OPINION:
Hidin’ Biden announced this week that he would no longer travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to accept the Democratic presidential nomination. Instead, Joe Biden will accept the nomination in Delaware (presumably in his basement where he has mostly been hiding out for months).
The former vice president spent much of 2020 hidden in the basement of his home away from the questions of the national press corps. Some of his critics blame it on his age (if elected, he will be 78 on Inauguration Day, while Ronald Reagan was 70 when he was sworn in as the 40th president).
Others question Mr. Biden’s mental stability. Joe Rogan, who endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders earlier this year, said on his podcast, “I believe there is also a large group of people that are very uncomfortable with a man who seems to be mentally compromised winning the election and doing so by hiding,” and went on to say, “He was just at another thing the other day and forgot where he was.”
The real reasons Mr. Biden’s campaign team is largely hiding him from the public are not his advanced age or some sort of early-stage dementia. The real reasons are Mr. Biden’s years of gaffes, his tendency to say anything to get elected and his embrace of radical positions to win over Sanders supporters.
Mr. Biden’s more than four decades of public life are littered with gaffes. Shortly after taking office as vice president, Mr. Biden spoke to members of the House Democratic Caucus about how Democrats could suffer at the polls in 2010 for supporting the $900 billion “economic-stimulus” package. At their annual retreat, he said, “If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30% chance we’re going to get it wrong.”
A few years earlier, then-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden was caught on tape trying to connect with a Native-American person saying, “In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian-Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.” Hard to imagine a Republican saying this without calls for his or her resignation.
More troubling than Mr. Biden’s gaffes are his years of seemingly saying just about anything to get elected to office. During his first of three attempts to be elected president, Mr. Biden said, “I started thinking as I was coming over here, Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?”
The press found out that Mr. Biden had plagiarized exact passages from a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. They later found links to other speeches.
Later, footage surfaced showing Mr. Biden had inflated his academic record at Syracuse Law School. A report also revealed that he plagiarized a law review article for a term paper. Eventually, Mr. Biden dropped out of the race for president.
In 2020, Mr. Biden told an audience that on “This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid. I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.” Politifact gave his statement a Pants on Fire rating after they interviewed Ambassador Andrew Young, who confirmed that neither of them was arrested in South Africa.
Beyond a long record of plagiarized and false statements, Mr. Biden has an equally troubling history of switching positions to fit the crowd. For years, he opposed taxpayer funding of abortion. During the 2020 primaries, he turned on his position. Same for the filibuster rule in the Senate. And it is hard to imagine him leading racial reconciliation in our country after he was the author of a bill to ban busing to desegregate our schools.
More than anything else, Democrats want to hide Mr. Biden from the American people so they can’t hear how he has outsourced his agenda to Mr. Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the radical left. They know that swing-state voters will not embrace a socialist agenda.
They don’t want voters to know that Mr. Biden’s plan will raise taxes on nearly every hard-working taxpayer in America. They don’t want voters to know that Mr. Biden’s plans will cost states like mine manufacturing and agricultural jobs. They don’t want voters to know that Mr. Biden favors taking money away from our police departments at a time when violent crime is surging in many of our largest cities.
They don’t want voters to know, so they keep hiding Mr. Biden in the basement. Hidin’ Biden should not have been elected president in 1988 or 2008 – and he shouldn’t be in 2020.
• Scott Walker was the 45th governor of Wisconsin. You can contact him at swalker@washingtontimes.com or follow him @ScottWalker.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.