Joe Biden Will Be Santa Claus in 2024 – Many people on the Right are talking as though the coming 2024 Presidential Election cycle will be easily won once the brutal Republican Party primary is determined. There’s a degree of determinism on the Right about the ultimate outcome that is likely the result of having such a large alternative media ecosystem in which various elements of the Right-wing basically talk to themselves.
All the talk about the inevitability of the Republican Party’s ultimate victory in 2024 reminds me a bit of the 2012 Presidential Election, where GOP leaders, in the name of all things Ronald Reagan, claimed that because Barack Obama was a spitting historical image of Jimmy Carter, Mitt Romney—Reagan 2.0, in their view at the time—would easily surmount Obama’s challenge and become the new president.
Flash forward to election night 2012, and you’ve got the infamous on-air meltdown of Republican Party election whiz, Karl Rove, with Megyn Kelly and Bret Baer.
The Republicans lost that race because the base was bitterly divided with the party’s leadership over their chosen nominee, Mitt Romney (the base preferred anyone other than Romney) and the Republican leadership did not care one bit about the opinion of their rank-and-file voters. Meanwhile, the Democrats were united behind their nominee. Similarly, whether the nominee is Joe Biden or another Democrat, such as Gavin Newsom of perhaps even Michelle Obama, the Democrats will be united against the Right in 2024.
Although the Republicans are overestimating their ability to win the 2024 election, they remain competitive, if only because there are but two options (for now) to run for the presidency—Democratic or Republican. So, the next question that must be answered is what policies the Republican Party will put forward to counter the Democratic Party proposals in 2024.
Sadly, this is where the Republicans run into problems.
Handouts, Bailouts, and Winning Votes
Going back to the painful 2012 election, as the GOP primaries were unfolding, conservative radio legend, Rush Limbaugh, gave a monologue about the dangers of where America’s entitlement mentality was taking us as a nation.
Evoking Alexander Fraser-Tytler’s comments that, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury,” Limbaugh warned his distressed audience that America’s republic would not last much longer if most Americans bought into the Democratic Party’s notions that they were the party of “Santa Claus.”
Essentially, in Limbaugh’s estimation, since Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented his New Deal programs, American domestic politics has been divided between those who favor such sweeping government intervention into every aspect of American life versus those, normally on the Right, who did not.
According to Limbaugh, the Democrats had shamelessly cracked the code for electoral success: just promise to hand out gifts to each disaffected subgroup of American voters to win their vote every election, without much care or thought of the ramifications for American society and its economy.
In this, Limbaugh was echoing the disturbingly prophetic words of the great conservative economist Thomas Sowell, who in 2010 warned about the threat that the United States had reached the “point of no return” in its socioeconomic and political development; that America was now on the permanent pathway to socialism and that path would end in national decline and, quite possibly, collapse.
The Bailout King, Joe Biden
Today, President Joe Biden, who has a sclerotic approval rating around 42 percent (his vice-president, Kamala Harris, is hovering at 39 percent), wants to be reelected. This, as the world clearly burns around Biden, both at home and abroad. Yet, Biden stands a good chance of getting reelected for a variety of reasons that have little to do with policy—but also because Biden is angling to become what Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal has dubbed as the “Bailout King.”
The seeds for Biden’s great taxpayer giveaways can be found in Biden’s earlier statements about bailing out student loans, expanding Social Security, preserving Medicare and Medicaid. In the run-up to the 2012 Presidential Election, then-President Barack Obama went to Osawatomie, Kansas, and gave what many believed to have been the mission statement for his reelection campaign. Chock full of class warfare rhetoric and redistributionist policy proposals, that speech was Obama’s clarion call to economic populism.
That’s why Obama won reelection in 2012. He was an economic populist.
Similarly, President Biden used his recent State of the Union address to sound more like an economic and social populist than even former President Donald J. Trump did. While the speech was workmanlike and nowhere near as moving as Obama’s 2011 speech was, it did the job.
Today, Joe Biden has spent his time strategically bailing out—either directly or indirectly—affected groups, from college graduates with insurmountable debt levels to his pals in Silicon Valley, and everyone between. Biden won’t stop either…and no one seems able or willing to stop him.
And the GOP is split even on what policies they want to champion.
Donald Trump, being a masterclass populist, denounced the GOP’s efforts to try to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Even in 2016, as he was raging against Obamacare, he insisted his opposition to Obamacare was because it wasn’t generous enough to the needy whereas Republican orthodoxy called for privatizing the whole system.
Whether Trump believes these things he says is irrelevant. He senses, as Alexander Fraser-Tytler, Thomas Sowell, and Rush Limbaugh did, that the voters are no longer mostly in favor of having fiscal discipline—at least not when it comes to their preferred carve outs. Therefore, coming out against these programs during a tight election, when the Republicans are running against Santa Claus, will not end well for the GOP.
Deception is the Acme of the Art of War
Whoever is the GOP nominee in 2024, they will not be able to win by raging against the debt or our profligate spending. Proposing even the modest cuts will likely be the death knell of any GOP candidacy in the 2024 General Election. Especially as Biden and the Democrats are basically opening the national treasury and throwing newly minted dollars out into the streets in exchange for votes.
Thus, Republicans should not offer or admit to making any cuts to our Entitlements of any kind.
Then, once in power make whatever modifications must be made—but do it in tactical ways to maximize their impact without letting those modifications pose a risk to the reelection of erstwhile Right-wing candidates. This is precisely what President Richard Nixon had his director of the Office Economic Opportunity (OEO), Donald Rumsfeld, do once in power, away from the manipulations of the media.
Democrats routinely lie about everything and manipulate desperate voters into thinking that they are Santa Claus who will save them. Americans are at their most desperate point economically and socially. It will be far too hard for anyone in such dire straits to resist the siren song of Joe Biden and his bailouts.
Better for Republicans to deny Democrats these talking points by assuring everyone that they won’t touch any of these programs—and will even try to fix the student loan crisis, but in a more rational manner—to give the GOP a fighting chance to return yet again to power.
Personality Over Policy
If the Republicans lose in 2024, it will be the last national election the GOP has a real shot at winning for a very long time. The Republican cannot get hung up on the details. Policy won’t win this thing. The force of the candidate’s personality, their ability to play into voters’ hopes and fears, and their likability factor will be the determinants in 2024. The GOP cannot lose sight of this reality as they did in 2012.
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Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who serves as a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive.com. Weichert is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower(Republic Book Publishers), The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (March 28), and Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.