What happened to New Hampshire Democrats?
In 2020, they showed the good sense to hand Joe Biden, the chronologically-challenged D.C. hack, a humiliating fifth-place finish.
Since then, Biden hasn’t gotten any smarter, as he demonstrated with Afghanistan, Ukraine, inflation, federal debt, and the border.
And he certainly hasn’t gotten any younger.
Why, then, did so many level-headed Granite State Democrats join party apparatchiks like former state party chair Kathy Sullivan and Rep. Annie Kuster to save his candidacy four years later? And how misguided does that effort look today?
It’s no secret to most Americans that Biden’s age is impacting his ability to do the job. That’s why they keep telling pollsters — as 76 percent did this week — they don’t believe he has the mental and physical capability necessary to serve as president of the United States.
On Thursday, that belief became a brutal reality with the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s decades of mishandling classified documents. That Biden engaged in illegal behavior is indisputable. According to the counsel, he “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
So, why didn’t the counsel recommend Biden be charged?
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote.
Biden’s memory is so poor, Hur added, “he did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice president?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“In 2009, am I still vice president?”).
“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
This is the 81-year-old politician that Sullivan and her fellow New Hampshire Democrats worked so hard to save?
Sullivan led an expensive, months-long effort to rescue Biden from his bullheaded decision to blow off the First in the Nation presidential primary. Urged on by party leaders like Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, more than 79,000 Democrats drove to the polls to write in Biden’s name and help him escape political embarrassment.
Who’s embarrassed now?
The answer should be every Democrat from Dr. Jill Biden to New Hampshire Chair Ray Buckley, who’s helped keep Biden in a job he’s clearly not competent to hold. But like the Trump diehards they hate, Biden Democrats appear impervious to shame.
And so requests for comment to Sullivan and other prominent Biden backers went unanswered — even after Joe’s trainwreck of a press conference Thursday night.
The goal of the hastily-called gathering was to refute claims that Biden is forgetful and mentally foggy. The result was to confirm both priors. He mixed up Egypt and Mexico. He falsely claimed he didn’t share classified material with his ghostwriter. (He did.) He also falsely claimed the counsel said he didn’t willfully mishandle classified documents. (The report literally says “willfully”).
Biden loves his Corvette but says he never noticed the boxes of classified documents stacked up in the garage with it. He also repeatedly blamed “my staff” for the decades of classified documents in his possession and yelled at reporters for asking him questions about it.
And then, just to remind everyone it’s actually dangerous to have a mentally unsteady commander in chief, he blurted out that Israel’s response to the Hamas terror attack was “over the top.”
All of this could have been avoided if New Hampshire Democrats had done their job.
Sens. Shaheen and Hassan could have forced Biden and the DNC to recognize — and participate in– the First in the Nation primary. Instead of the South Carolina safety net, it could have been the Granite State doing its job of vetting the candidates. If Biden had to come here, who knows what other Democrats might have shown up, too?
The point of moving the first primary to South Carolina was to discourage any serious challenger to the elderly Mr. Biden. New Hampshire Democrats aided and abetted the plan rather than pushing back.
And now, here we are. An indisputably infirm and incompetent incumbent president, with no quality alternative on the Democratic Party horizon, and losing to Donald Trump in the latest polls.