I do find it interesting how people accuse me of being obsessed by Trump, yet I see there's 546 pages in the topical thread which I haven't posted in (and don't intend to). My interests are primarily in the electoral process and systems, and so there's really no point in saying anything about Trump until the Midterms have been held as that's when the primary process will begin, although Trump is doing exactly what I said he would be doing and that's non-stop campaigning from the day he was kicked out of office until Election Day 2024. So he is well and truly on his pathway to re-election. I reckon the only thing that will stop Trump running in 2024 is if he either dies or has some other serious health issue take him out (or if he gets convicted of something).
The real unknown at the moment is whether Biden will stand for re-election. Trump filed his re-election form with the FEC for the 2020 on the day he was inaugurated in 2017. To be fair, that's highly unusual and narcissistic, so you can't read anything into the fact that Biden hasn't filed for re-election yet, however it goes to illustrate the point that there is no question that Trump is running in 2024. He can barely contain himself from announcing it now, he's regularly holding mega rallies that are effectively 2024 campaign rallies. C-Span is already reporting them as 2024 campaign rallies. So while I note Trump is campaigning already, I'm not too interested in the 2024 presidential candidates until we get to late 2023 and I'm certainly not interested enough in Trump to closely follow what he's doing in the meantime. Remember the 2024 election won't be about Trump, it'll be a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration.
Biden and the Democratic party face a zugzwang and they really need to make a decision about their dilemma the moment the 2022 Midterms have been held if they want to have any chance of re-election in 2024. And I don't mean up against Trump, I mean up against any generic Republican presidential candidate. A party in power rarely wins an election if a sitting President isn't running. Biden, despite what many here will argue, would have lost in 2020 if not for the Covid-19 pandemic and Trump's eccentric and erratic behaviour. Well that combined with an exceptionally strong anti-Trump media. Take note that Biden certainly hasn't solved the pandemic like he promised he would in his campaign, in fact there have been more deaths from Covid-19 to this point in October in 2021 than there were last year in 2020. With the vaccination rate so low in America the pandemic is going to carry on well into 2022 and, as a result, the Democrats will get hammered in the Midterms.
Let me be clear, I don't think old Sleepy Joe intends on running in 2024. We get the entertainment of two primary contests at the same time if he doesn't, and who can't be happy with that? Well here's the issue, at least for the Democrats. If Cunt has not fallen off a cliff he will breeze through the Republican primaries almost like he's still a sitting president. It'll be entertaining to watch, but it won't be a contest. If they really want to have a serious competitor they need to select one well before 2024. Hold the primaries in 2023.
Say what you will about the presidential competitors, it's become quite clear to any neutral observer that the US Presidential Primary process rarely results in the selection of the best candidate for office. 2016 may be seen as an extreme example, lest we forget that the Democratic Primaries selected Crooked Hillary to be their candidate for president. The process is rife with corruption on both sides:
The process rarely results in the election of an upstanding citizen to the highest office. Obama was a rare exception, had he been allowed to run for a third term he would have easily beaten Donald J Cunt.
Even when it works better, it's still a lengthy exercise of self-harm each party inflicts upon themselves. The quirks of the system is really what allowed Donald J Cunt to win in 2016 - he was up against a crooked warmongering figure of the establishment who had been badly bruised in the Democratic primaries.
At this point if Biden was to stand in 2024, he would be favoured to win second place in the two-horse race. A lot will come down to whether the Dems lose the House or the Senate in the Midterms, and whether the Biden administration solves any of the crises that it is facing or effectively implements the agenda it was elected into office to deliver. Yes that means he absolutely needs both a major foreign policy success, and a major domestic policy success. Foreign policy will be difficult, because he already has a major failure with the Afghanistan withdrawal. Domestic policy is not going much better - his administration hasn't controlled the Covid-19 pandemic or provided effective leadership over it with a credible plan to bring the country out of the pandemic, he's facing a massive migration crisis, and the urgent police reforms promised to win over the black voters have yet to materialise. He has not shown himself to be collaborative, pragmatic, and flexible, the key qualities he possessed as a former lawmaker that was promised to the voters to heal divisions in both the Democratic party and the extremely partisan politics to bring people together and “heal the nation”. He's done nothing to further that, and he needed to start on day one it wouldn't really help him to start now.
He does not have a vaccine strategy, and that's very clear by the way. The Dan Andrew's government in Victoria is the same. Making vaccines mandatory for everyone (or incredibly large parts of your population) is what you do when you don't have a plan. Forcing people to take medical interventions against their will with the threat of losing their job is the most self-defeating policy there can possibly be. Remember, the Biden campaign squarely framed the Trump administration on being incompetent with the Covid-19 Pandemic. I pointed out before that Biden's promise that he made in one of the debates to “shut down the virus, not the economy” was stupid because he couldn't deliver upon it. Well so far we've seen neither consistent policy nor competent policy. Americans don't trust their regulator the FDA, that's one reason many of them don't want the vaccines, what exactly is the Biden administration doing to reform the FDA and increase public confidence in it? That's a real problem that needs to be addressed, we don't have the problem in Australia with our equivalent institution the TGA.
We have the same messaging problem here that we have in the US. For example, NSW is claiming vaccinated people can have greater freedoms (as is Biden). Really? Who's going to enforce that? I'll let you think about that for a moment, and while there are very different structures to policing and powers that police in America and Australia have, they do not have the right to require you disclose your private medical history to them. If a police officer asks you to show proof of vaccination, you have the right to say "I'm invoking my right to silence". Is the Biden administration planning to give police across the United States sweeping new powers - that'd be popular, wouldn't it?
Messaging matters. When you have poor public trust in the FDA, largely due to the perception that they're influenced by the drug companies in their decisions, what you don't do is announce that 3rd booster shots are going to be required for everybody and then jump the queue to get the very first one. The FDA had not made that decision (still hasn't - they've made it available only for 65+ and people with underlying health conditions) so where did Biden get that message from? He could only have got it from the drug companies. That makes him a mouthpiece for the drug companies, and puts pressure on the FDA to do what they're told to do rather than make an evidence-based decision. Oh and you certainly don't blame the unvaccinated for the pandemic continuing.
There's plenty of time for all of this to change of course. This is not an exercise of Biden-bashing, it's a quick and dirty snapshot of where his administration is 9 months in. Whether he likes it or not, his entire administration's performance is going to be framed within their pandemic policy to argue incompetency both next year in the midterms, and again in 2024. His presumptive 2024 competitor is holding regular campaign mega rallies now, if Biden really wants to compete he needs to adopt the same strategy - attract your supports, hold rallies, test your policy ideas on your supporters, and campaign non-stop until 2024.
The real unknown at the moment is whether Biden will stand for re-election. Trump filed his re-election form with the FEC for the 2020 on the day he was inaugurated in 2017. To be fair, that's highly unusual and narcissistic, so you can't read anything into the fact that Biden hasn't filed for re-election yet, however it goes to illustrate the point that there is no question that Trump is running in 2024. He can barely contain himself from announcing it now, he's regularly holding mega rallies that are effectively 2024 campaign rallies. C-Span is already reporting them as 2024 campaign rallies. So while I note Trump is campaigning already, I'm not too interested in the 2024 presidential candidates until we get to late 2023 and I'm certainly not interested enough in Trump to closely follow what he's doing in the meantime. Remember the 2024 election won't be about Trump, it'll be a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration.
Biden and the Democratic party face a zugzwang and they really need to make a decision about their dilemma the moment the 2022 Midterms have been held if they want to have any chance of re-election in 2024. And I don't mean up against Trump, I mean up against any generic Republican presidential candidate. A party in power rarely wins an election if a sitting President isn't running. Biden, despite what many here will argue, would have lost in 2020 if not for the Covid-19 pandemic and Trump's eccentric and erratic behaviour. Well that combined with an exceptionally strong anti-Trump media. Take note that Biden certainly hasn't solved the pandemic like he promised he would in his campaign, in fact there have been more deaths from Covid-19 to this point in October in 2021 than there were last year in 2020. With the vaccination rate so low in America the pandemic is going to carry on well into 2022 and, as a result, the Democrats will get hammered in the Midterms.
Let me be clear, I don't think old Sleepy Joe intends on running in 2024. We get the entertainment of two primary contests at the same time if he doesn't, and who can't be happy with that? Well here's the issue, at least for the Democrats. If Cunt has not fallen off a cliff he will breeze through the Republican primaries almost like he's still a sitting president. It'll be entertaining to watch, but it won't be a contest. If they really want to have a serious competitor they need to select one well before 2024. Hold the primaries in 2023.
Say what you will about the presidential competitors, it's become quite clear to any neutral observer that the US Presidential Primary process rarely results in the selection of the best candidate for office. 2016 may be seen as an extreme example, lest we forget that the Democratic Primaries selected Crooked Hillary to be their candidate for president. The process is rife with corruption on both sides:
The process rarely results in the election of an upstanding citizen to the highest office. Obama was a rare exception, had he been allowed to run for a third term he would have easily beaten Donald J Cunt.
Even when it works better, it's still a lengthy exercise of self-harm each party inflicts upon themselves. The quirks of the system is really what allowed Donald J Cunt to win in 2016 - he was up against a crooked warmongering figure of the establishment who had been badly bruised in the Democratic primaries.
At this point if Biden was to stand in 2024, he would be favoured to win second place in the two-horse race. A lot will come down to whether the Dems lose the House or the Senate in the Midterms, and whether the Biden administration solves any of the crises that it is facing or effectively implements the agenda it was elected into office to deliver. Yes that means he absolutely needs both a major foreign policy success, and a major domestic policy success. Foreign policy will be difficult, because he already has a major failure with the Afghanistan withdrawal. Domestic policy is not going much better - his administration hasn't controlled the Covid-19 pandemic or provided effective leadership over it with a credible plan to bring the country out of the pandemic, he's facing a massive migration crisis, and the urgent police reforms promised to win over the black voters have yet to materialise. He has not shown himself to be collaborative, pragmatic, and flexible, the key qualities he possessed as a former lawmaker that was promised to the voters to heal divisions in both the Democratic party and the extremely partisan politics to bring people together and “heal the nation”. He's done nothing to further that, and he needed to start on day one it wouldn't really help him to start now.
He does not have a vaccine strategy, and that's very clear by the way. The Dan Andrew's government in Victoria is the same. Making vaccines mandatory for everyone (or incredibly large parts of your population) is what you do when you don't have a plan. Forcing people to take medical interventions against their will with the threat of losing their job is the most self-defeating policy there can possibly be. Remember, the Biden campaign squarely framed the Trump administration on being incompetent with the Covid-19 Pandemic. I pointed out before that Biden's promise that he made in one of the debates to “shut down the virus, not the economy” was stupid because he couldn't deliver upon it. Well so far we've seen neither consistent policy nor competent policy. Americans don't trust their regulator the FDA, that's one reason many of them don't want the vaccines, what exactly is the Biden administration doing to reform the FDA and increase public confidence in it? That's a real problem that needs to be addressed, we don't have the problem in Australia with our equivalent institution the TGA.
We have the same messaging problem here that we have in the US. For example, NSW is claiming vaccinated people can have greater freedoms (as is Biden). Really? Who's going to enforce that? I'll let you think about that for a moment, and while there are very different structures to policing and powers that police in America and Australia have, they do not have the right to require you disclose your private medical history to them. If a police officer asks you to show proof of vaccination, you have the right to say "I'm invoking my right to silence". Is the Biden administration planning to give police across the United States sweeping new powers - that'd be popular, wouldn't it?
Messaging matters. When you have poor public trust in the FDA, largely due to the perception that they're influenced by the drug companies in their decisions, what you don't do is announce that 3rd booster shots are going to be required for everybody and then jump the queue to get the very first one. The FDA had not made that decision (still hasn't - they've made it available only for 65+ and people with underlying health conditions) so where did Biden get that message from? He could only have got it from the drug companies. That makes him a mouthpiece for the drug companies, and puts pressure on the FDA to do what they're told to do rather than make an evidence-based decision. Oh and you certainly don't blame the unvaccinated for the pandemic continuing.
There's plenty of time for all of this to change of course. This is not an exercise of Biden-bashing, it's a quick and dirty snapshot of where his administration is 9 months in. Whether he likes it or not, his entire administration's performance is going to be framed within their pandemic policy to argue incompetency both next year in the midterms, and again in 2024. His presumptive 2024 competitor is holding regular campaign mega rallies now, if Biden really wants to compete he needs to adopt the same strategy - attract your supports, hold rallies, test your policy ideas on your supporters, and campaign non-stop until 2024.
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