By Glenn H. Reynolds | New York Post
According
to the Wall Street Journal, 63 percent of voters believe the country is on the
wrong track. - AP / Susan Walsh
It’s time to admit it. Less than a year in, Joe Biden’s
is a failed presidency. Biden knows it, the press knows it, and voters know it.
And our foreign adversaries like China and Russia know it.
It’s also time to look at the “cabal” of business, labor
and political leaders who foisted the Biden administration on us. That won’t be
hard, as they were openly bragging about their efforts less than a year ago.
The failure is obvious. The administration is so
desperate, it’s begging the press for better coverage. (What, they’re supposed
to lie about gas and food prices? I guess so.) The Chinese and Russians are
moving aggressively against the United States and its allies, on the ground, on
the seas and even
in outer space, because they don’t fear repercussions from a tired,
incoherent president who presides over an administration of woke incompetents
and Obama retreads.
And voters? Voters know firsthand. A staggering 63
percent of them think the country is on the wrong track, according to this
week’s Wall Street Journal poll. Only 27 percent think it’s on the
right track. Forty-six percent expect the economy to get worse; only 30 percent
think it will get better. Far more expect inflation to worsen than to improve.
Thirty-three percent think crime will get worse. Fifty percent think the
nation’s political divide will worsen.
Gas
prices hit an all-time high in California last month, with the highest prices
in the country. - AP / Noah Berger
Hispanic voters — the Democrats’ great demographic hope
for national dominance — no longer lean Democratic but are now evenly split
between the parties. Economic issues are a particular concern, and it’s easy to
see why: With grocery and gas prices skyrocketing, with rents climbing and with
supply-chain, border and crime-related economic issues, the outlook is poor.
It’ll take more than another lame Bill Kristol column accusing Donald Trump of
racism to distract them from that.
Normally when you get a bad president, voters are to
blame. They decided what they wanted and, in H.L. Mencken’s famous phrase,
deserve to get it good and hard. But in saddling America with the Biden
administration, the voters got more than a nudge.
As Time
magazine reported shortly after the 2020 election, a “cabal” — Time’s
word — of “left-wing activists and business titans” worked to get rid of Trump.
It pushed mail-in voting. It moved to block election fraud suits brought by
Trump and supporters. It employed social media censorship to mute pro-Trump
arguments and amplify anti-Trump arguments. It sponsored protests.
According
to the Wall Street Journal, 50 percent of voters believe the political divide
will worsen. - AP / Richard Drew
Time calls this a “conspiracy to save the election,” but
in truth it was a conspiracy to save the election for the Democrats.
The consequences in terms of lost faith in democracy have been severe, but the
worst effect is that the winning ticket was never seriously vetted by the media
or the campaign process. As a result, we have a president whose mental capacity
is openly doubted by much of the nation.
And the line of succession isn’t much better: Kamala
Harris’ competence is mocked even by fellow Democrats, and her own staffers are
lining up to jump ship. Harris didn’t win a single delegate in the Democratic
primary and is polling even worse than Biden. And third in line is 81-year-old
Nancy Pelosi, who seems energetic and sharp only by comparison with our aging
chief executive.
In a normal campaign, Biden’s weaknesses would have been
obvious. Normal candidates endure grueling schedules with frequent speaking
events that mercilessly reveal any shortages of energy or intellect. It’s now
clear that had Biden had to do that, a majority of voters would have seen him
as unfit.
But the “cabal” ensured that the press didn’t pressure
him to leave his basement. Questions about his abilities were silenced. And the
press also helped by drumming up and deploying COVID hysteria against Trump,
sometimes openly hoping that it would harm him, other times deploying the
hysteria to support mail-in ballots and other questionable practices.
Vice
President Kamala Harris’ approval rating recently dropped to 39 percent,
according to a Rasmussen Reports poll. - AP / Susan Walsh
Time’s piece says, “It sounds like a paranoid fever dream
— a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and
ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change
rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
But that’s OK because, we’re told, “They were not rigging
the election; they were fortifying it.”
Were they? Were they really?
America now faces a dangerous time, internationally,
domestically and economically, with obviously inadequate leadership at the top.
If disaster ensues, the people who openly bragged about their efforts to
install the Biden administration may wish they had kept quiet.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law
at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
