President Joe Biden (right) and First Lady Jill Biden walk off stage after speaking at a campaign rally in late June in Raleigh, North Carolina. (AP Photo / AP
President Joe Biden (right) and First Lady Jill Biden walk off stage after speaking at a campaign rally in late June in Raleigh, North Carolina. (AP Photo / AP
Opinion by Shane Te Pou
Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour Party activist.
Drawing deeply on his faith and with the support of a close-knit Irish Catholic family and before meeting future wife Jill, he set about raising his two surviving sons, Hunter and Beau, commuting back and forth on trains from their home in Wilmington, Delaware to his Senate office in DC.
For most, if not the entire duration, of a long and consequential career in that body, in lists of Senators by net worth, Biden was reliably the poorest. He also battled to overcome a speech impediment that, along with a lack of Ivy League pedigree and his proneness to verbal flubs, made Biden easy to underestimate, even disparage.
This was, Biden intuitively grasped, a strength masquerading as weakness. Setbacks, adversity, the howls of elites who think they know better: Biden hasn’t just overcome these before, he has made them his rocket fuel.
Biden’s knack for exceeding expectations persisted well into his presidency. He achieved major, even historic, policy wins by stitching together bipartisan majorities nobody believed possible, including investments in infrastructure on a scale not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and in ways that will allow the US to maintain its competitive edge for decades to come.
His steadfastness on Ukraine and deft diplomacy in Europe has restored the Nato alliance left in tatters after Trump’s first term. His hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan and over-indulgence towards Benjamin Netanyahu on Gaza are undeniable blemishes on Biden’s first-term record, but in both cases he shares the blame with decades of bad foreign policy enacted by both sides of American politics.
You might think him deluded, blind to reality, bloody-minded, stubborn, arrogant, egotistical, whatever, and there’s some truth in all of that, but if you were looking for a politician who backs out of a fight because the odds are against him, Joe Biden was never going to be your guy.
Watching my Democratic friends wrestle with the Joe Biden conundrum feels a bit like those divorces that occur among family or friends when you love everyone involved and wish more than anything else that you don’t have to choose sides.
But Democrats have an election to fight, one that will determine far more than who occupies the White House for the next four years. They have a one-seat majority in the US Senate to protect and a real shot at snatching a majority in the House of Representatives.
Beyond DC, there are hundreds of races to determine who controls state legislatures, county administrations, as well as elect countless mayors, sheriffs and judges. If Biden, or a prolonged family dispute over Biden, drags on until November, it risks being a wipeout for Democrats up and down the ballot. If the unusual restraint on display over the first two days of Donald Trump’s nominating convention are any indication, Republicans know this too.
The assassination attempt on Donald Trump can only increase sympathy for him. Photo / Getty Images
While the attempted assassination was a despicable act of political violence, rightly condemned across the board and carried out by an individual without an apparent partisan agenda, it would be naive to avoid the conclusion it helps Trump, even as both sides strain not to admit as much out loud.
Aside from the sympathy that naturally comes from a literal “dodged bullet”, it draws vital attention away from Trump’s many vulnerabilities at just the time voters were beginning to pay attention.
Add to that the Biden crisis on the Democratic side and there is an understandable air of victory at the GOP convention but, so far at least, they’re keeping their swagger in check.
Democrats remain, understandably, panic-stricken. Despite record highs on Wall Street, historically low unemployment, sharply falling crime levels after a Covid spike, even an appreciable drop in the number of illegal crossings at the Southern border, they appear headed for defeat against a man with 34 criminal convictions, who still denies he lost in 2020, who lies with such frequency and abandon that fact-checkers have given up counting, and who appears determined to set the US rule of law ablaze as he pursues retribution for enemies and rewards for himself. It is, for liberals, a mind-bending state of affairs.
Beware the punditry of easy answers – and I offer none here.
But it does seem like standing mute before the coming storm is not an answer. It’s definitely not what Joe Biden would do.
He would back himself to defy the odds, fight to the very finish. The tragedy of this moment is that for Democrats to fight like Biden against the extreme Maga threat, they have to do it without him.
