The Democrats got a ridiculously early start on the 2020 presidential campaign. It would be exhausting if they weren’t all making so many gaffes along the way.
For now, we can sit back and enjoy the show. There’s something poetic about watching Democrats eat their own.
Speaking of which, Joe Biden is officially in the running. He’s also target number one for all of the other candidates. They’ve already been hard on him, but the worst is yet to come.
Joe Biden held out on announcing his candidacy for 2020 as long as he felt he could. There were a few good reasons for him to do that. As fun as it would be to ridicule his strategy or intelligence, his campaign could not have received a better start.
Since his announcement, he has been the solid Democratic frontrunner. In fact, he’s gained significant ground so far.
Obviously, it’s still super early to try and say who will win the bid next year. The Democrats are flirting with being ridiculous in trying to start their campaigning so early. The risk of voter burnout is huge.
That’s one of the reasons Biden didn’t want to announce so soon. The second, and much bigger, reason has to do with the far left.
Biden’s campaign was not received well by the progressives. The radical left hates establishment Democrats, and Joe Biden fits that bill to a tee.
The radicals have already started attacking Biden on every single issue. He’s holding up for now, but with such a rabid hatred from an entrenched group of Democrats, there’s a good chance they’ll land serious blows on his credibility long before the first polls open for primary voting.
The first major blow has already landed. This part of the story actually goes a long way to highlight how far to the left the average Democrat has moved. Robert Gates was the defense secretary under Obama. That means he worked directly with Biden on issues of foreign policy.
Gates agreed to a national interview, and his assessment of Biden’s competency on foreign policy was not kind. The worst of the interview is best left in Gates’ own words, “[Biden had] been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
He continued to attack the former vice president by suggesting he would be unable to work cooperatively with senior members of the military.
This is a scorching takedown of Biden’s qualifications to be the Commander in Chief. Gates is in a rare position to provide overwhelmingly credible assessments of Biden’s foreign policy. Taking his words this far will surely ignite the progressives. We’re going to hear this from them for the next two years.
So, is Gates being fair? As a conservative, the knee jerk reaction is always to disagree with anything progressives like. When you look at Biden’s record, there might be room for a smidgen of common ground after all.
The thing the progressives might hate the most is that Biden voted in favor of the Iraq war. This put him in line with most of Congress, and it’s the one thing conservatives won’t hold against him. Based on the information at hand, that was the right call, and we ended up finding massive caches of chemical weapons. He gets one point here.
Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing he ever did right. Biden was a huge supporter of both NAFTA and TPP. He had some hand in Benghazi (although he wasn’t the primary leadership in that disaster). Generally speaking, Gates is right. All of Biden’s votes and decisions were bad. But, the worst is something that still isn’t widely known.
When Biden first campaigned with Obama, he seemed to have a mostly neutral stance on China. He favored American investments in the region but came down hard on their willingness to ignore intellectual property rights.
His tune completely changed in 2013. That was the year he took a diplomatic trip to China. Biden’s son, Hunter, was also on that trip. While Joe was supposedly carrying out diplomacy with the communists, Hunter signed a $1 billion private equity deal with the Bank of China. That deal later grew to $1.5 billion.
Ever since, Joe has been perfectly soft with Chinese foreign policy. If you want to talk about a presidential candidate being beholden to a foreign power, China basically owns Joe Biden. Locking him up for corruption might be a bigger priority than dealing with crooked Hillary.
It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that China tries to influence the 2020 election—they want their boy Joe to win bad. How many pro-Biden, anti-Trump ads do you think Facebook will allow the Chinese to buy this election cycle? Something to watch for.
