Feehery: Is Democrats’ Mr. Perfectly Fine a reelection disaster? 

When Democrats settled on Joe Biden as their candidate in 2020, they seemed to think he would be perfectly fine. He wasn’t completely crazy, he seemed moderate, he was happy enough to hide away in his basement to make the campaign all about President Trump, and he had enough experience in Washington to go along the established order that the nabobs of the capital city prefer.   

But like Taylor Swift pointed out in her 2008 hit song, sometimes Mr. Perfectly Fine turns out to be a disaster. Or as one friend of mine likes to put it, everything is fine until it is not fine.  

Biden has had some bad breaks in his life, and we should acknowledge the tragedy that he has had to endure up front. But when it comes to politics, Biden has been far luckier than good.   

He is prone to wide exaggerations about his own life experiences and has a penchant for at times stealing the words of another. He often says things that have no possibility of being true. Because voters seemingly grade on a curve, Biden’s gift for gab and Irish charm has carried him to a position of power that just about nobody saw in his future. That includes his former boss, President Obama, who talked him out of running in 2016 and who made clear to anybody who would listen that he didn’t think Biden was up to the job. 

Biden has a habit of making exactly the wrong decisions. On international issues, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Biden, “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”   

From his vaccine mandates to his mask mandates, from his reckless spending plans that helped to spur inflation to his embrace of the defund the police crowd, from his doubling down on the climate change hysteria to his confusing rhetoric on Ukraine before the conflict started, Biden has consistently made bad situations immeasurably worse. 

Three things are now confronting Biden as he seeks reelection, outside his less than stellar performance. First, his age. Second, very real questions about how he got elected in the first place. Third, his corrupt business deals with his son, Hunter. 

Biden’s geriatric bearing has long concerned voters, and it frequently is one of most cited reasons why voters voice discomfort with his reelection. He was old when he ran for vice president. He will be the oldest president by close to a decade should he win reelection and serve out his second term. And despite the aviator sunglasses and cool sports car, Biden is not a young old man. The voters notice and they don’t like it. 

The latest revelations that people inside the intelligence community put their hands on the scale to tip the election in Biden’s favor makes his election appear to be illegitimate in the eyes of many voters. Did the CIA and FBI pressure Big Tech to suppress stories that would have hurt Biden in the closing stretch of the 2020 campaign? Should we take the allegations of whistleblowers seriously when they say that the Bidens are not playing by the same sort of rules as everybody else?   

And at what point can we just ignore how Joe Biden got so wealthy mostly on a government salary? How come so many of the roads to Hunter Biden’s wealth lead to hotspots like China and Ukraine?   

The Democrats can pretend all they want that Mr. Perfectly Fine is going to walk into the nomination and easily dispatch either Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But just remember: Everything is fine until it’s not fine.   

Feehery, a partner at EFB Advocacy, blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).