(Steven Hayward)
Of course he isn’t. It’s an absurd question, but there is some mischief to be made about this, and I’m just the guy to do it.
Here’s why I thought of that absurd headline, which I assert is not mere clickbait. In the debate, Slow Joe said Antifa “is an idea.” Well, what is one of the favorite slogans (and book titles) of conservatives? Ideas Have Consequences. And bad ideas, in politics, often have the worst consequences, like gulags. Antifa is one bad “idea” that any sensible person ought to be able to repudiate, but by dismissing Antifa as “an idea,” Biden shows that he actually doesn’t take ideas seriously.
He is the ultimate political chameleon without a single principled bone in his body; his only principle is what will promote Joe Biden. Kamala Harris was correct when she attacked Biden in the first debate last year for opposing busing to achieve racial integration in the 1970s. You’ll also find several things in Biden’s record from back then that put him to the right of several Republican senators at the time. He voted against the watered down Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act (the original version of Humphrey-Hawkins called for open socialism and central planning of the economy, but the final version that came for a vote was largely neutered). Biden criticized Humbert Humphrey, a dying man at the time, saying that Humphrey “isn’t cognizant of the limited, finite ability government has to deal with people’s problems.” That kind of talk will get you canceled in the Democratic Party today.
Worse: Biden voted for the Republican-sponsored capital gains tax cut in 1978—the first step in the supply-side tax revolution. Howard Jarvis, fresh off his big win with Proposition 13 in California in 1978, endorsed Biden for re-election to the Senate that year.
And this leaves aside his long record of statements over the years that, coming from anyone else, would get him banned in today’s Democratic Party. That he is the last man standing from the Democrats’ large candidate field suggests a party that is exhausted and out of real ideas.
