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The Joe Biden pool — 36 Comments

1. I agree, no rush for them. But for America maybe not. Not that Harris would be competent. I thought and still think by July this year. He is going down hill fast.
   As keeping him in until 2 yr and 1 day so Harris could run for 2 full terms, that is very plausible.

   BO’s third term for sure.

2. Fundamental Transformation

3. There’s a rumor going around that Jim Carrey was recently abducted by persons unknown and flown to an undisclosed location in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave….

   Just a rumor, mind you.

   (Or maybe he volunteered?)

4. I agree that they’ve planned all along to get the maximum 10 years out of a Harris presidency. Dragging Joe along for another 2 years can provide cover for the lie that they did not run a woefully incapacitated man for president. Furthermore, as Neo said, it will give less time for the country to see what Harris is about (and why she couldn’t muster more than 3% support in the primaries) before she is crowned president for a decade (once she is crowned, any misgivings about her will drop away as they did with Obama in 2008–remember, Candidate Obama wasn’t exactly the revered figure to the black community President Obama became).

   If Biden had to be removed before which time Harris would qualify for a 10-year reign, it would have to be made to look like something sudden, like a massive stroke or an overwhelming (preferably Covid-20) infection, rather than progression of long-term neurodegenerative disease.

5. The Democrat party has gone from the party of Harry Truman and his “The buck stops here” policy to a party has raised buck passing and responsibility dodging to an art form. Slow Joe is the perfect foil for that art. Possibly Harry Truman was the aberration?

6. I believe it will be earlier. Biden went on the EO signing binge putting in place some pretty radical Orders. Orders that Kamala Harris would assume and be able do dodge criticism since she would merely be carrying out what Joe put in place. It’s the “Pure as the Driven Snow” presidential play.

7. Disagree. Accounts of how Obama worked were that his subordinates sent him memoranda with canned options and he checked an option and added some inane marginalia. Henry Kissinger once said you could identify the bureaucratic consensus each time; it was option 2. Accounts of how the administration’s top echelon positions were staffed had it that the candidate had a pro forma meeting with Obama before the appointment was announced; that was his contribution.

   Take a look at what the man did with his life prior to 2004. There isn’t much there there. The Obama administration was the resultant of the vectors at work in the Democratic Party. He added little but some petty spite, his odd knots of secretiveness, and his motormouth.

   What I think this indicates is that American government is highly ‘institutionalized’ and can bump and grind along for a good while without much intentional leadership. There will be a secular decay in the quality of decision-making and perhaps a crisis where people wake up. Recall FEMA under Michael D Brown.

8. Pushing Biden* out before the 2022 mid-terms might make some of his 2020 voters think that they were played for fools (or worse), and vote to flip the House and even the Senate to keep things from going high-order.

9. Art Deco:

   “Reports” of how Obama work don’t mean much to me, because I don’t necessarily trust those reports. I’ve heard that sort of thing. But my reading of Obama is quite different, and has been for a long time. I think he’s far more of a force – then and now. That was true from decades ago – his behavior regarding power in the Illinois legislature, as well as his treatment of Alice Palmer. I’ve written many posts about this, but I don’t have time right now to find the links.

10. Then again there is Creepy Joe and the leg hairs in the pool and stories of Creepy Joe swimming nude in the pool when female Secret Service personnel were assigned to him as VP. The press pool didn’t no nothin about those pools neither.

    Dr. Edith has her hands full keeping him out of the deep end.

11. That was true from decades ago – his behavior regarding power in the Illinois legislature, as well as his treatment of Alice Palmer. I’ve written many posts about this, but I don’t have time right now to find the links.

    I was involved in street level politics in Upstate New York, not Chicago. However, i’ve been a plaintiff and a defendant in election law suits. What happened to Alice Palmer is pretty much what you can expect in those sorts of circumstances, provided you’ve got a lawyer experienced in the election law niche.

    I was told by an old hand in Rochester, however, that the major parties had an implicit non-aggression pact and each left the other’s petitions alone; my mentor said he’d done spot reviews of major party positions and they were commonly filled with trash. Petition challenges were an intra-party matter. My mentor had also had experience with petitioning in New York City when Carmine deSapio was president of the Board of Elections and Republican and Democratic commissioners formed a cartel to scotch insurgent petitions. You could get on the ballot, but you had to go to court. He said DeSapio’s conduct at formal hearings was almost comic, if maddening.

    And, no, I don’t think he’s a force, just had the benefit of clever handlers and astounding good luck. One reason he’s elected president is that 10 notable financial institutions careered into insolvency right in the middle of the campaign. Another is that the Republican candidate stupidly put a pair of grifters in charge of his campaign. The main reason he’s elected to the Senate was that moles in the Illinois court system were willing to leak confidential paperwork about his opponents’ divorce proceedings and elements of the Chicago media were willing to help out by unscrupulously publishing it. If you’d had honest men in the media, the only thing that would have been published would be the names of the people who turned over the goods.

    Steve Sailer has been satisfactory at delineating who the Obamas really are. Had they been white, or had they been ordinary bourgeois blacks, you’d never have heard of them. They’d be selling real estate or running an ordinary small law practice or they’d be apparatchiks in some NGO. They’d have probably had to declare bankruptcy at least once, because they kept sinking deeper in debt in spite of the handsome salaries she was paid (for doing no one knows quite what). For some occult reason, people in Chicago who could make things happen took a shine to them (though not enough of one to get that job at the Joyce Foundation that Mooch really wanted her husband to land).

12. You know what’s weird? I just looked it up and the U.S. has actually had eight Presidents die in office. Throw in Nixon resigning, and that’s nine times we’ve had someone become President without being actually elected. The time since Nixon is actually the 2nd longest stretch in U.S. history where a Presidential term hasn’t been cut short since the time between George Washington and William Henry Harrison dying in 1841.

    Which means no one really has any idea what Biden being pushed out the door will lead to, especially considering there hasn’t been a figure in U.S. Presidential politics like Donald Trump in over 120 years.

    Our country used to be strong enough to withstand a President dying in office literally every 20 years or so. Anybody think we’re still that strong?

    Mike

13. Our country used to be strong enough to withstand a President dying in office literally every 20 years or so. Anybody think we’re still that strong?

    I don’t think that ‘we’re not strong enough’ is the problem. The problem is that the culture of the professional managerial class was such that there was a certain lower bound to the quality of the understudy. We dodged a bullet when Spiro Agnew was compelled to resign (he was remarkably acute, but his occult criminal history on top of Nixon’s shenanigans would have made for a wretched spectacle). We dodged another bullet when Henry Wallace was replaced as VP (he was an honest man, but given to bouts of fatuity).

14. And, no, I don’t think he’s a force, just had the benefit of clever handlers and astounding good luck. One reason he’s elected president is that 10 notable financial institutions careered into insolvency right in the middle of the campaign. Another is that the Republican candidate stupidly put a pair of grifters in charge of his campaign. The main reason he’s elected to the Senate was that moles in the Illinois court system were willing to leak confidential paperwork about his opponents’ divorce proceedings and elements of the Chicago media were willing to help out by unscrupulously publishing it. If you’d had honest men in the media, the only thing that would have been published would be the names of the people who turned over the goods.

    I agree with this. I have wondered for years who was running Obama. How did he get from Occidental college, a small college in southern California that has become hard leftists in recent years, to Columbia, to Harvard Law School and “president” of the Law Review having never submitted an article?

    This was what I knew of him in 2008.

15. If the plan is truly to get Kamala Harris installed as a two-term president on the back of a full or fractional Biden term, then it will be absolutely paramount that the House Bill HR1 gets passed almost intact.

    This bill would completely reform election law in the US as I read it, with the Feds asserting much more comprehensive control over the states in the administration of federal elections. And it has all the very worst features of the 2020 fiasco made permanent and in some ways, worse.

    That’s the only way they could pull it off, by completely owning the ballot box. Nobody – nobody – likes Kamala enough to vote her into the office of the Presidency, as we saw very well in the primaries. She has all the charm and charisma of a badger with mange.

16. Barry, so a remake of “Dave”?

    Here’s a question: do the people in Biden’s inner circle, or his “advisors”, like Kamala? I have not read anything re this. For the remake to work, I think we need to assume that Biden’s advisors think Kamala is an opportunistic hack who must be kept from ever becoming President, hence a doppelganger scenario using Jim Carrey with a face-mask ala Mission Impossible.

17. Mike K’s comment along with Neo’s all seem to point to a much larger cabal in charge of the Ds, and maybe the entire government. Hate to put a tin hat on, but there’s so much going on that seems to point in that direction.

18. IMO, neo has the right of it.

    However, I’m very doubtful that Harris can, after 2 years as President win a Presidential contest without massive fraud (again).

    Of course that points moot, as the democRats are certain to engage in whatever degree of fraud is necessary to see to Harris’ reelection. And intend to so from this point forward.

    As for Obama, he’s as cunning as he needs to be. It’s easy to mistake laziness for incompetence. He’s not anyone’s puppet (too narcissistic) but he is heavily advised and listens to the advice when he finds it persuasive.

19. I have trouble seeing Obama as a string puller, more of a pullee. Too much of a lightweight in my view.

20. I agree wholeheartedly, Neo. With an almost universally compliant media, and an incessant, fevered repetition of the ‘he just has a speech impediment!; how dare you suggest anything else, you ABLEIST!!!’ meme, there is no pressing need to push out Slow Joe. As long as he can manage a few carefully controlled public appearances each week, as long as he doesn’t have a public mental breakdown so dramatic that no amount of media spin can cover up its reality, and as long as he knows his place and does what he is told, signs what’s out in front of him, etc., it is best (for Democrats) to keep the docile, doddering old idiot in place…a thinly veiled façade, but a useful one.

    And yes, it is Obama and his people (particularly Susan Rice) running things, pulling all the strings. How much input and influence Harris has is debatable, but I’m guessing not too much.

21. I’d be willing to participate in a pool if the prize is some form of dark chocolate, or maybe a silver coin or something. Or a wheat penny? I dunno. How about a Star Wars action figure? Possibilities abound. Maybe something more topical… a carved wooden marionette, perhaps….

22. @MikeK: I don’t know Obama, never met him, but I know lawyers who were at HLS with him, the guys in the class ahead of him who voted to make him president of the Harvard Law Review. They said (i) he was very smart, and more importantly, (ii) he was the compromise candidate between the radical left and the conservatives. The Review was having a tough time with a lot of internal warfare, and they thought he could patch things up, and that was more important than scholarship. In the mid-2000s, when Obama was first coming to national attention, they still thought that he was very talented politically.

23. Well the Deep State always wanted to run the country, so now with the Cloth Headed Dummy and Kackling Kamala everyone knows they are running it but they still get to be in the shadows. All the power, none of the responsibility, what’s not to like?

24. neo wrote, “Keeping Joe in there for at least two years (or more) allows Kamala to run for two more terms even if she becomes president at that point.”

    Neo, can I interest you in a proposition bet? Kamala is out before Joe. $20 to a charity chosen by the winner. Charity to be mainstream, not controversial and not political.

    Eh?

25. physicsguy wrote, “Hate to put a tin hat on, but …”

    Ah, guy, the girls are already there.
    https://www.amazon.com/s?k=tin+foil+shower+cap

26. How long ago did Mr. Biden’s family take away his car keys?

27. to Columbia, to Harvard Law School and “president” of the Law Review having never submitted an article?

    Columbia I suspect was standard-issue affirmative action. Columbia has been quite meticulous about sequestering his transcript, so it hasn’t leaked the way those of George W Bush, Al Gore, and John Kerry did. His major was political science – methodologically haphazard and largely non-quantitative in that era. Steve Sailer has hypothesized (and done a dumpster dive into some odd data set) that he tests quite well, and that his LSAT scores landed him a berth at HLS without AA.

    See Wm. Dyer (“Beldarblog”) on the corporate architecture of the Harvard Law Review and how it differs from ordinary law reviews. ‘President’ is an office-political position chosen quite differently from the way most law review editors are. Dyer called explicit attention to the lack of case notes attributable to Obama and how that would have precluded him taking an editorial position at Dyer’s law school. (I believe a solitary case note written by BO has since been identified).

    Sailer notes that accounts of him at Harvard Law School are quite different from accounts of him earlier. One of his classmates has said she’s been personally acquainted with two people whose personality did a complete 180 at some turning point in their life. One was Obama, the other was the rock performer Joan Jett (whom she happened to know). That particular classmate said he was thought of as a motormouth and his soliloquies in class caused a certain amount of eye rolling.

    The thing about BO is that he was a much better law student than he was a lawyer. I asked an attorney I correspond with what sort of lawyer he thought Obama was. His replay, “The sort of law school graduate who has no interest in practicing law”. Which, he said, was a common type.

    You notice something about Obama the electoral politician is that he faced very little competition prior to 2008. He had only token opposition if that in his state legislative campaigns and his U.S. Senate campaign in 2004 was a coast consequent to the document dumps humiliating his opponents. The document dumps made the press his accomplice, as it was in his presidential campaigns. The one competitive race he was in where the media did not matter was his challenge to Bobby Rush in 2000, wherein Rush won 61% of the vote and Obama 30%.

    And note in regard to his time in office, it’s a reasonable assessment that no president in living memory has faced a more compliant media, down to and including the CNN ‘moderator’ who acted as his second in one of his debates with Mitt Romney.

28. And yes, it is Obama and his people (particularly Susan Rice) running things,

    Rice is this generation’s Madeleine Albright. She was well-connected ‘ere Obama ever came on the scene, not an Obama protégé.

29. This talk of when and how (not if) Joey Hairplugs will be relieved of his duty are interesting, but how long can he possibly go without being seen in public?

    He has already missed an appointment to give a State of the Union address, and I’m wondering how they can weasel out of this Constitutional requirement if Grampa Badfinger is not, as is becoming more apparent, not even capable of standing and reading without passing out, falling down, or talking about Corn Pop.

30. Art Deco; et al:

    By the time Obama got to Harvard Law School, law review editors were no longer chosen by grades only, as they had been in the past. Here is Obama’s own account, as a law student, of how it was done.

31. Art Deco:

    When Obama ran against Rush, Obama had made the big mistake of choosing the wrong person and the wrong district in which to make his challenge. Rush was able to make Obama look ridiculous by challenging Obama’s black bona fides and portraying Obama as elite and entitled and calling him “a white man in blackface.” After that, Obama stayed in his old district in the state senate, and in 2004 ran statewide for the US Senate, where he would be far less vulnerable to such attacks.

32. If HR 1 passes the senate. Don’t think it will but if it did the timeline of sending Joe home to Delaware may change. No need to wait.

33. He has already missed an appointment to give a State of the Union address, and I’m wondering how they can weasel out of this Constitutional requirement if Grampa

    I don’t think it’s required until he’s been in office for a period of time. Delivery in person is not required at all, and was not done during the period running from 1801 to 1912.

34. Art Deco:

    It has become customary to at least address a joint session of Congress at the outset. Most presidents are eager to do it. Biden clearly is not.

35. “Biden clearly is not.”

    Shouldn’t that be ” ‘Biden’ clearly is not.”?

    (Certainly, just the other day ‘he’ said ‘he’ was more than ready to “answer any questions” before his ‘compassionate’ handlers quickly stepped in and—with the utmost care and concern, not to mention deepest respect—pulled the plug….)

36. “How long ago did Mr. Biden’s family take away his car keys?” – CaptDMO

    TommyJay says they’re working on it – but they’ll start with the Nuclear Football.

    https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/03/04/open-thread-3-4-21/#comment-2544377

    In a letter sent Tuesday but publicized Wednesday, 31 lawmakers [all Dems] led by Reps. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) urge the commander in chief to “consider modifying the decision-making process the United States uses in its command and control of nuclear forces.”

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