Ian Macfarlane |
Joe Biden has one great chance to emancipate himself from the extremists in his own party and work with moderate Trump supporters and NeverTrumpers among the Republicans.
"There is a pathway to significant success for a President Biden. It is hard to detect, given the questionable nature of his apparent election, fragmented party, likely inability to enact anything that he currently supports in the Congress, and the probable Democratic loss of the majority in the House in the midterm elections, as well as his evident frailties.
"Biden was retrieved from imminent candidate mortality by the party elders to spare the Democrats a Bernie Sanders candidacy and was saddled with most of Sanders’ quasi-Marxist program. But in his most impressive remark in the presidential debates, Biden said that in policy terms, “I am the party.” It was a forceful, and in a way, a reassuring statement.
"Joe Biden, in his 48 years in Washington, has been on all sides of almost every issue. If he has never been strong, so too has he never been an extremist. He is not a true believer in the radical leftist program that he officially stood upon and from which he has in effect already departed. In any case, such a program has absolutely no chance of being adopted by a Congress with such a strong Republican presence as the next one.
"Since there is also no practical likelihood of his attempting a second term as president, the only way that Biden could build a record of achievement is to work with the Republicans in Congress along with whatever moderate Democrats remain. His party would run away from under him, or at least the Sandersite wing of approximately 40 percent of them would run. But they would have nowhere to go. " . . .
Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.