‘Joe already has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history…’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Joe Biden has all but secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to run against President Donald Trump in November. His main selling point is that he’s a moderate who can persuade moderate voters in critical swing states.
But Biden’s moderate brand is a ruse, admitted President Barack Obama last week.
“Joe already has what is the most progressive platform of any major party nominee in history,” Obama proudly said during his formal endorsement of Biden on April 14.
Obama curiously refused to endorse his two-term vice president during the Democratic Party’s primary elections. Many Biden supporters considered it a slap in the face. President Trump, however, intimated that something serious was afoot.
“He [Obama] knows something that you don’t know. That I think I know. But you don’t know,” Trump tweeted.
Now Obama is front-and-center in what appears to be an attempt to satisfy the party’s radical left-wing base and dupe moderates in states where Biden has longstanding union ties, such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In 2016, Trump won those states by a combined 70,000 votes.
Biden himself has gotten on board with the bait and switch. He defeated left-wing firebrands like socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., during the primary elections by taking the more moderate path.
But in March, Biden claimed, “I have the most progressive record of anybody running for the…anybody who would run.”
If successful, Biden has committed to raising taxes on the middle class, banning plastic bags (even though far-left San Francisco just made them mandatory again for health reasons), reinstating the Obamacare individual mandate, doubling the capital gains tax to 40 percent, raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, imposing a carbon tax, banning fracking and promising to “get rid of fossil fuels.”
It’s an open question whether Biden would even be competent to serve as president for any length of time given his clear cognitive decline. But perhaps the scenario presents a de facto third term for Barack Obama.
The New York Post even posed a hypothetical scenario in which Biden would select Michelle Obama as his running mate, take the oath of office and then quickly bow out, invoking the 25th amendment to claim he was “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Although the backlash from some might be severe, most supporters on the Left would likely support such a scenario with a wink and a nod.
“I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now,” Obama said during his endorsement.
There had long been considerable speculation that Michelle Obama might, herself, enter the race (perhaps if faithless delegates refused to back Biden, forcing a brokered convention), but that not only would subject her to greater political scrutiny, it would limit her to serving two terms instead of three.
The Obamas have continued to accumulate a massive campaign infrastructure network through PACs and super-PACs led by loyalists like former Attorney General Eric Holder and Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, Tina Tchen (who has overseen restructuring of the half-billion-dollar “nonprofit” Southern Poverty Law Center).
They also have lucrative development deals with outlets like Netflix and PBS that would effectively lend themselves to free advertising, even if Michelle Obama were ultimately to recuse herself from them.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.