The Wheels are falling off the Democratic Party
November elections look to be a Red wave
It is hard to imagine a worse performance as President than Joe Biden’s first 15 months since his election. On the day of his inauguration he canceled the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline while it was under construction and nearing completion. Now in the face of a global energy shortage (much of which is of Biden’s own making) Biden is trotting off cap in hand to ask dictators in Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia to increase oil output to ease the pressure high oil prices has put on gasoline, while stifling U.S. oil & gas production to placate his own radical left. Biden’s profligate spending on left wing policies of little value has contributed to inflation now running at a 40 year high of 7.9%, and, the crisis at the Southern border has done nothing but get worse since Biden took office.
Despite Biden’s “climate change” rhetoric and divisive and destructive energy policies, the Energy Information Administration reports CO2 emission rose 8% in 2021 and are expected to rise another 1.8% in 2022 and keep rising in 2023. Pretty terrible for a President who wears his climate change nonsense on his sleeve, but no real issue for the world since it is clear that CO2 emissions are harmless and even beneficial. In the meantime, “climate change” has pretty well fallen of the radar of voters, impressing only 10% of voters who are more concerned about the economy, healthcare and national security. A clear majority of American voters do not approve of Biden’s job as President.
The mess Biden has created is only going to get worse. Rampant price increases in commodities like aluminum, copper, zinc, lead, tin, cobalt and nickel have yet to flow through the economy but will surely exacerbate the inflation picture, not to mention driving up the cost of electric vehicle (EV) manufacture since the batteries that power EV’s need large quantities of nickel, copper and cobalt all of which are today in short supply. Massive federal deficits of about $3 trillion in each of 2020 and 2021 are certain to throw gasoline on the inflation fire and Biden keeps encouraging Congress to pass multi-trillion dollar spending bills in what seems to be a desperate effort to buy enough votes to keep control of the House and Senate this November.
Biden’s foreign policy gaffes are even worse than his domestic performance. The long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan could have been a triumph for him but he bungled it so badly it left a stain on his copy book. His vaccilating “support” for Ukraine suffering the Russian invasion reeks of weakness, with the U.S. ignoring its obligation to protect the sovereignity of Ukraine based on a 1994 treaty signed by President Bill Clinton. Biden’s attempt to negotiate a nuclear weapons agreement with Iran will need some finesse since Iran would be foolish to trust the United States after Biden’s blatant abrogration of the agreement to protect Ukraine’s independence in return for their dismantling what was the third largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. Instead, it seems likely Biden will come up with an agreement with Iran that removes the sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and has a facade of virtue-signaling verbiage pretending that Iran will curtail its nuclear program, but devoid of any enforcement mechanism that has teeth.
The only western leader who looks weaker than Biden is Canada’s own Justin Trudeau who went into hiding when a peaceful protest came to Ottawa and from cringing in his bunker invoked the modern version of Canada’s War Measures Act to punish the protesters by arresting them, jailing them, seizing bank accounts and calling them racists, misogynists and Nazi’s (they were none of those). Within a few weeks of the protests end, Canadian provinces started to dismantle the vaccine mandates the protesters were complaining about and only the Ottawa government kept those mandates inplace, hoping to avoid the obvious embarassment of using the Emergency Act to quell a protest demanding an end to vaccine mandates only to end those mandates a few weeks later as unnecessary.
Comparison with Trudeau won’t get Biden’s party much voter support but since he doesn’t have to face the electorate for his own office until 2024, he can find ways to spin the likely rout Democrats face in November as happening in spite of his leadership and not because of it. That won’t wash but it is all he has left. His choice of Kamala Harris as Vice President is a better comparison for him since she looks inept, ineffectual and out of touch with reality every time she speaks. I suspect the Democratic Party will not have either Biden or Harris on the ballot in 2024, since neither has a hope in hell of re-election as I see it.
Barring some brilliant new strategy from the Democrats, November will likely be a sea of red states with Republicans taking over the House of Representatives and possibly ending the stalemate in the Senate, with even Democrats turning their attention on trying to keep governors in office in blue states. Biden’s legacy will be making it clear to Americans that a Democrat Party government is destructive to prosperity.