Joe Biden Does Not Appear to Be Really Running for President

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks in Wilmington, Del., on June 30, 2020. (Patrick Semansky/AP Photo)

Commentary

The fantastic spectacle of former Vice President Joe Biden attempting to run as an outsider who can reform the Washington, D.C. system would be comical if the Democratic Party were not demanding that the voting public take the idea seriously.

Biden has been a Washington, D.C. insider and fixture since he won a Delaware Senate race in 1972, almost 48 years ago. Barack Obama’s former vice president is now an increasingly fragile-looking 77, and attempts by the media to avoid discussing his age-related issues have backfired and ended up calling even more attention to them.

His public appearances are short and often limited to his reading prepared statements. Even tightly scripted media interviews tend to go off the rails, such as when Biden snapped at a black media host, “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black!”

This was followed by a more recent gaffe in which Biden babbled that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus had killed more than 120 million Americans, which would be more than one-third the population of the country.

Legitimate questions have been raised about Biden’s cognitive faculties after several media events in which he struggled to remember names and talking points, even when he was seated and had notes in front of him.

On top of this, the news media was forced to highlight the fact that only in late June of the election year was the Biden campaign finally getting around to filling top staff positions in the battleground states.

Bloomberg News reported: “Joe Biden’s campaign has only begun to hire top officials in key states, leaving him without senior staff in battlegrounds like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, alarming some Democrats who say the leadership vacuum could hinder the party’s efforts to defeat President Donald Trump in November.”

This is simply astonishing.

I’ve been following presidential campaigns since the George H. W. Bush/Michael Dukakis contest of 1988, and I can’t recall ever seeing a national campaign waiting this long to fill key staff positions in states they need to win. Waiting until just four months before the election is like letting your opponent get two-thirds of the way to the finish line in a 100-yard dash before you begin running yourself.

In contrast to Biden, the Trump campaign has had fully staffed teams on the field in these crucial battleground states for more than two years. Evidence of the efficacy of the Trump ground game is seen from the fact Trump has repeatedly set primary voting records running unopposed.

When he finally emerged from his basement for his first press conference in more than 80 days, Biden told reporters he has no plans to hold any rallies due to “doctor’s orders.”

While Trump will be holding numerous rallies around the country and even moved the Republican National Convention from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, because North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper would not commit to allowing the Republican Party to hold a full convention, Democrats now plan to hold a “virtual event” in Wisconsin, with all the delegates staying home instead of traveling to Milwaukee. And now Biden is blithely telling the press he’s not holding any rallies.

What’s Going On Here?

The question must be asked: How much do you really want to win if you’re running a campaign this way?

From what I’ve seen, the strategy appears to be to run a bare-bones campaign and, after losing spectacularly, loudly claim President Donald Trump must have stolen the election. We’ll be told that it’s manifestly impossible for the irascible old white supremacist to have won by such a large margin while the country is right in the middle of undergoing a cultural shift away from its systemic racist past.

Biden doesn’t seem to be spending any real money thus far on his campaign. Hillary Clinton spent well north of $1 billion in her bid for the presidency in 2016. Biden may very well end up not spending even a quarter of that.

While Republicans have been setting fundraising and primary voting records this campaign season, the Democrats are seriously lagging on fundraising, on voter enthusiasm, and everywhere else except in the national media polls.

Right now all Democrats can do is point to news media polls giving Biden huge leads over Trump, some as high as 15 points.

As Chris Barron writes at The Political Insider, national media polls are essentially worthless until Biden leaves his basement and joins Trump on the campaign trail.

Eventually Biden will have to visit various states and hold press conferences where he takes unscripted questions from reporters and citizens. He’s going to have to debate Donald Trump at least three times.

Biden’s continued delay in naming a vice presidential candidate to run alongside him is understandable. Once he taps someone such as Stacey Abrams or Kamala Harris, most of the interest in his campaign will dissipate.

Due to the current national climate fostered by the corporate gaslighting about the “vast cultural shift” the nation is supposedly currently undergoing away from its systemic racist founding, Biden is almost sure to nominate a female of color when he finally does pick a running mate.

There’s even rampant speculation that Biden is going to be replaced, either before or at the Democratic National Convention in mid-August. The rumor goes that once Biden picks his running mate, he'll quickly step down for “health reasons” and the vice president pick will assume the frontrunner position.

Whatever happens, I don’t put much faith in the media polls. I believe Biden faces a huge challenge in replacing Donald Trump in the White House.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.