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I Take It All Back, Joe! Please Don’t Quit!

This is a cri de coeur.

I know what Joe is thinking right now. Joe knows that his 60-year quest to become president is crashing and burning. He knows that things are looking pretty hopeless. He knows that he hasn’t got a prayer. He knows that he will never sit behind the Resolute Desk. He knows that he will never spend the night in the White House bedroom. He knows that he will never fly on Air Force One. He knows that he will never hear “Hail to the Chief” as he enters the room. He knows that he will be remembered as something other than “a distinguished elder statesman”—it will be more like “geriatric three-time loser.” 

I know what Joe is feeling right now. The temptation to quit is overwhelming. Joe is tired. His brain, or what passes for that information processing organ inside Joe’s cranium, is barely able to keep up with the surrounding reality. His body has all the vigor of a near-octogenarian, because it is the body of a near-octogenarian. His mouth at times seems to operate independently from the rest of him. His dentures free-float while Joe is live on TV. His memory has yawning gaps in it, to a point where he can’t even remember which state held the contest he had just lost, hours earlier. 

Quitting Is Not an Option!

Well, Joe, as the nation’s foremost Bidenologist, I am here to tell you: you can’t quit on us now. This is a battle for the soul of our country, and you are the one true warrior that this battle needs. 

Yes, Joe, things are looking pretty grim for you, now that the New Hampshire results are in, and the dust is settling. You were right to flee New Hampshire as the votes were being counted—the only thing worse than being in South Carolina, as they announced your catastrophic fifth-place finish, would have been staying in New Hampshire.

Yes, once upon a time, you were the frontrunner. In April, when you announced, you had support numbers in the 40s, while your nearest competitors could barely crack 20 percent. Sadly for you, it was all downhill from there.

But Joe, as someone who knows you better than you know yourself, I am here to tell you: this is no time to give up. Quitting is simply not an option.

Someday, when the history of the 2020 campaign is written, the biggest mystery will be how so many people were fooled for so long into believing that Joe Biden was a viable candidate. 

Why were so many people willing to write checks to an enterprise clearly destined for an epic fail? How could so many sign up for a campaign that was listless and lacking even a modicum of energy? 

How could so many pundits and TV talking heads take seriously a blundering fossil who exhibited signs of mental and cognitive disconnect on a near-daily basis? How could so many elected politicians endorse a worn-out old man they knew could not possibly go the distance? How could so many journalists accept the notion of Biden-the-electable-candidate, when his campaign staff did everything in their power to whisk the candidate away into a witness protection program? 

How could so many supposedly smart people miss or ignore the obvious signs that the Biden campaign was a Titanic sailing in search of its iceberg?

A Lily-White Spectacle of Ultra-Wealthy Frauds

It distresses me greatly now to admit that by publishing my fair share of pieces skeptical of Grandpa Joe’s virility and campaign prowess, I played a small part in helping expose Joe Biden for what he is: a shambling, bumbling, confused doofus who should not be within a 500-mile radius of the presidency. And it distresses me even more because we—all of us patriotic Americans—need Joe Biden now more than ever. 

With Biden shuffling about the country and saying whatever weird and inexplicable things pop into his head, the race will stay unsettled.

I take all of my criticism of Grandpa Joe back. I am sorry I ever uttered an unkind word about Gramps. As the country’s preeminent Bidenologist and American Greatness’s leading expert on all things Biden, I will now state categorically and unequivocally: Joe Biden should not—he must not!—drop out of the race.

All of the candidates who weren’t porcelain-white by now have been ejected from the Democratic nomination process. The hate group masquerading as a political party, the same political party that once fought a four-year civil war to retain and perpetuate the institution of slavery, is clearly very uncomfortable with the idea of minority candidates, even a century and a half later.

The Democratic Party’s elitist nomination process has devolved into a spectacle of old lily-white multimillionaires arguing with old lily-white billionaires about which of these ultra-wealthy leftist frauds and limousine-ensconced hucksters is the most authentic victim of racism and discrimination. With straight faces, these wealthy charlatans lecture ever-shrinking TV audiences about how they will apply their own personal victimhood experience and lengthy record of lap-of-luxury suffering to public policy. 

The DNC-sponsored “debates” between the merely very wealthy phonies and the uber-wealthy quacks are unwatchable, even by those who have an interest in politics. I gave it a good college try a few times, and simply gave up on the whole debate thing sometime in the fall—it defies my imagination how anyone in full possession of his mental faculties can tolerate more than 10 minutes of that preposterous drivel. 

I can’t imagine how professional journalists, whose job it is to watch those things, manage to get through the agony of watching the Democratic debates without a stiff drink and two ibuprofens. Don’t believe me? Try watching the next one, and see for yourself. You’ll regret it quickly enough.

Holding Back the Tears

The Democratic Party “race” for the presidency, such as it is, is now down to Bernie-the-Marxist frontrunner with his roughly one-quarter of the Democratic electorate, and the so-called “moderate wing” trying to choose between Mayor Pete, Fauxahontas (becoming more irrelevant by the hour), Amy from the Midwest, Steyer the really really rich coal guy, Bloomie the fabulously rich Wall Street guy, and Grandpa Joe. If I were a normal Democrat, I’d be crying tears of despondency. I’d be reaching for my antidepressants. Hell, if I were a normal Democrat and I wasn’t on antidepressants, now would be a great time to start.

With options like these, it is no wonder that Democratic Party voters can’t coalesce around one alternative to Bernie. And I wish there were bigger quotation marks I could put around the words “moderate wing”—a normal voter who still identifies as a Democrat, if there are still such people left out there, has to select between the merely loony, the certifiably insane, the downright crazy, and the barking mad.

Now, it is true that Biden’s performance in Iowa was a belly flop. Biden’s performance in New Hampshire was more like diving head-first into an empty swimming pool. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that Biden’s performance in the Nevada caucuses on February 22 will be on par with his New Hampshire debacle. In other words, there is simply no other way to look at it—Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy is dead in the water, and Biden’s discombobulated wreck of a campaign is going exactly nowhere.

And that is precisely why Joe Biden must remain in the race

For the good of the country, if he loves America as much as he professes, Joe Biden cannot abandon his hopeless quest. It is his patriotic duty to continue the fight, no matter how pointless or quixotic. Biden needs to continue lumbering from state to state, the names of which he can’t recall, from city to city he can’t identify, trying to sell people on the absurdly unsellable idea that a future president is standing there before them. 

It is a manifestly ridiculous notion, but there are just enough takers out there to make it worthwhile for the rest of us, for Biden to keep going.

Fight On . . . and On . . .

I want to see the Democrats spend the next four months tearing into each other to the bitter end. I want to see them going for each other’s throats like deranged pit bulls in a cage. I want to see them ripping each other to shreds in debate after debate that literally nobody, except the truly addicted political junkies and the hapless media hacks, watches. I want the battle for the Democratic nomination to become a modern-day Verdun. 

I want Democrats attacking each other with everything they’ve got, until Republicans no longer need to search for political advertising material, and don’t even need to advertise in the first place. I want to see their fur flying as if a pack of tomcats crazed with hunger is clawing at each other over dumpster scraps in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant.

With Biden in the race, it will take the Democrats that much longer to settle on a nominee. With Biden shuffling about the country and saying whatever weird and inexplicable things pop into his head (“You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier!”), the race will stay unsettled. Biden will siphon off just enough votes from the other “moderates” that nobody will be able to consolidate the “moderate” vote. I can’t wait for that consolidation to not happen.

I want to see a bloodbath on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in July, when not even the superdelegates can bring order to the chaos. I want to see vote after inconclusive vote, all of them failing to produce a winner and a nominee. I want the convention to last for weeks, until the American public is sick of it, and the pundits run out of metaphors to describe that train wreck. 

I want the eventual nominee so wounded and exhausted by the internecine combat against his future intraparty “allies,” that he will need a month-long vacation just to retain whatever vestiges of rationality he has left. I want those future “allies” to be so unhinged by losing that they will pay only lip service to support the eventual Democratic nominee.

And Joe Biden can help make it all happen, by staying in the race until the bitter end. Please, Joe—do not give in to temptation. Do not quit on us!

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About George S. Bardmesser

George S. Bardmesser is an attorney in private practice in the Washington, D.C. area. He is the author of Future Shot and Distance to Target, as well as a contributor to The Federalist and American Greatness. He is sometimes heard on the "Inside Track" radio show on KVOI in Tucson, Arizona, and sometimes seen discussing politics (in Russian) on New York’s American-Russian TV channel RTVi and the Two Cats Video Productions politics podcast.

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