By: The Editorial Boarad – wsj.com – July 12, 2024

Democrats fear defeat in November, but the bigger threat is the next four years.

Thursday evening’s press conference was a microcosm of their self-induced peril. The President showed no sign of political retreat, or introspection, and he was just coherent enough to prevent a wholesale flight from his candidacy. Yet he lost his train of thought numerous times, bailing out of sentence after sentence with his now trademark “anyway.” We counted 10.

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While Mr. Biden may make it through a particular event, Democrats can have no confidence he won’t have another debate-like meltdown between now and November. As Democratic Rep. Jim Himes put in on CNN in explaining his call for Mr. Biden to step aside:

“Imagine that three months from now we get another performance like there was in the debate, right before the election. Do you want to take that risk? I don’t.”

More important for the country—and more damning for the Democrats—Mr. Biden gave the appearance of an old and enfeebled man who has no chance of meeting the demands of the Presidency for another four years. If Democrats are honest, they know America’s adversaries are savoring the prospect of Biden II.

Here’s Mr. Biden’s answer on Thursday to a question about Volodymyr Zelensky’s request that Mr. Biden let Ukraine use U.S. weapons to strike targets inside Russia:

“We have allowed Zelensky to use American weapons in the near-term, in the near-abroad into Russia. Whether or not he has—we should be—he should be attacked—for example, should Zelensky—he’s not, but if he had the capacity to strike Moscow, strike the Kremlin, would that make sense? It wouldn’t.

“The question is: What’s the best use of the weaponry he has and the weaponry we’re getting to him? I’ve gotten him more HIMAR—I got him more long-range capacity as well as defensive capacity.

“And so, our military is worki—I’m following the advice of my commander in chief—my—my—of the—the chief of staff of the military as well as the secretary of Defense and our intelligence people. And we’re making a day-to-day basis on what they should and shouldn’t g—how far they should go in. That’s a logical thing to do.”

That’s a hard-to-follow jumble that didn’t begin to answer why Mr. Biden has restrained Kyiv from getting the weapons and employing a strategy that would help Ukraine prevail. Mr. Zelensky doesn’t want to attack Moscow with U.S. weapons. He wants to attack its supply lines and missile bases in Russia’s south. Neither the President nor his policy are going to get better in a second term.

Democrats ignore this policy weakness, focusing instead on Mr. Biden’s falling re-election prospects. Democratic election analyst Doug Sosnik usually surfaces every four years to assure Democrats they’re going to win. But this week he showed up in the New York Times to say Mr. Biden has only a single, narrow path to victory in the Electoral College.

Mr. Biden must sweep all of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where he now trails. And he must beat off Mr. Trump’s challenge in states that Republicans haven’t won in years but are now in play—New Hampshire, Minnesota, New Mexico, Maine and Virginia. The Times now wants Mr. Biden to withdraw from the race, so the timing of Mr. Sosnik’s analysis is no accident.

Every day brings new establishment defections, and new reports of behind-the-scenes scheming. What are Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi up to? Is Chuck Schumer having second thoughts as his Senate majority looks in jeopardy? The progressive press is in open revolt, with even the most slavishly partisan columnists saying Joe must go.

Will he? Who knows. We’ve been saying since last year that for the good of the country he should withdraw. But Democrats, blinded by their hatred for Mr. Trump, refused to acknowledge the truth about Mr. Biden’s manifest decline. They thought Mr. Trump was unelectable, or that Democratic prosecutions would surely take him out.

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Mr. Trump is also flawed and unpopular and may have hit his voter ceiling in the polls. A younger Republican would be winning in a rout. This means Mr. Biden can point to some polls showing a still close race, and it may be why he’ll refuse to leave even as the panic and pressure from his fellow Democrats increase. The Democrats did this to themselves, but the tragedy is they also did it to the country.

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Source: The Bitter Biden Reality Sinks In – WSJ