Having posted this interesting piece yesterday Article: "What’s next for Kamala Harris?" Not satire or parody here's something from the conservative National Review. And despite it all, the country still remains pretty much 50-50. Trump only won the popular vote by a little over 2 and a half million.
"It wasn’t one thing — it was everything"
President Biden owed his election to the narrow coalition of voters who excised Donald Trump from the political scene while leaving the GOP all but intact. ... Biden’s ascension stemmed from his willingness to buck the progressive Left and from his not being Trump. But he was seduced by a cadre of partisan historians who charmed him with the promise that he could become a transformative figure. In the end, Biden got his wish.
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By the end of 2021, fiscal measures taken to ease the pandemic’s effects caused inflation to spike. As consumers began to resent their declining purchasing power, they were treated to a legislative bait and switch: a green-energy spending binge marketed as the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
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Farther afield, hot wars in Europe and the Middle East, with a third looming in East Asia, imperiled ever more American interests. Each of these crises made it even clearer that Biden’s foreign-policy hands were out of their depth.
The president’s pigheaded withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan set the tone. The administration evacuated U.S. soldiers before it exfiltrated civilians and our Afghan allies, gave up Bagram Air Base, broadcast misleading claims about the security and accessibility of the U.S. embassy in Kabul, and was forced to rely on the Taliban to provide security amid the scramble out of the city’s civilian airport. ...America’s humiliation in Afghanistan was the prelude to many more debacles as the international threat environment deteriorated during Biden’s tenure.
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Following that failure, the president made maximalist rhetorical commitments to Ukraine’s defense but did not match them with action.... Likewise, the president spent the first three years of his tenure attempting in vain to coax Iran back into the defunct Obama-era nuclear accords....
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The administration did its best to coddle the antisocial malcontents tearing up their campuses and terrorizing American streets. It castigated Israel in public while encouraging it only in private. It floated cease-fire deal after cease-fire deal and implied that the recalcitrant party was the Benjamin Netanyahu government rather than the Hamas terrorists.
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Biden soon tried to integrate social fads relating to trans athletes into his administration. He didn’t stop with restoring Obama-era Title IX policies, some of which robbed students accused of malfeasance of their due process rights. In the last year of his term, Biden broadened the definition of sex-based discrimination in Title IX to include “gender identity,” paving the way for male school athletes to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. The rule change was a lightning rod. Only 26 percent of respondents in Gallup’s May 2023 survey agreed with Biden’s policy.... the president seemed fixated on issues of next to no import. “Biden says U.S. capitalism treats workers, consumers like ‘suckers,’ ” Reuters reported in the summer of 2023. What sparked this little tirade? The exorbitant cost of Taylor Swift tickets. Yes, seriously.
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Biden and his party spent the past four years giving every voter in America at least one reason to gravitate toward the Republican column. The Democratic Party’s accumulating failures and intrusions into private affairs culminated in the restoration to power of a figure who was twice impeached, became the first president to lose reelection in a generation, and had been convicted of felonies. Kamala Harris’s attempt to fabricate “joy,” only to fall back into Biden’s tired “fascism” attacks on Trump, underscores what a struggle it was for her to escape the president’s gravity well of failure. A more capable politician may not have fared better.
It takes work to alienate the diverse coalition Trump secured for himself. The Democrats’ historic repudiation is a feat. Biden hoped posterity would see him as an epochal figure, and he got what he wanted. The GOP wouldn’t be where it is today without him.
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