Occam's Razor

There’s a new alarming poll from the Washington Post: 58% of Democrats want someone other than Joe Biden to be their 2024 party’s nominee for president. I don’t. I want Joe Biden as the nominee because he’s best positioned to win the election and deliver results to the American people.

I guess I can understand why some find Biden uninspiring. I can see why many say he’s too old, being our oldest president. But in rocky times, Biden is proving to be a small bit of sanity among a candidate pool of mostly extreme and insane people. He doesn’t strike me as suffering any mental decline. I can’t say that about his likely competitor, Donald Trump, who recently mistook his rape accuser E. Jean Carroll for his second wife Marla Maples. If Biden is suffering cognitive decline, it’s not obvious. With Trump, it’s indisputable.

Biden’s a proven Trump killer. He won the 2020 election with a record 81.3 million votes. Moreover, he won a majority (51.3%) of the votes cast. He won in states where bettors say he shouldn’t have: Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. Moreover, he’s gotten things done. The Inflation Reduction Act was a huge redirection of federal money into things that really matter, like renewable energy. He’s created more jobs than any other president and brought down the unemployment rate to a new low. Moreover, real wages are increasing.

Despite all this, deficits have actually been decreasing. Had he lost, that would not be the case. Trump’s tax cuts added a third to our national deficit, and in just four years. Insulin costs are now capped at $30 per month for most diabetics. That’s a huge windfall for diabetics who could easily spend hundreds of dollars a month on insulin. No one thought this would happen because no one envisioned senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would vote for it. Despite the narrowest of margins, Biden got it through. By many accounts, it was the most impactful law for the common man since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administrations.

Biden’s sunny personality is a big change. He’s not your typical pompous windbag of a president. He knows presidents aren’t God and come and go. “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” He laid his finger on what the 2024 election is going to be about: abortion, MAGA extremists and the loss of liberty by Republican legislators and governors. He knows all this change is disrupting and Americans are sick of it. Given how Biden has governed so far, it’s likely four more of the same if he wins reelection. You won’t find Biden advocating for women being prohibited from getting abortions. His campaign is entirely mainstream, not extreme. This will be comforting to most voters. I’m convinced that if anyone else had been president, the Inflation Reduction Act just would not have happened. Biden pulled it off with tiny majorities.

Moreover, since voters gave the presidency to Trump in 2016, America has soured on him. No national poll shows they prefer Trump to Biden. Trump is likely to win the Republican presidential nomination again. I can’t stand the guy but I say good: he’s virtually a shoe in to lose if he tries to reprise the 2020 election. So Trump is the safest bet for their nominee if you want to keep a Democrat in the White House in 2024. What you give up with Biden is the glitz. What you get is a man experienced with running government and who you can count on to be mainstream.

So I’ll be giving to Biden’s campaign. In many ways, Biden is a sleeper president. What you get from him is actually a very effective president and politician. I could use four more years of that and so I bet could you. For you Democrats bored with Joe Biden, I say look again at his record.