Joe Biden: The incredible vanishing president
Yup, Joe is off doing his backslapping Santa Clause routine with a sack full of Trump vaccines slung over his back in Europe. It's easy duty, trashing America, agreeing in advance to do anything any european wants to do.
But then it will be back to the basement. He is certainly not coming back to head out to some place where the Trump vaccines don't get you any adulation. such as the border.
I read an article about Kamala in one of the lefty papers yesterday and although it was lame I have to admit that I can see that it will gain traction soon and fast.
The growing assertion among the dem lefties is that Kamala is a victim of Joe's sexism- that is to say, Joe does all the glad-handing, backslapping stuff but stuck her with the immigration problem which is basically an insolvable (by dems approach anyway) problem and nothing but a losing assignment to her that will leave her badly tarnished- if not already. As I said, I think it is a totally lame argument but I must say that I can it growing in the far left camp.
It is lame because Kamala has no other duties- perceivable ones anyway. so it is not sexist- actually the opposite-to give her an important assignment. She is not one of Joe's handlers so it is not like she is hustling around taking care of all sorts of other duties that Joe should be doing and that he is using her like a dog. Nope. She is VP and is supposed to be doing important stuff. She wanted visibility for a future presidential run. Great. You have it now.
The other way, of course, that this little crusade to see Kamala as being the victim of a thankless assignment will manifest- and soon, very soon, is to start asking Joe why he is not going to the border. The whole "go to the border" thing has gotten to be absurd. It is like somehow you are supposed to argue that you went once or twice back when you were in California so that counts- as if it is like saying you ate the worm in the bottle of tequila once so you got that out of the way.
Not sure what Kamala's working arrangement is. She defended not going to the border by saying she was focused on building relations with the northern triangle, but she did a a hit and run visit and they said they hate her and dont like what she says. Okay, so now what? What does "working with the northern triangle" look like now? Just lopping a check over the wall at them? Okay, that works for them.
The other think that goes unspoken in the media every day is that Kamala our VP
hates the border patrol and ICE with a passion. In a normal administration you would learn by going to the border but also by building communications with the people who work there on the front line. But no, she not only does not go there to see the nasty stuff with the kids and migrants but she also does not have the balls or the decency to communicate with our own federal people there.
Anyway, it's about Joe, and when he comes back. He will be back to the glad-handing stuff. Kamala is still stuck hard on how to get out of the muck and the lefties - such as that Univision reporter and AOC- are beginning to turn on her bigtime. But they dont want to turn on her. Old white guys are the designated target. So Joe going to be taking some incoming too bigtime on allegedly sloughing this off on to Kamala.
What a mess. Anyway, watch for some coming rounds of "poor Kamala." Heh, I even heard one left, Leslie Marshal, get all lathered up and start yapping about how the guatemala dictator there was really the one responsible, not Kamala. Ahhh, no shiite Leslie. It's a snakepit. We have been dealing with them for years and they have gotten rich off of every dime we have sent to those countries and Kamala is about to send them even more. They are good at what they do. Kamala and Joe? Not so much.
and yup, Trump takes hits in this article too. But Joe is the one in office now.
Joe Biden: The incredible vanishing president
Images of Joe Biden giving speeches and shaking hands with foreign dignitaries during
his ongoing trip to Europe will take up space in the news over the coming week. But once he returns to the United States, the pattern that's prevailed over the past five months will likely resume.
Which means the president will once again disappear.
It was common for Democrats during the 2020 presidential campaign to talk encouragingly about how boring a Biden administration would be in comparison to the nonstop cycle of chaos, cruelty, and outrage that prevailed under President Trump. Where Trump tweeted partisan provocations day and night, keeping reporters and pundits furiously scribbling, analyzing, and denouncing 24/7, life under a Biden presidency would return to normal, with a slower pace and the president receding from public view, allowing other people and topics to proliferate, and our nation's public life to settle down and heal, perhaps even with a modicum of unity returning.
That isn't what's happened. Biden has indeed stepped back — in comparison to Trump, absolutely, but even compared to Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Biden simply doesn't say or do very much in public. He's content, instead, to allow surrogates, staffers, and Democrats in Congress to take the lead in getting the administration's message out. The result is that it often feels as if we have no president at all.
Yet the nation hasn't quieted. On the contrary, the virtual wars that roiled the country over the previous four years have continued. The primary difference is that the president plays very little part in them. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it's not especially encouraging either. Indeed, it points to deeper cultural and political changes that set the context for the presidency.
Beyond the desire to do the opposite of Trump, there are several strong arguments in favor of the president playing a smaller role in our politics. Treating the president like a monarch isn't healthy for a democracy, so anything that reduces his role is good. A less prominent head of the executive branch might allow power to flow back to Congress or the states and away from the imperial presidency. A largely invisible president is less likely to whip up war hysteria.
Then there's the case for returning to the original conception of the president as standing above politics. Maybe the best way for a president to rise above the din of political battle is for him intervene less often in partisan disputes by remaining largely silent as they rage around him.
As I said, these are powerful arguments. But do they pertain to the world we actually live in? I'm reminded of Aristotle's tendency to separate out arguments that are "true simply" from those that are true in particular concrete situations. If we could start the country over again from scratch, knowing how we've ended up, it might be a good idea to redouble our efforts to avoid the presidency taking on the role that itdidover the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. But given the way history actually unfolded, I wonder if any of these ideal arguments pertain.
Through most of the 20th century, the president was at once the head of the executive branch, the leader of a political party, and the commander in chief of the armed forces who would on occasion speak to the nation as a whole and be treated as its titular leader. Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, urban or rural, man or woman, white or black or brown, when the president gave an address to the nation, especially in times of crisis, the overwhelming majority of Americans would listen with respect, confident that he was speaking for and to the whole country. In this respect, the original conception of an extra-political president persisted, existing alongside the more political roles he would also play.
This continued even as the parties became more ideologically polarized — and the country as a whole more
centerless — over recent decades. In a country divided by party, class, race, education, region, culture, religion, entertainment, news sources, and myriad other differences, the president was the one person who could stand at the center of our national life and speak to us all as parts in a larger whole. Even George W. Bush and Barack Obama could still do this on occasion.
