The Democrats Are Cackling Too Soon

From Conrad Black

It must be said that the Democratic political and press apparatus rose like a Pacific Coast salmon (completely out of the water), in the swiftness and uniformity of their levitation in favor of the post-Biden presidential campaign.

Liberated from the impossible task of reelecting the seriously declining Joe Biden, lumbered as he was with failure on the economy and inflation, immigration, crime, the Green Terror, and an incoherent and at times disastrous foreign policy, and by scandals in his family that probably exceed any ethical taint that afflicted any previous American president, the Democrats rose at once and very professionally to meet the miraculously improved electoral opportunity.

President Obama and Speaker Pelosi appeared to have been the chief architects of de-Bidenization: an incumbent president expressing, however implausibly, confidence in his imminent reelection, suddenly disappeared through a trapdoor beneath him. Mr. Obama at least advocated an open convention in which Mr. Biden would release his delegates and a full-scale campaign for the nomination would take place on the compressed timetable of a month.

President Biden, presumably in his last act as the effective leader of the Democratic Party, purported to direct his delegates to vote for Vice President Harris, and had the pleasure of denying his assassins the choice of his successor. The entire mass of the Trump-hating, mindlessly Democratic legions in the press instantly set aside the banal and inarticulate vice president with whom the public has become tediously familiar in the last four years and replaced her with the refreshingly new face of the standard-bearer of contemporary women and wise reform.

Ms. Harris’s complete fiasco as the administration figure chiefly responsible for the southern border was addressed by the simple proclamation of the 180° departure from the truth: she was not responsible for the southern border. All the malapropisms about Venn diagrams and electric school buses and the importance of time and our “staunch ally North Korea” were forgotten.

The open border and free medical care and the instant right to vote for all illegal migrants, like the war on fracking, all this had become obsolete years ago and the vice president had “moved on” as she did on her former pledge of nationalized health insurance with all costs paid by the federal government.

The Republicans seem to have been caught slightly off guard, even though President Trump had publicly predicted that Mr. Biden would quit the race and that Ms. Harris would be foisted upon the Democrats by the party bosses. What was difficult to foresee was that Democrats would instantaneously transform their bumbling, lackluster vice president whom nobody took seriously, into a silver bullet crisply reading banalities off the Teleprompter without the hesitations of the outgoing president.

There would be no hard questions, no real encounters with the press until sometime in the autumn. Everything was taped and scripted, and Ms. Harris has been a mechanical female candidate completely evading questioners as she barnstorms to the convention in Chicago this week.

Trump was slightly wrongfooted and was caught in the differing ambitions of those who travel hours to attend his rallies and want him to speak in a somewhat humorous way for 90 minutes, and those who watch him on television and want him to confine himself to the many authentic policy differences, almost all of which are in Trump’s favor in the polls, and to avoid attempted sarcasm about the vice president’s Christian name or the ancestry of her parents, or her father’s long-standing record as a Marxist professor. None of this has any relevance now. It is time to hammer the issues relentlessly.

The good news for the Trump side is that, as usual when the Trump-haters see any likelihood that they have the upper hand, they make premature claims to victory, and this trait has been amplified by candidate Harris’s inexplicable lurch further to the left.

Buckling to antisemitic pressures to pass over a moderate governor,  Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, as her vice presidential candidate choice for a far-left blowhard, Tim Walz, who has lied for decades about his military record and is best remembered for doing nothing as governor of Minnesota while Minneapolis burned after the death of George Floyd, and for establishing tampon dispensers in male washrooms in the public schools of the state.

He is for transgender surgery at an early age without regard to parents’ wishes and claims to oppose a southern border wall because it will simply be overwhelmed by an undiminished mass of migrants carrying 30-foot stepladders.

The Democrats frequently accuse the 45th president of hyperbole, and not without reason, but Mrs. Pelosi’s claim that Mr. Biden is a president of “Mount Rushmore accomplishments” is one of the greatest whoppers in American presidential campaign history. Even the Washington Post suggests that the economic plan, which includes fixing food prices, is vulnerable to the charge of “communist,” and it has been mistakenly compared to Richard Nixon’s wage and price regulation of 1970, which was only for 90 days and for a defined political objective.

We have also seen the return in strength of numbers of suspect polls: for CBS to be showing Ms. Harris ahead by three points nation-wide when Rasmussen has Trump ahead by four points leaves us in little doubt of which is more likely. Except for Trafalgar and Rasmussen, almost all the polls are operated by left-wing universities and press organizations and they traditionally underestimate Trump by three to four percent (but not seven percent).

While Ms. Harris’ own popularity has jumped to the mid-40’s from 34 percent, Trump’s has risen to 48 percent from 42 percent. The Democrats will not be able to go all the way to the finish line hiding their candidate like a pheasant under glass and trying to pretend that she was not the co-captain of the Titanic in all the failures of the Biden administration.

Trump needs to update his game and transfer his comedic and sarcastic talents to the issues that concern Americans. There is no reason to believe that the country will reelect the appalling administration of the last four years. Even if the Chicago convention goes fairly smoothly, if Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, Senator Vance, who is emerging as an excellent campaigner, stick to the facts and the policies that concern the voters most, they should be able to resume their glide path to victory. The left, in emulation of their candidate, are cackling too loudly and too soon.

First published in the New York Sun