I & I Editorial BoardI&I Editorial
Now that the media have declared the election over and Joe Biden is president, the left is busy trying to conjure up a mandate for his administration. But if there is anything clear in this disaster of an election, it’s that Biden and his band of socialist Democrats have not been ordained to do anything.
On Friday, Biden said his voters have “given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.” On Sunday his deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said that Biden had “campaigned on an incredibly progressive and aggressive agenda” and that “he’s going to make good on those commitments.”
Let’s leave aside the fact that there are still legal challenges and recounts, and despite what the media say, states have not certified their results. In other words, Trump hasn’t lost the election yet.
But assuming Biden prevails after all these challenges, what possible claim does he have to a mandate?
Despite what his campaign is now claiming, the only issue that Biden actually ran on was COVID-19, and even there he didn’t offer any solutions. All he did was blame President Donald Trump for the deaths it caused.
Everything else about his agenda was kept carefully hidden in Biden’s basement. At the Democratic convention, Biden’s agenda never came up, as speaker after speaker droned on about how empathetic he was.
Seriously, beyond a national mask mandate – on which Biden shifted positions half a dozen times – how many Biden voters could accurately describe any of his economic, environmental, or social policies?
Biden says he has a mandate for “action” on the economy. That is far from true. When asked, voters said they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy. And for good reason. Before the pandemic lockdowns, the economy was at historically low unemployment. Median family incomes shot up in 2019 at a rate never before seen. Minority groups were making substantial gains.
Once the lockdowns began to be lifted, the economy came roaring back, with unemployment already under 7%, and GDP growth in the last quarter making up two-thirds of the loss from the shutdown.
On top of that, even after the massive disruptions this year, most people say they are better off than they were four years ago.
The last thing voters want is Biden’s growth-killing mix of tax hikes and reregulation.
Nor do voters care about climate change, which is so far down on the list of priorities that it doesn’t even register as one. They are certainly not going to embrace Biden’s plan to eliminate the oil and gas industry, sharply raise utility rates, ban gas-powered cars, and impose prosperity killing carbon taxes.
What about “systemic racism”? If anything, the Democrats’ extremism on this issue cost them votes, including those cast by minorities. In fact, Trump claimed a bigger share of the non-white vote than any Republican since Richard Nixon in 1960, including substantial gains among Latinos in several states.
Beyond bashing Trump on the coronavirus, Biden’s entire campaign was built on the fact that he is not Donald Trump. That he’s a nice guy. That he can “bring people together.”
Finally, there are the election results themselves. Far from a mandate, voters made it clear that they do not support Biden and his leftist party’s agenda of court-packing, tax-hiking, defunding police, and enacting the Green New Deal.
First, Republicans gained seats in the House precisely because voters rejected the Biden-Harris agenda. Even Democrats are admitting to that.
Second, it’s likely that Republicans will retain control of the Senate after the runoffs in Georgia in January, which means that voters will have opted for legislative gridlock. (Unfortunately, there is plenty of damage Biden could do through regulations and executive orders.)
Third, Biden’s victory was the result of razor-thin margins of victory in states where Democrats had laid the groundwork for his win by pushing universal vote-by-mail schemes. Had all those voters who cast ballots early waited to get all the information they needed, Trump could be getting ready for a second term right now.
The only thing that Biden can credibly claim is that he is the luckiest man in the world. Had COVID-19 not hit, the economy would be roaring and Trump would have easily won a huge victory.
Had the pandemic not persisted all year, Biden could not have run his campaign from his basement, or kept his public appearances to a minimum. Instead, he would have been forced to run an aggressive campaign, with daily public appearances, where the press can ask questions, and where his declining mental faculties would have been glaringly apparent to everyone.
Of course, every president wants to declare that he has a mandate. But none in recent memory has been given as weak a hand as Joe Biden.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Bob Maistros
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
While I do agree with you unfortunately the Media is and will push that Biden does have a mandate. Get ready to hear it repeated often.s
Mandate? Oh my. Another meme from The Ministry of Truth. They love to apply The Goebbels Rule: “Tell a lie often enough and loud enough and everyone will believe it.”
With the entire system at stake, the Left will be pouring millions, if not billions, into those two run-off elections. They have mastered the Art of the Fraud, so I have little doubt those elections will go their way and be the death knell to what we knew as America. . .
Nice rhetoric and I agree with it. But he has already claimed multiple mandates in the past two days. The left will ram through its agenda if the Senate is flipped. By any means necessary. We must now resist.
Biden and Kamala probably believe they have a mandate to impose all the irrational and insane policies of the whole virtue-signaling, social-justice apocalyptic doomsday cult of wokeness. More bizarreness than you can shake a stick at.
Joe Biden is a man without a country, a conscience, or a mind. Imagine what’s written in the Book of Life about Joe when he leaves this life: All those lies, the ill-gotten gains, the deaths and ruined families.
Joe, when you finally get gone, ain’t nobody gonna feel bad about it. You’ll be missed like an abscessed tooth.
And it came to pass in the fullness of his years that Joe Biden, heretofore a pale male croupier at the gaming table of American life who stacked the deck and loaded the dice in more than four decades in public office so that he and his family could finish the race before it had begun, became president. In his most recent pull at the federal teat, the erstwhile vice president, along with his boss Barack Obama, lectured the American people that they did not build anything they thought they had built while participating in our raucous and free-wheeling capitalist economy. No sir, the blue propaganda machine hectored, you did not, and the doyenne of the party, Hillary Rodham Clinton, piled on with her lesson that independent thought and action were not responsible for your success, it was an illusory village instead. Got that? Collectivization is the ‘kumbaya’ concept for liberals. Will ol’ Joe stay on board now that he is the Big Kahuna or will he break with the gloriously woke Beltway stage and collectivist ethos? Will Biden remain a mouthpiece for others, a political puppet for lance carriers like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who program his teleprompter like a ventriloquist, especially as he has no true mandate? All winning politicians claim to have a mandate irrespective of their margin of success; witness Lady Pelosi claiming a mandate in the House as she licks her wounds from unexpected losses and calms restive Democrats in her caucus who believed her lies about a blue wave election.