by Richard Schulman
As with Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy in 2008, some conservatives entertain a hope that a Biden administration might bring improvements in US governance. Josef Joffe, conservative publisher-editor of the German weekly, Die Zeit, sees a decline of responsible leadership in the West. In earlier years, that abdication of international leadership made possible, he writes, the 1930s Depression and World War II.
He sees President Trump leading the US and the West into another such decline:
[T]he West is emulating hedgehogs that roll up in a ball when threatened….Instead of “manifest destiny,” it is “leave us alone.” Stop the invasion of people and products… Nativism and mercantilism are raising ramparts everywhere, rending the fabric of globalization and sharpening great-power rivalries….
‘[E]veryone for himself’ blunts cooperation, be it economic or diplomatic. Stifling trade, nations at loggerheads sacrifice the benefits of coalition-building as a tool of global order. How could Mr. Trump corral Berlin and Paris when he treats them as economic enemies?”
Joffe praises the liberal international order that the US led after World War II. Now, he worries.
Today, this Golden Age of U.S. diplomacy is yielding to MAGA, and damn the rest. If Trump stays, he will finish the demolition job. But it is not foreordained that a Biden-led America will gather the pieces and glue them together.
Good leadership from Democrats unlikely
Not only is it not foreordained: it almost certainly will not happen, as recent developments in the Democratic Party have made clear. Whereas Trump remade the Republican Party in his own image, the opposite has happened in the Democratic Party — which is reshaping its two malleable candidates in its own progressive image. Both are well-suited to this role. Joe Biden and his newly selected running mate, Kamala Harris, are political opportunists. Their views throughout their careers have effortlessly shifted to whatever at the moment would secure them patronage and political power.
The progressive press has a euphemism for this in the case of Mrs. Harris. Rather than admitting the truth that she is a shameless opportunist, she is described as a “pragmatist.” That “pragmatism” failed her spectacularly in her short-lived presidential campaign, where she made a fool of herself by constantly shifting from one position to another, hoping to eke out an electoral advantage in a crowded field.
The party, Pelosi, and Schumer in the drivers’ seat
A Biden-Harris administration will be whatever the party, as channeled through Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, believes enhances Democratic power and electability. All will be bent to political expediency, even science. Take Biden’s recent call for compulsory wearing of masks outdoors. This has it exactly backwards. The science is clear on this point. The risk of contracting Covid-19 lies indoors, not outdoors. But what a triumph and photo op it would be, Democratic politicians reason, if they could get the whole population to march around in public outside wearing masks in fealty to Democratic decrees! This would be right up there with the nation going vegan, exchanging cars for bicycles, and guns for yoga pants.
Xi’s preference
China has indicated that it wants Biden, not Trump, as the next US president. One could say that Biden is Xi Jinping’s Manchurian candidate.
Did Biden’s campaign committee, who ghost write everything the candidate reads haltingly from his basement teleprompter, deliberately set him up to be replaced by Kamala Harris early in a Biden-Harris administration on the basis of the 25th amendment? Harris is everything Biden isn’t: relatively young, high energy, mentally acute, hyper-ambitious. She is the perfect identity politics nominee for appealing to key constituencies the Democrats hope to hold or win: the Bernie Sanders progressives, suburban women, blacks, immigrants, and hyphenated-Americans.
A nasty piece of work
But Harris is widely regarded, even in her home base of California, as “a nasty piece of work.” This came out for all to see in the first primary debate where she demagogically played the race card against Biden for his misgivings — to his credit — about the forced busing of African-American students to white schools. Busing triggered race riots and did little to improve education for either party. In a recent late-night interview, Harris brushed away her trashing of Biden by repeatedly saying “It was just a debate,” followed by her trademark gales of laughter when confronted with an embarrassing question she didn’t want to answer.
The nastiness came out even more strongly in her malicious questioning of Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings. She put on a repeat performance of that nastiness with her trademark vague and insinuating questioning of Attorney General Barr when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is what unscrupulous prosecutors do when they have no interest in ferreting out the truth but just entrapping some unfortunate witness by a single misstep or mis-remembrance.
Her first speech, a bad start
Her first speech after receiving Biden’s selection of her as his running mate was filled with bald lies, such as the claim that Trump had caused the current unemployment and economic setback rather than the pandemic of Chinese origin.
Prior to her selection as veep, journalists were warned that if they attacked her they would be branded as racists and could incur the wrath of Black Lives Matter activists.
Her rapid rise in California politics, the most progressive-dominated state in the nation, was achieved by agreeably making herself the mistress of Willy Brown, the politically powerful Speaker of the California State Assembly, despite the fact that he was twice as old as she was, married, and with children. He rewarded her with a BMW, two generously-paid patronage jobs, and subsequent political sponsorship. In sleeping her way to the top, she was not quite the role model the feminist movement might have wished.
The party’s domination by the SF Democrats
Harris is the second important “San Francisco Democrat” – the other being Nancy Pelosi – to assume a top leadership in a party that has re-fashioned itself as the party of the California-led bi-coastal elites.
Since joining the US Senate, she has initiated no significant legislation. Her voting record, however, has been further to the left than Bernie Sanders.
Like the rest of the California left, she endorses open borders and has compared the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service (ICE) to the Ku Klux Klan. She defended San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy even after a multiply-deported illegal immigrant gunned down a woman on San Francisco’s pier. She called the San Bernardino massacre a “tragedy” but made no mention of its jihadist inspiration.
Return of the tax and spend Democrats
Harris favors break-the-budget spending and sharply increased taxes, as does Biden. While Trump has hardly been a fiscal conservative, he’s at least had the sense to lower taxes and call for lowering the capital gains rate. Biden, by contrast, plans to raise that rate. This is a sure-fire guarantee to kill investment and growth.
Among the budget-busters that Harris favors are free college tuition — despite the fact that the public schools, controlled by the Democratic Party’s teachers’ unions, are failing to provide the K-12 education necessary to prepare students for college.
She favors free full-service public healthcare for everyone, including illegal immigrants
She supports rent control, that favorite Democratic tactic for replacing a healthy urban housing stock with decay, key money, and political favoritism.
AOC’s Green program
Mrs. Harris was an early supporter of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green program and the Democratic Party’s intention to convert the US over to windmills and solar panels, a policy which created California’s present energy disaster. She supports a ban on fracking, an end to energy exploration on federal lands, and ultimately of fossil fuel use altogether. In this, she is one with the party’s progressives, who are against environment-preserving pipelines and Alaska’s native population, which depends on royalties from that state’s oil drilling.
It’s no secret that Putin loves America’s Democrats and Greens. Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton turned over US uranium deposits to Russia’s nuclear monopoly Rosatom. US electricity customers will be paying Russia for nuclear fuel contracts for years to come. But oil and natural gas production is our nation’s gold mine, if Biden, Harris, and the Democrats don’t kill it, as they intend to do. If they succeed, this will cause more damage to the US economy than the coronavirus has.
Mrs. Harris favors the confiscation of privately-owned firearms, a proposal that will not sit well with a population threatened by a decrease in police protection brought about by the Democratic-sponsored Black Lives Matter movement.
She also wants to revoke all limitations on abortion. This may explain her animus against Catholics and their charitable organization, the Knights of Columbus. Biden, despite himself being a Catholic, also shares her animus against that faith.
Harris, like many in her party, especially its progressive wing, is anti-Israel and refuses to condemn the anti-Semitism of Reps. Omar and Tlaib. She also wants to restore Obama’s disastrous Iran deal.
The first 25th Amendment president?
In a normal election year, Mrs. Harris’s character and political shortcomings would of be lesser concern, given the relative unlikelihood of the death in office of a president. This is not a normal year, however. Mr. Biden’s age and declining mental condition greatly improve the chances that Mrs. Harris, with her leftist politics, lack of political principles, and scarcely any Washington experience, will succeed him.
Let us hope that well-intentioned European conservatives like Josef Joffe join with Japan’s Shinzo Abe and Australia’s Scott Morrison and others to help keep the West together in cooperation with whatever administration occupies the White House as of next January.
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