President Joe Biden squared up on a reporter, made a baby cry, and inappropriately touched a little girl during this year’s White House Congressional Picnic on Tuesday.
At one point during the event, a reporter asked the president what his message is “to Democrats who don’t want you to run again.”
The question was based on a New York Times poll published Monday that showed that 64 percent of Democrat voters “would prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign.”
Watch the president’s response below:
“They want me to run,” he replied.
“Two-thirds say they don’t,” the reporter rightly noted.
“Read the polls! Read the polls, Jack!” Biden replied as he squared up on the reporter.
“You guys are all the same! That poll showed that 92 percent of Democrats, if I ran, would vote for me!” he added in clear-cut annoyance.
He was somewhat right. The poll specifically found that if he were pitted against former President Donald Trump, 92 percent of Democrat voters would indeed choose him.
But that minor finding doesn’t distract from the more pertinent revelation that “a majority of Democrats say they don’t want you to run again in 2024,” as noted by the reporter in response to the president’s point.
“Ninety-two percent said if I did, they’d vote for me,” Biden replied, doubling down.
Yeah, if they had no other option. But given an option, the poll also made it exceedingly clear that they’d gladly choose somebody else — anybody else.
During another point in the event, the president unintentionally made a baby cry as he took a selfie with the parents.
He also inappropriately touched a little girl.
Look:
History will slam the US for first using fraud to put this idiot into office and second, for allowing him to stay there. He’s the worst and most destructive joke on the US since Obama. Another caricature president.https://t.co/HeU717BBSS
— RD Carrington (@rdcarrington) July 13, 2022
All this comes amid the president’s polling numbers reaching record lows, with the Times’ poll, for instance, showing him with an approval rating of only 33 percent versus a disapproval rating of 60 percent.
The event Tuesday, the first of its kind in three years, was ostensibly designed to foster camaraderie and cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.
It comes at a time when the president and the Democrat Party at large are desperate to pass anything at all so they have something to show going into the midterms.
“Senate Democrats are redoubling their efforts to finalize a new spending package that could lower health-care costs and combat climate change, hoping to hammer out a long-elusive deal with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and bring it to the chamber floor later this month,” The Washington Post reported Monday.
“A new sense of optimism — and urgency — has set in among party lawmakers nearly seven months after their last attempt to pass a sweeping bill ended in stunning defeat. Piece by piece, Democratic leaders in recent days have started reconstructing their economic ambitions as they race to deliver on a staple element of President Biden’s agenda before the midterm elections in November,” the outlet added.
At the moment, Republicans are poised to take the House and possibly the Senate as well. And without a miracle, it seems unlikely that even the last-minute passage of a bill or two would engender much of a difference.
But as noted earlier, Democrats are desperate, and it showed in the president’s rhetoric:
At one point in his Congressional Picnic speech, the president recalled having lunch with segregationists.
“We used to have debates with and, for example, Jim Eastland, with whom I agreed on virtually nothing except we were both senators. But we would debate like hell on the floor of the Senate and go and have lunch together,” he said.
He made the remarks as Vice President Kamala Harris stood right by him. This matters because during the 2020 Democrat presidential primary debates, Harris slammed then-Democrat candidate Biden for talking about getting along with segregationists.
“It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country,” she said.
Continuing his remarks at Tuesday’s event, the president said, “And John McCain became one of my closest friends, even though John McCain and I were like brothers who would go at each other with hammer and tong.”
“It’s hard to dislike a colleague when you know he or she has a wife or a husband that has cancer. It’s hard to look at someone you strongly disagree with and make it personal when you know that they have a son or a daughter that has a problem,” he added.
His desperate, last-minute “Kumbaya” rhetoric strongly contrasted with him spending months accusing Republicans of being racist monsters for trying to pass election reform laws and curtail the teaching of racial essentialism.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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