Recent polls indicate that Republican front-runner Donald Trump leads incumbent President Joe Biden eight months before the presidential election. And age is not the only factor on voters’ minds — Biden may now be losing the likability advantage he has held over Trump.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette contends that Democrats are solely responsible for the predicament of their aging candidate. Making matters worse, Navarrette argues, any hope of another Democratic candidate emerging is now unrealistic given how close we are to November.
Damn you, Democrats. Republicans accuse you of making bad policies that harm the country, but what you really excel at is making bad decisions that hurt yourselves. Anyway, what are Republicans now? They’re just as broken, just as corrupt, just as hypocritical, just as dysfunctional and just as lacking in principle as they accuse you of being.
But you, Democrats, have become so comfortable with using the failings of Republicans to deflect attention away from your own shortcomings that it’s hard to get through to you when you really screw up. And boy, have you gone and done it now. You stuck us with Joe Biden, a perfectly affable and good-natured public servant, who is, if you believe the polls, likely to get clobbered by he who shall not be named in November.
Well, how was it that special counsel Robert Hur described Biden, whose handling and possession of classified documents Hur was tasked with investigating? Ah yes, “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Ouch. It’s no wonder those words stung Democrats like a swarm of hornets, so much so that they instinctively attacked Hur for what Biden’s defenders called a “partisan hit job.”
Biden’s age — 81 — is a sensitive issue for a lot of Democrats. A majority of them have been telling pollsters for the better part of the last year that they didn’t want Biden to run, insisting that he was too old to serve out a second term as president, and it continues to this day.
