Ramblin' with Roger

Kelly, that guy from western New York, asked several questions, two about the Presidents.

One scenario I had in mind when Biden was elected was that he would serve two years–essentially steward the country through the worst of COVID and get the economic recovery going–and then step down, making Harris President. Should he have done so? Would Harris have done better as an incumbent?

One thing I know about Joe Biden is that he is a traditionalist regarding the presidency. Barring extraordinary circumstances, such as severe illness, he would never serve two years and then resign. Only one president in our history resigned from office: Richard Nixon in 1974, less than two years after Joe became the US senator from Delaware.

Moreover, if he had announced too early that he would quit after two, any chance of his agenda being acted upon would have been almost impossible to achieve. I suppose he could have done it secretly and then announced it after the midterms of 2022.

However, completing a president’s agenda in the best situations takes time. There are negotiations to be had, and much of what he achieved was in the latter half of his term. I noticed that FOTUS felt entitled to do everything on Day One, but he didn’t even have his cabinet in place on January 21st.

Secondly, I don’t think he would have ceded the presidency to Kamala Harris in 2022. Many people, including me, thought she was a terrible candidate when she ran for president in 2020. Heck, her campaign didn’t even make it to the election year; she started it in 2019 and ended it in 2019.

HHH redux

Moreover, in 2022, she would have been burdened by immigration and inflation worse than in 2024. Conversely, the Biden support for Israel in the Gaza war harmed her greatly. It would have been like Hubert Humphrey running against LBJ’s Vietnam War in 1968; it would have been even more difficult for Kamala to separate herself from Joe.

She was a much better candidate than I anticipated when she ran in 2024. Still, many people hated the process of her becoming the Democratic nominee; even people I know IRL, who probably voted for her, were appalled by the manner in which she became the pick.

I have intimated before that it would have been a better choice for Joe to decide to be a one-term president much earlier. There have been willing, “successful” one-term presidents before. The most noteworthy in terms of his agenda was James Knox Polk (1845-1849), who managed to win the Mexican War and expand our manifest destiny. I’m not saying this is good, merely that he was triumphant at it.

His inner circle ultimately served him poorly by trying to manage his physical decline. As Dean Phillips suggested, Biden should have stepped down around July 2023. Then, there would have been a primary process that most Democrats would have embraced.

(BTW,  my candidate would have probably been Pete Buttigieg because he spoke so well to the rightwing news crowd, going on their shows regularly; he was like the “FOX whisperer.”)

All that said, I’m not sure that ANYONE could have beaten FOTUS unless the man were indicted shortly after January 2021. Jack Smith’s much-too-late report proves clearly that he was the felon we all knew he was. “But for [his] election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” the report states.

AotD

On November 22, 2024, Senator John Fetterman told ABC This Week’s Jon Karl: “You have a singular political talent [in FOTUS]. It’s undeniable. …if you’re not afraid to say all of those things, or, and after you survived an assassination, you literally were shot in your head and had the presence of mind to respond, ‘fight, fight, fight.’

“I was driving home from Indiana County (PA) at nine o’clock, and there was a Trump superstore on the side of a road, nine o’clock on Friday night, and people are buying swag. And that really crystallized in, at the assassination [attempt]… the day or two later, you start seeing people wearing shirts with that iconic picture. And, you know, the energy and the anger and, it’s like, wow, I really thought — in fact, I thought that might be ball game.'”

So, FOTUS has mastered the Art of the Deal, in which January 6, 2021, was a stroll through the Capitol. His pardon of the J6 insurrectionists was the final nail in the gaslighting coffin.

“They’re eating their cats” is merely Orange hyperbole. Yet I read how he picks out the lies and errors of others. Joe LIED about not pardoning Hunter. He was wrong about the fact that the Afghan Taliban wouldn’t take over Afghanistan that quickly.

Part of the reason is that many Americans, especially men, preferred Ben Shapiro, “Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, YouTube, and X over the mainstream media,” where Biden and Harris largely operated.  

Perhaps it’s a function of what author Jianwei Xun, in his book about FOTUS and Musk, calls Hypnocracy, a “new form of social control… that… induces a permanent functional trance through algorithmic modulation of collective consciousness… In the era of post-truth and artificial intelligence, power no longer operates through repression but through the manipulation of reality perception.” 

When this question came in, my daughter and I watched the 2005 Charlie the Chocolate Factory movie with Johnny Depp. She suggested that the children that Willy Wonka selected were like FOTUS. Much of the American public was like the indulgent parents who capitulated to their noisy brats.

BHO

What WERE 45 and Obama saying to one another at President Carter’s funeral, anyway?!

“Donald, you know that I think you’re a dipwad. But you’re gonna be president again, much to my consternation. [FOTUS laughs]. So you’re in ‘the club.’ Let’s get together and have a rational conversation somewhere about why you shouldn’t undermine the Panama Canal treaty or blow up NATO by seizing  Greenland and threatening Canada. Hey, if these actions don’t happen, people will think all of this is bluster and that you’ve ‘grown’ into the presidency. This could help your historical reputation!”