Opinion: Saagar Enjeti
The veneer of Joe Biden for president is being slowly unraveled to the point of imminent political collapse.
NYMag’s Olivia Nuzzi paints a sorrowful portrait of the former vice president whose campaign is bloated by democratic establishment insiders and even a former secret service agent who follows Biden around to project what she terms “big presidential energy.”
I don’t know why exactly but having an employed former secret service agent to protect the aura of presidential ‘electability’ is just about the perfect exemplar of the Biden campaign. Nuzzi puts it best perhaps in this paragraph
Quote “for many of these staffers the campaign feels like it should be a coronation. Joe Biden 2020 isn’t a labor of love or ideology. it’s about the proper order of things. it’s about who’s entitled to what. it’s the vehicle by which the democratic party establishment arrives once more to power, the displaced Obama and Clinton professionals reinstalled to the levers of power.”
This perhaps more than anything else I’ve ever seen boils down the Biden campaign to its essence. Biden is simply the vehicle thrust upon all us in order for the army of K street lobbyists and consultants to restore the cash cow that was the presidency under Barack Obama. A Biden campaign restores the natural order of things in which oceans of outside money groups coalesce around the white house, advisory councils, and trade meetings. He resets the clock on a multi-billion-dollar machine that has been disruptive.
And that’s what America rejected in 2016 and there is very little evidence that anybody outside of Washington wants it. Biden’s campaign numbers show one on complete life support if current trends continue. as I discussed on Friday, a POLITICO report from Thursday tells us that less than one third of Biden’s donations are from small dollar donations less than 200 dollars. the lowest number in the entire race.
That means Biden is wholly dependent on big dollar donors to keep his campaign afloat, and guess what? Even they are starting to realize that it’s probably not going to work out. The New York times reports that Biden’s finance director sent an email to bundlers proclaiming, “We need you to dig deep” while trying to ensure them that they had enough money in order to keep the entire enterprise afloat.
The times also noted that wall street donors feeding Pete Buttigieg at one of his latest big dollar fundraisers felt that quote: that Biden already lost. that is a very bad place to be. ultimately what the former vp is doing is trying to convince us all that all the real metrics that matter for campaigns don’t matter simply because he is already generally well known.
Don’t forget people, the very own president that he served under won’t endorse him but has no problem endorsing Justin Trudeau in the Canadian election. Biden truly wants us to believe he asked Obama not to endorse, let’s take a listen.
Biden’s crowds? Well they’re lackluster. his money raised from actual supporters? well they’re not around. A general enthusiasm for his candidacy? Well that doesn’t really exist. Ultimately, this is a lesson that 2016 forever broke the backs of those who try to cloak what’s good for the American people in the traditional way of doing things. It resounded not just through the Republican Party but but the Democratic one as well.
This is actually great news for all of us. the fundamentals of American elections are shifting before our very eyes. The democratization of the internet means that traditional channels of “stovepiped” information can be gone around, and it means you can finally interface with the candidates and actually get to the point in which you need to find out who you should actually support.
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