OPINION:
Amid the smoldering wreckage of last Tuesday’s elections, Democrats must ask themselves a simple question: Who is in charge?
Who is the leader of the party today?
Sadly — for them, anyway — the answer is simple and obvious. It is President Biden, who will go down in history as the only person — Democrat or Republican — to ever beat Donald Trump in an election, no matter how curious and strained that election was. (And the 2020 election only got curiouser with last week’s stunning results.)
The man who Democrats spent years assuring us was sharp as a tack. The man for whom Democrats rigged the Democratic primary cycle to get him renominated. The man they claimed outworks all the youngsters in the White House.
Until he was utterly destroyed in a debate by Mr. Trump — a debate that will go down in American history as the most devastating, victorious and consequential debate of all time.
The “gasp” debate.
And then Democrats rigged the nomination a second time to steal it from the man they had rigged it for in the first place and who had won all the votes. And they installed as their new nominee the only politician in America more unpopular and more inept than Mr. Biden.
That so many Democratic voters were surprised by Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss last week only proves how much they were lied to by Democratic politicians and their crazed media cult. Even a billion-dollar campaign could not beat Mr. Trump’s America First campaign, which spent less than half as much money and now offers to pay off the debts of the Democrats’ campaign.
So after all that, the leader of the Democratic Party remains Mr. Biden, former President Barack Obama’s vice president. The one who, in turn, gave us Ms. Harris. The only man to beat Mr. Trump. The crashing star of the “gasp” debate. The defenestrated one. The one who cannot walk through sand on the beach. He who can barely lift a beach chair.
The leader of the Democratic Party.
The sweetest part of all this is how bitter Mr. Obama is that Mr. Biden remains the leader of their party.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [mess] things up,” Mr. Obama was once famously quoted as saying about the man he picked to be his vice president. And today, Mr. Obama and his minions are viciously attacking Mr. Biden behind the scenes and blaming him for last week’s losses.
Mr. Obama’s old campaign manager David Plouffe, who was dispatched to bring some of that Obama “magic” to the Harris campaign, called the Biden campaign he inherited a “deep hole” that he simply could not dig out of.
Let us never forget that Mr. Obama gave us Mr. Biden, a man who had been hounded from national politics long before. But Mr. Obama needed Mr. Biden in 2008, and so he used him.
Now that Mr. Biden has outlived his usefulness, Mr. Obama has turned on him with a vitriol reserved only for men who are indebted to other men.
By Mr. Obama’s own calculations in 2008, he could not have been president without Mr. Biden. That’s why he needed him to be his vice president.
Yet once Mr. Obama had used Mr. Biden for all he was worth, Mr. Obama chuckled: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [mess] things up.”
After Mr. Obama finished giving us Mr. Biden, he gave us Mr. Trump. That, of course, after Mr. Obama managed to lose more than 1,000 seats across the country for the Democratic Party over his eight years in the White House. One interesting footnote about Mr. Obama’s two successful elections is that while he did win reelection, he won in 2012 with 4 million fewer votes than he got in 2008.
By the time 2016 rolled around, his legacy was in tatters. And last week, Mr. Obama continued his track record of losing.
Unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump only improves with time. In 2016, he won the election with 63 million votes. In 2020, he improved, receiving 74.2 million votes, beating Mr. Obama’s best total by 5 million votes. Last week, Mr. Trump got 74.8 million votes and counting.
As Mr. Obama whimpers back to the sidelines in defeat, Mr. Trump continues his ascent in the greatest political comeback in American history. And the doddering Mr. Biden remains the leader of the Democratic Party.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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