The biggest surprise of the past four years is not that Joe Biden is a corrupt, two-bit political hack whose volume setting has always exceeded his I.Q. It’s the willingness of other Democrats — in particular, New Hampshire Democrats — to embrace him all the way to the ugly and embarrassing end of his presidency.
It didn’t have to be this way.
In 2020, Biden was basically booed out of the state, coming in fifth place in the First in the Nation presidential primary — famously fleeing to the political safety of South Carolina before the polls even closed.
Back then, it looked like Granite State Democrats got the joke. Even when the options boiled down to Socialist septuagenarian Bernie Sanders and obscure, small-town Mayor Pete Buttigieg, not a single member of the New Hampshire delegation threw in with the former vice president.
America, they seemed to be saying, take the hint.
Instead, COVID allowed the already infirm Biden to ride out the 2020 campaign in his basement and, thanks to anti-Trump sentiment, win the White House in 2020.
But then all hell broke loose.
There’s no need to recount the list of Biden’s boneheaded moves: failed Afghanistan withdrawal, nine percent inflation, the virtual collapse of the southern border, the surge in urban violence, mishandling Israel vs. Hamas, etc. etc.
The net result is Biden leaving office with a lower approval rating (37 percent) than any other president of the past 50 years except post-Iraq-War George W. Bush (22 percent).
His approval has fallen so low in fact, Donald Trump was more popular leaving office after the January 6, 2021 riots than Joe Biden is today.
None of this is a surprise to people who pay attention to politics. Despite falsely claiming to be a multi-degree-holding super genius, Biden’s always played the role of D.C. buffoon. Good for a laugh and a gaffe, but not much else.
Just ask his old boss, Barack Obama. (“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.”). Or former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. (“I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” he said a decade ago.
And yet, as Biden dug his hole in presidential history, who was there beside him with their shovels?
The New Hampshire Democratic Party and its leadership.
And not just in the early days, when inflation was roaring and gas prices were soaring. Party loyalty explains why, as Biden was taking a beating, Democrats like Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and state party chair Ray Buckley would “close one’s eyes and think of England.”
But after he stripped New Hampshire of its lead-off primary? After the June 27 debate fiasco? After the months of watching his embarrassing stumbling and bumbling — insisting, for example, that he would have beaten Trump if he hadn’t been pushed off the ticket?
Why the heck would anyone back Biden after all that?
And yet that’s what Granite State Democrats did — and are still doing.
Forget Sens. Shaheen and Maggie Hassan insisting during the New Hampshire Democrats’ write-in campaign that Biden was fit to serve for four more years. Forget Hassan saying after Biden’s debate disaster that she continued to support him as “perhaps the most successful president of my lifetime.” Even forget Rep. Maggie Goodlander comparing Biden to George Washington after he had to be forced out of the race.
No, the low point came last weekend when Biden invented the power to amend the U.S. Constitution, and New Hampshire Democrats deciding to go along.
On Friday, Biden announced that “the 28th Amendment is the law of the land,” and that he believes the Equal Rights Amendment is now in effect.
Harvard Law professor Stephen Sachs calls it an act of “constitutional vandalism.” Biden’s own Department of Justice concluded in 2022 that the deadline for ratifying the ERA expired decades ago.
But not New Hampshire Democrats. Shaheen released a statement backing up Biden’s false claim that the ERA has crossed the ratification threshold. The new leader of Democrats in the New Hampshire House, Rep. Alexis Simpson (D-Exeter), did the same.
Most embarrassing of all is Goodlander — who once taught constitutional law at UNH’s law school — making the legally bizarre claim that Biden “recognized that the federal Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land.”
“Recognized?” First, this is a guy who can barely recognize members of his own cabinet. Second, there is no “presidential recognition” role in the U.S. Constitution. It doesn’t exist.
Despite their shouts that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our constitutional democracy, Granite State Democrats have stuck with a failed, infirm president who has spent four years undermining our political norms, and they’re slapping him on the back on the way out the door.
I know why Joe Biden isn’t embarrassed by his record. He doesn’t know any better.
New Hampshire Democrats — what’s your excuse?
