Democrats stifling Biden’s competitors

The Democrats are actively stifling the real competition Joe Biden has for renomination. Rarely does any incumbent President seeking reelection have any competition. Most of the time, everyone in the Party falls in line. Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald R. Ford in 1976, and Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980; those are the exceptions. (“Clean Gene” McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. challenged Lyndon Johnson – and arguably drove him out of the race.) But even then, the incumbents didn’t try to deny the challengers a voice. But the Democrats under Joe Biden are doing precisely that. Do the Democrats have so little confidence in Biden as a candidate that they refuse to have a primary process?

Democrats refuse primaries and debates

A series of tweets in the last thirty-six hours demonstrate that the Democrats want no debates, and no primaries.

Two challengers for the Democratic nomination have emerged thus far: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marianne Williamson. Williamson noted last month that the Democrats were refusing to schedule primary debates in 2024. So did a co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 run for the nomination:

Even now, Biden’s apologists are making much of the Republicans not scheduling any debates in 2020, when Trump ran again. Technically, he had challengers. But – like Pete McCloskey in 1972, “challenging” Richard M. Nixon – none of them had any traction, and everyone knew it.

So how serious are the challenges Joe Biden faces? Marianne Williamson probably doesn’t pose much of a challenge, according to Politico.com. Her policy and philosophical positions differ little from those of Biden. She even supports current policy in Ukraine, to the dismay of one “libertarian theologian.” But she levels one accusation above all: Joe Biden is not delivering results. Her criticisms are twofold: that Biden doesn’t go far enough, and that he’s not accomplishing anything.

Robert Kennedy – the real threat

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is another matter. On two important issues he breaks sharply with most Democrats. He openly denounces the “surveillance state” and “Big Tech” companies acting as State actors.

In this message he resoundingly criticized what has become current Administration policy as manipulative and mendacious.

Mr. Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense, an organization opposed to mandatory immunizations of all kinds – and COVID vaccines in particular.

Quoting Mr. Kennedy’s tweet about the “surveillance state,” Mark Mendlovitz noted the kind of Party the Democrats have become.

Darrell L. Castle noted in his radio broadcast yesterday that Kennedy might have figured in the suspension of Tucker Carlson. Kennedy has appeared on Carlson’s program often. He opposes not only current COVID policy but also, unlike Williamson, he opposes the war in Ukraine.

He opposes it because America under the Democrats seems to have turned war into a business. That business, furthermore, is empire-building, which does nothing for ordinary people. As such Kennedy would ask questions in any primary debate that the Democrats want no one to ask. Those questions would go to the heart of what it once meant to be a Democrat – back when Russia called itself “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” And they might also include whether his Uncle Jack died at the hand of the CIA.

In short, Kennedy might not win, but he’d make sure Biden could never win, for the embarrassment he would cause.

Summary

So that’s the opposition the Democrats want to stifle. One candidate criticizes the incumbent for talking what a leftist would call a good game – but failing to deliver results. The other criticizes policies at the heart of Administration policy – and accuses this administration of betraying everything Democrats stood for, as much as sixty years ago.

No wonder that Party wants no primary debates! That exercise would only embarrass them, and they know it. But one cannot keep a candidate totally silent today. Bv refusing debates, the Party actually calls attention to the very people they wish would go away. They also keep at the forefront the issues on which they cannot hope to win.