https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/ ... term=first
Joe Biden’s Decoy Presidential Candidacy
by CHARLES C. W. COOKE, June 11, 2024
Biden is operating as a stand-in, a widget, or a MacGuffin, whose primary purpose is to make it to November 5 of this year without expiring.
In life, as in science, it can be useful to extrapolate, and here, in the summer of 2024, it comes time to do just that. It is by now near-universally acknowledged that Joe Biden is too old to perform his duties. It is less universally acknowledged that this has serious implications — the chief among which is that, for all the rococo pageantry that attends his reelection campaign, Joe Biden is not, in fact, running to be president of the United States.
I do not offer this observation in a conspiratorial tone. Joe Biden won the 2020 election legitimately; he is currently serving as the rightful occupant of his office; and he remains eligible to run again, to win again, to take office again, and to exercise all the levers of power that the Constitution would grant his office during a second term. Instead, I mean that Biden is operating as a stand-in, a widget, or a MacGuffin, whose primary purpose is to make it to November 5 of this year without expiring. Most candidates have plans for their coveted four years; Biden has none. He does not expect to be there, and the public agrees with his hunch.
This, if I may borrow a phrase from the Trump years, is “not normal.” Per recent polling, 62 percent of voters think that, if Biden is reelected, he will die in office. Never, in the modern era, have voters been asked to cast a ballot for a candidate who they believed was unlikely to see the end of his term. In 2008, 20 percent of Americans thought that John McCain was too old. In 1996, 27 percent of Americans thought that Bob Dole was too old. In 2024, a whopping 86 percent of Americans believe that Biden is too old to be president of the United States. In effect, Biden’s candidacy represents a sort of reverse Keynesianism, built atop the flippant promise that, in the short run, he’ll be dead. And they say that our politics has lost its ambition!
That Joe Biden has been transmuted into little more than a game token is routinely implied by the substance of our political conversations. Inevitably, discussions of Donald Trump’s candidacy revolve around what will happen if Donald Trump wins the presidency, and, inevitably, discussions of Joe Biden’s candidacy revolve around what will happen if . . . Donald Trump wins the presidency. Filter out the partisan hallucinations in which Biden is cast as a successful chief executive, and you will find little more than anti-matter left within the residue: Biden must win, because Donald Trump must not, and, because Biden must win, then Biden cannot be too old or too incompetent or too misguided, because if Biden is too old or too incompetent or too misguided, then Donald Trump might win, and, as was established earlier, Donald Trump must not win. This, perhaps, is why Biden so often likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” The alternative is all he’s got — and, at his age, irritating the Almighty is a risky idea, indeed.
The fruits of this approach have been extremely peculiar. If political correctness is defined as the repetition of mantras that everybody knows to be untrue, the Democrats’ 2024 pitch might be defined as the elevation of “ought” over “is” alongside the berating and exiling of anyone who declines to play their proper role within the charade. Yesterday, Biden’s approval rating dropped to a record-low 37 percent in the 538 average of polls, and, instead of absorbing this information as if it were part of the fabric of our shared reality, the political establishment elected to lash out at the messengers. In and of itself, this is odd. But what makes the whole thing so utterly, startlingly, unfathomably weird is that the people who were responsible for this outburst are the very same people who will immediately begin orchestrating Biden’s removal if he manages to win in November after all.
Does that sound strange? It shouldn’t, for, at this stage, Biden is little more than a political instrument, to be played for the benefit of his team. Presently, Biden’s utility lies in his staying in the race. Twenty-three seconds after he has won, this will change. And, when it does, the reversal will be astonishing in both speed and scope. Instantly, all of Biden’s senile tics will be visible to all. Within seconds of his inauguration, the Science will begin to cast doubts on the ability of any octogenarian to do such a demanding job. After a couple of bad polls, the muttering will begin; after the first public slip-up, the Sunday shows will swoop in; and, as the party starts to look forward to the midterms, the number of amateur grim reapers will multiply into a requiem chorus that drowns out all but their own predilections. The late-night comics will observe the green light. The friendly cable channels will practice their sorrowful faces. The papers will channel Hamilton, whose demand for “energy in the executive” will be quoted as a constitutional imperative. And when the last weight falls, it will become clear as day that Joe Biden wasn’t a presidential candidate but a lumbering decoy, in the first virtual election in the republic’s long line.
With the sarcasm put to the side why can't Tulsi find traction in her own party? Since we now know she is a Russian tool does that work against her? Maybe HRC will invite her to a midnight meeting in Ft Marcy park so they can chat. 
