The weirdness of President Joe Biden’s address to Congress on April 28 was due not solely to having so few people in the House of Representatives to listen. The place is usually packed to the rafters with auditors jostling, for example, to shake the commander in chief’s hand as he strides triumphantly toward the podium.
This year, pandemic restrictions winnowed the throng to a socially distanced 200 in masks. That was bizarre; they’d all been vaccinated. What message were they trying to send the public? That vaccines don’t work?
A packed crowd creates energy and encourages emphatic rhetoric. An empty cavern does the opposite. Biden whispered his way through the evening. His demeanor and delivery invited the public to wonder, what could possibly be threatening about this frail, quiet, old geezer?
Unfortunately, the answer is “a lot.” For, to America’s great misfortune, Biden has turned out to be the perfect frontman for a deceptively radical and militantly left-wing agenda. He and his lieutenants intend to change the country.
Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and Clinton White House operative, bragged about this, saying, “One of the things [Biden] has done and the White House has done is come up with a very secret sauce. His persona is soothing and reassuring to moderate swing voters. His policies are soothing and reassuring to progressives. And that creates a problem for the Republicans, a dynamic between the persona and the policy which they cannot crack.”
Bull’s-eye! Biden comes across as a blue-collar granddad who wouldn’t hurt a fly and should alarm no one except young women who don’t want a lizard sniffing their hair. But in terms of governance, what you get with Biden are policies that radicals are delighted about.
The first 100 days have made it clear that his is a sort of Nixon-to-China presidency. Just as it took a Republican president with an unearned reputation as a reactionary to reassure the public that it was OK to make friends with Chairman Mao, so it takes an old-school — read elderly — Democratic president with an unearned reputation as a centrist to reassure suburbia that it should stay calm despite obligatory unionization, a massive extension of tax-funded healthcare, the takeover by Washington of elections, the destruction of women’s sports, the imposition of woke culture, the appeasement of Iran, and the debauching of the national treasury by $6 trillion of unnecessary spending.
Characteristically, Emanuel thinks of this only tactically, as something that can be pulled off and is temporarily popular. But it is much bigger than that. It is a deceptive revolution for which there is no voter mandate and is eroding our nation’s character and prospects.
One of the other things Biden ponders destroying is the Senate, which is the subject of our cover story this week by Jay Cost. Its purpose, like that of all today’s federal radicalism, is the acquisition of a permanent Democratic hold on power, and the conversion of free, self-reliant people into dependents of the state.
Biden has arrived. Comes the hour, comes the man.
