There’s an old political saying: You can’t beat somebody with nobody.
The Democrats are hoping that adage is no longer true, because they have anointed Nobody at the top of their ticket, and his name is Joe Biden.
But then, this election has always been a referendum: Donald Trump, thumbs up or thumbs down.
Just to put everything in perspective in this national top-of-the-ballot referendum, if you vote thumbs down, you will get a guy who on Friday was campaigning in Iowa and Minnesota in brief appearances in which Biden forgot his age (he’s 78, not 74). He vowed to tax “trillionaires.”
He touted the endorsement of a retired military leader he identified as “General McGeneral.” He pegged the number of COVID-19 dead at 30,000 (quite a reduction from his earlier claims of “200 million” dead).
Joe Biden is not all there.
He looks like the old guy you see sitting by himself on a park bench, legs crossed, talking to passing clouds, screaming at pigeons, maybe later wandering through the parking lot at Market Basket trying to remember where he parked his car, or if he even still has a car.
This final Biden campaign, as someone wrote yesterday in the National Review, is “a doddering culmination of a half-century of hackery and blarney.”