If Joe Biden intends to humiliate every last one of his supporters before he leaves office, he is well on his way to achieving that goal.
Mostly out of sight while President-elect Trump dominates the spotlight, Biden has decided to resurface inconveniently to destroy Democrats’ claims of moral superiority by pardoning his dissolute son along with a raft of fraudsters and corrupt public officials.
Biden’s mass clemency, combined with the ridiculously broad get-out-of-jail-no-matter-what card for son Hunter, is an outrage in and of itself. But the fallout from his irresponsible behavior will forever taint the Biden-Harris Cabinet. Hatred for Trump didn’t just unite the fractious Democratic Party, it created a toxic blind loyalty to Biden. Now, after four years of defending anything and everything Biden (which absurdly continues), that loyalty is going to bite.
What makes Biden’s mass clemency especially outrageous is that many of the beneficiaries are fraudsters who likely will never make restitution to their victims or to taxpayers. Among Biden’s greatest (or sleaziest) hits are commutation for Rita Crundwell, perpetrator of the largest municipal embezzlement scheme in American history; Meera Sachdeva, who bilked Medicare for millions by shorting her patients’ chemotherapy drugs; and Gregory Podlucky, who defrauded investors of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Worst of all, Biden commuted the sentence of disgraced Pennsylvania judge Michael Conahan, who, along with a co-conspirator, accepted millions in bribes to sentence more than 2,000 children to a for-profit juvenile detention facility. The damage he did to those young people and their families was (and is) extraordinary, including drug addiction and even suicide.
Biden has managed to wreck any credibility he ever had with respect to the rule of law and an independent judiciary. One of the strongest arguments the Democrats had against Trump was the incoming president’s cavalier attitude toward the legal system. All that is in tatters.
This whole sordid affair brings up further questions as to who was vetting these clemencies. Did anyone get paid off? It’s not like the stench of potentially paying for pardons is unknown to Democrats.
Perhaps Biden is far too mentally checked out to be held responsible for what his aides cooked up and put in front of him. But that leads to a further question — if Biden doesn’t know who he is letting off the hook legally, how can he be expected to discharge his other duties?
Democrats may think the best thing to do is lay low and deflect to Trump as much as possible. So far, that is not working. The public is turning against Biden and the collateral damage is mounting.
Biden’s approval rating is cratering. Last week’s YouGov benchmark poll showed him with a mere 38 percent approval rating against 57 percent disapproval. Just before the election, Biden was at 43 percent approve and 53 percent disapprove, so that’s a nine-point swing against him. In both polls, only unthinking, reflexive Democratic loyalty is propping him up. His approval rating with independents is more than 30 points underwater. The RealClearPolitics approval averages show Biden behind both Harris and Trump.
The lack of courage to break with Biden is metastasizing to other Democrats. Harris, for example, has fallen from even approve-disapprove ratings in the YouGov poll to a 9-point deficit. That is not good for someone who hopes she still has a political future. Pete Buttigieg, a putative candidate for Michigan governor, is not likely to benefit from Biden’s perfidy.
What’s worse about Biden’s numbers is that he should actually be improving in the polls. Post-election, the departing president usually gets a polling bump. The focus moves toward the incoming president and the barrage of election criticism normally falls away. That Biden is sinking so badly is remarkable.
The biggest casualty in the end may be the left-progressive media ecosystem. Whether the traditional newspaper establishment like The Washington Post, the cable news networks MSNBC and CNN or even the new media and social influencers like Harry Sisson, their fervent cheerleading for Biden will not age well. In their role as quasi-state media, pushing over-the-top party talking points, Biden could do no wrong and was a paragon of virtue, particularly in comparison to the odious Trump. But today, Biden looks like just another old, corrupt politician who won’t get out of the way.
As the Democrats seek to rebuild from the political mess Biden is leaving, all the main actors are tainted by their support of the departing president. At some point, they will have to break with the past. Biden’s legacy is that he is making that task more difficult by the day.
Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.
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