums of “woke” ideology, on the one hand, and a revitalization of the principles that guided America at its founding, on the other. What are those principles? Here are three: individual liberty, equality of opportunity, the sanctity of private property. 

Those principles are conspicuously absent in the Democratic talking points Joe Biden tried to get his mouth around tonight. His address to the nation was a reminder of how far we have sunk. 

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance offer a “morning-in-America” alternative, which is why the Democrats are panicking and why, at the end of the day, Joe Biden dropped out of the race. The media will do all that it can to prop up the preposterous Kamala Harris, so long as she looks to be the nominee. But she too is destined for history’s oubliette. Which is why, notwithstanding its many cringe-making moments, we should be grateful for Joe Biden’s little address tonight. It veered between saccharine braggadocio and breathtaking mendacity. But it did remind us of what the stakes are in this upcoming election.