Joe Biden did an interview with ABC’s David Muir. He spoke more about his COVID response and about whether he would be running again in 2024.
He was asked about his prior declarations that he would run in 2024. His answer was interesting because he provided himself an out not to run again.
“Yes, but look, I’m a great respecter of fate,” Biden answered. “Fate has intervened in my life many, many times. If I’m in the health I’m in now—if I’m in good health—then, in fact, I would run again.”
But he isn’t coherent now. So this does sound like he’s giving himself the “health” out as a possibility. That could be what we see ultimately because he doesn’t want to be a declared lame duck. But the longer he takes to get to that place, the more disarray you’ll see among Democrats who think they’ll have to deal with him and justify his unpopularity. We’re also likely to see a lot of intrigue behind the scenes about who thinks they could succeed him.
Muir then asked him about running again against President Donald Trump. Biden did that smirking thing that he does, and did a little laugh, “You’re trying to tempt me now?” Biden replied. “Sure. Why would I not run against Donald Trump if he were the nominee? That would increase the prospect of running.” But the polls have shown, at least at this point, that if he ran again against Trump, Trump would likely win as we noted here. Americans were sold a moderate fantasy about Biden. What they got was the gaffe-ridden mess that he’s always been and now they know that you can’t stuff that genie back in the bottle again. Trump’s successes stand out now, especially in sharp relief to the problems of Biden.
Muir also asked Biden about his COVID comments and raised the question about Biden’s failure to anticipate the test kit need. Biden had been asked about this by PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor on Tuesday and he snapped at her, claiming it wasn’t taking too long to have testing, and that no one could have anticipated that Omicron would increase at this rate. That conflicted with what the CDC director who said, yes, we did anticipate it would. Biden also told more lies about Omicron transmission.
“Three days before Christmas, if you look out across the country, you see it everywhere, these long lines, people waiting for hours outside in the cold, just to get tested, to be reassured before they spend time with their family,” Muir said. “If you go to the pharmacy, we hear this over and over again, empty shelves, no test kits. Is that a failure?”
“I don’t think it’s a failure,” Biden answered. “I think it’s — you could argue that we should have known a year ago, six months ago, two months ago, a month ago.”
“I wish I had thought about ordering a half a billion…two months ago,” he added.
Biden kept calling the test kits “pills,” corrected himself, then called them “pills” yet again. He said he wished he’d thought of ordering them before? He called for more testing availability last December and attacked Trump over it when Trump had less time than he has now, as I noted yesterday.
So what is he even talking about now? Even now, these test kits wouldn’t be available for weeks and there would only be 500 million, which sounds like a lot but is less than 2 for each American. So if you truly believe it’s necessary, then it’s late and hardly enough for dealing with the issue now.
Biden admitted that nothing was good enough about their response. That’s one of the few true things that he’s ever said. But then he followed that up with a comparison to last Christmas suggesting that no one could get together (they did) and now they could and were vaccinated. Last Christmas, the vaccines had just been developed and weren’t widely in circulation yet. This is a year later and he still doesn’t have his act together, even given the vaccines.
Biden’s problem? There isn’t an excuse for the failures and the incompetence. Maybe, too, when you don’t know the difference between test kits and pills, you should just pack it in and call it a day.
