Jessica Tarlov’s encomium for President Joe Biden is curious. “Joe Biden bows out of the 2024 race — we lost a good president and a good man,” ran the whole Fox News headline, but it’s second part, after the dash, that is curious. To the best of our knowledge, Sleepy Joe Biden did not resign the presidency.
Ms. Tarlov has been a contributor to Fox for many years. She is a well-known “liberal Democrat.” The article’s praise for the Biden Administration is clear in the blurb: “American Rescue Plan, infrastructure funding and gun safety are all things Joe Biden can be proud about.” Uh, OK.
“Biden just announced that he won’t be seeking re-election this November. And even though I knew it was coming, it feels profoundly sad to me,” wrote Ms. Tarlov below the headline.
Sad on a human level. Joe Biden is a fundamentally good man who did not want this outcome. He believes he can win, even if the data doesn’t say so. And sad on a political level. Biden was an incredible president with a record to be enormously proud of. Whoever is at the top of our ticket will no doubt celebrate his accomplishments – and him! – but there’s a joy to how he talks about what the Biden-Harris administration has gotten done that I’ll really miss.
“I know that I speak for regular Democrats in thanking Joe Biden for an incredible four years and saying that we’re really, really sad. Father Time came for a really good one,” concluded Tarlov.
Chad Pergram, reporting on Fox, claimed that White House insiders had called Biden’s debate performance in late June evidence that his campaign was “unsustainable.” Since that June 27th night, and usually with a pretense of shock at Biden’s decline, major Democratic Party bigwigs, from Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to a huge cadre of billionaire donors, had been calling on him to give up the campaign.
But, oddly, not to resign the presidency. Apparently running the country is no biggie; running a winnable campaign is.
1 reply on “Peculiar Praise”
Biden did not want to fold completely. Resigning the Office while continuing to campaign for reëlection would of course be still more absurd, and he needs the Office to pardon various members of his family. Had he issued those pardons shortly prior to abandoning both the campaign and the Office, the appearance to many would be that he’d been brought-down by impending exposure of his family’s influence-peddling racket, and a more energetic investigation of that racket would surely follow, corrosive to the Bidens even if they escaped prosecution.
By belatedly endorsing Harris, Biden makes her seem a betrayer if she participates in an invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment against his will. But negotiations with the Bidens are surely continuing. A promise of pardons may get Joe to resign from the Office, so that the mainstream of the media can then talk-up how all decent people are morally obligated to rally around her and what a magnificent job she will be doing as Our President™ under Truly Extraordinary Circumstances.
When the pardons are issued, by Biden or by Harris, the excuse will be that, without them, the Bidens would be subject to malicious prosecution by Ultra-Maga Republicans.