BIDEN IN BRIEF
Scott Johnson, Powerline
By contrast with Peggy Noonan, to take a prominent example, Gerard Baker provides an unillusioned assessment of President Biden and Vice President Harris in his Wall Street Journal column “Biden Emerges as Progressive Government’s Mr. Bad Example.” There is no false hope, no sentimentality, no uplift, no gush or mush in his evaluation:
It’s not too harsh a judgment to say that this is a man who has risen to the top of American public life without a trace of accomplishment. When you’ve been in national politics for almost 50 years, you ought to have achieved something, if only by accident. But this journeyman politician, when he wasn’t getting almost all the big issues wrong, was largely a bystander. He is now a husk of a leader, a dangerously debilitated figure, who oscillates between displays of vacuous incoherence and weird, angry outbursts, like a confused old man at the wrong bus stop.
Meanwhile, a heartbeat and a spine-chilling cackle away from the presidency is another living rebuke to the idea that government is virtuous and wise. Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated, evidently to the alarm of much of her own staff, that she is simply another of Mr. Biden’s many mistakes—perhaps the biggest one yet. It is a dismaying state of affairs that we must all pray nightly for the continued health of an inept president to avert the calamity of a worse one.
That is a bullseye.
