Bye Bye Biden

President Biden is a month way from being former President Biden.  He has taken off for his home in Delaware – I assume for the Christmas holiday.  Will he return to his desk in the Oval Office?  Will he attend the Inauguration? 

Do not know – and it really does not matter.  He no longer is a functioning President – in more ways than one.  His only significant potential action – and one that is likely to further damage his reputation and already limited legacy – is to issue an insane number of pardons. 

As was the case of his most recent pardons – including his son – they will represent an abuse of the power and purpose of pardons.  I will be paying off a lot of bets if his next round of pardons do not include family and friends associated with Hunter’s business dealings with Ukraine, Russia and China – especially now  that Hunter can be subpoenaed as a compelled witness.

Whether Biden hangs around the Oval Office or not, his days of relevancy are over.  From the moment the 2024 presidential election was called by the national media, former President Trump not only became President-elect but essentially the de facto President.  The center of political gravity in America shifted from the White House in Washington, D.C. to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach Florida.  World and American leaders of every sort have been on the phones with Trump – many making a homage trip to Trump’s lavish country club home.  And not stopping by the White House en route.

In case you missed it, Biden may have already given his farewell address.  He recently traveled to the Department of Labor to make his (hopefully) final summation of his presidency – as he sees it (or at least hopes how we see it). 

Biden’s address to the nation did not get a lot of coverage.  None of the television stations interrupted normal programming to air the speech.  It received its greatest attention from MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, who used up an entire segment praising the speech and Biden – and criticizing the news media for not covering it.  But then, that is Lawrence O’Donnell and his shrinking audience.

In the first part of his address to the nation, Biden went over his list of accomplishments.  It sounded as though his staff had loaded one of his old campaign speeches in the teleprompter.  He self-praised the wonderful economy he produced with his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Bill and the Chips Act.  The public has heard that speech repeatedly – when he was running and then carried forward by the Harris campaign.  In both cases, voters were not buying it.

Biden is trying to convince a very skeptical nation.  According to the most recent FOX News survey only 23 percent of votes view the Biden economy in positive terms – 77 percent negative.  Only 33 percent of Democrats say that his economy has helped them – 17 percent say it hurt them, and 50 percent say it made no difference.  With those numbers, it makes no sense for Biden to make the economy his greatest contribution.  He is trying to pump life into a dead horse that has already turned to dust.

Since the speech was his own political obituary, one can understand why there was no mention of his contribution to the worst inflation in decades … the Russian invasion of Ukraine that he failed to stop … the failure to win the release of American hostages held by Hamas … the re-emergence of Iran as a sell financed state sponsor of terrorism …  and Afghanistan, of course.

A good portion of his speech, however, was in praise of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  Biden waxed on about the greatness of the New Deal.  I had a sudden impulse to check the calendar.  It sounded like speeches Democrats gave in the 1940s and 1950s when their Party WAS the Party of Labor.  At best, it was a speech reflecting the reverie of an old warrior living in the past.

As with such historical narratives, his romanticized reflections failed to address the fact that FDR was a strident racist and White supremacist – and that the New Deal programs were racist to the core — designed to shift jobs from Black workers to unemployed White workers.  In fact, the NAACP of the times called the National Recovery Act (NRA) the “Negro Riddance Act.”  But that is not what Biden wanted we the people to remember.

Biden is exiting the world stage with a whimper – a feeble old man who stayed at the fair too long.  He is departing office lamer than any lame duck President in modern times.  Perhaps it is just a problem of comparison.

So, there ‘tis.