Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
He was meant to be the the party’s Great White Hope. From the onset, it never really added up though. Now everyone can see why.
This week, the Democrats’ election primaries descended into chaos, as election workers were unable to provide any election results after the polls closed their opening primary contest at the Iowa Caucuses. This was supposedly due to a ‘technical glitch‘ in the highly suspicious digital voting App that was meant to tally results from the state’s 1,700 precincts. The more people learn about this mysterious App and the people behind it, the more they might feel that this was no coincidence. You can start with the fact of who won the actual popular vote in the state. Hint: it wasn’t the choice of party elites.
By now you have figured out that the Democratic Party establishment have been backing a few select centerist candidates, led by 77 year-old former Vice President Joe Biden, long hailed as a “top tier candidate” and a “front-runner,” only this time he was a near no-show.
With sleeves rolled up and mic in hand, stalwart Biden only managed to hobble in at 4th, or 5th place – in a state that was meant to favor older establishment and centerist Democrats. Now he’s out of the top tier and trailing behind progressive leader Bernie Sanders, and conservative democrats Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, and neck and neck with another marginal centerist, Amy Klobuchar. As a result of this abysmal performance, Joe won’t be taking many delegates from Iowa to the party convention in July.
None of this bodes well for the next 49 states he’ll be running in. After a devastating defeat in 2016, Democrats aren’t keen to waste their vote on anyone who garners the label unelectable.
Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff’s epic impeachment train wreck hasn’t done him any favors either. The ramshackle proceedings seemed to create additional obstacles for Biden who now is unable to shake-off allegations of corruption and nepotism. When it’s all said and done, smart historians will look back on the impeachment circus for what it actually was: an ornate partisan distraction engineered to conceal the Democrats’ own rank political and financial corruption and foreign policy failures which were allowed to fester under 8 years of Barack Obama.
SEE ALSO: Hunting for Hunter: Evidence on Biden, Burisma Ukraine Bond Scandal, Tied to U.S. Firm
When Today Show reporter Savannah Guthrie challenged Biden on Sunday about his son Hunter’s dubious oil and gas enterprise in Ukraine, an embattled Biden immediately became defensive, lashing out at the reporter and claiming that she ‘didn’t know what she was talking about.’ This embarrassing media moment really signaled the death knell of the Biden 2020 campaign. Biden tried desperately to tout his electability bona fides by claiming he was the only Democratic candidate with “broad support,” but poll numbers do not reflect the imaginary world he and his party’s elite wing are attempting to project on the consciousness of the American public.
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Despite going to great efforts to market himself as ‘middle class,’ he embodies everything that Americans have learned to hate about DC elites; shamelessly accepting big corporate contributions, letting lobbyists run your legislative platform, including allowing credit card firms to bankroll your political existence while simultaneously supporting dodgy legislation which made average Americans sink further into personal debt. Not to mention gifting his family with unearned fortunes from side deals landed by virtue of his own lofty status within Washington DC hierarchy. None of this seems to bother Joe though.
Hence, the aggregate image of Joe Biden which the American people are forming is not good – that of an ill-tempered aging plutocrat who has the front to intimate reporters and voters, and who is deeply corrupt. How party elites ever thought that a fatally flawed character like Biden would resonate with the American people is really beyond belief.
Biden has frequently lost his temper when questioned about his son Hunter Biden’s lucrative board position with Burisma in Ukraine.
Still, it will be interesting to see how the party and media try to resurrect Biden after this, or if they just cut their losses and let him go. But it really does show just how out of touch party luminaries are with life on the ground in America. Again, they’re making the very same mistake they made in 2016 when they shunned the popular party base in favor of a hand-picked, pre-anointed establishment centerist. Any voter who can read knew that all polling beforehand showed Bernie with a commanding lead in Iowa. Then suddenly, the Des Moines poll gets memory-holed, and entire state-wide voting system ‘crashes’? Really?
Watching all of this unfold in a space of 48 hours, and taking into account all of the DNC shenanigans in 2016, should lead any reasonable political analyst to conclude the Democratic Party might be the most corrupt political organization in the world, and that it would hardly bat an eyelid before trying to cheat or deceive its own voters. Political commentator Nathan Robinson summed-up just how bad Iowa has been for the Democratic Party, as he explains:
If you’re a Sanders supporter, you have reason to be suspicious. We had already seen the Des Moines Register suppress the results of its “gold standard” poll on the eve of the election, after a complaint from Buttigieg. And with 0% of caucus results in, Buttigieg declared himself “victorious”, praising the “incredible result” and saying Iowa had “shocked the nation”. The only thing that had shocked the nation at this point was Iowa’s total inability to perform the relatively simple task of counting people’s votes. But Buttigieg, good McKinseyite that he is, was getting a head start on deploying the PR spin.
Make no mistake: the party’s elite wing will do whatever it takes to undermine and ultimately railroad any potential anti-Establishment or populist candidate threatening to erect a big tent on its palatial corporate. Thus, all manner of dirty tricks are fair game for these Machiavellians.
Iowa was just the opening act. Get ready for the wildest, ill-mannered and most cut-throat political cannonball run in American history. By the end of it, the party will have all but devoured itself, and in hardly any condition to make an aggressive run against the incumbent in the White House.
If they lose, they will only have themselves to blame, again (and not the Russians).
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Author Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq. See his archive here.
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