Venerable columnist George Will begged Democrats Wednesday not to allow President Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris to seek the White House in 2024, warning that nominating either would “insult and imperil the nation.”
“Biden is not just past his prime; even adequacy is in his past,” Will wrote in the Washington Post.
The 81-year-old Will, a longtime Republican who left the party in 2016 after Donald Trump won its presidential nomination, voted for Biden in 2020, and describes himself as “unaffiliated,” said the president’s false statement last month that the student loan forgiveness plan was passed by Congress marked a breaking point.
“Meeting recently with some progressive activists, Biden said his $426 billion student loan forgiveness was accomplished by ’a law’ that he had ’just signed’: ’I got it passed by a vote or two.’ No. He. Did. Not,” Will wrote in the column.
”Biden was not merely again embellishing his achievements,” he continued. “This is not just another of his verbal fender benders. There is no less-than-dismaying explanation for his complete confusion. What vote? Who voted?”
“It is frightening that Biden does not know, or remember, what he recently did regarding an immensely important policy,” Will pronounced. “He must be presumed susceptible to future episodes of similar bewilderment. He should leave the public stage on Jan. 20, 2025.”
Will was similarly unsparing about the veep, who he described as “starkly unqualified” and “lacking natural talent.”
“Transcripts of her verbal meanderings cannot convey their eerie strangeness,” wrote the onetime Pulitzer Prize winner. “Videos of them should be watched.”
Will then directly quoted Harris serving up word salad at various public appearances, including her recent, widely mocked comments about her love of yellow school buses.
“I have a particular fondness, I must tell you, for electric school buses,” Harris said last week. “I love electric school buses. I really do … I’ve been on these electric school buses … 25 million children in our country, every day, go to school on those diesel-fueled school buses. And hundreds, thousands of school bus drivers are driving those buses. Which are then, these people — these children, these adults — are inhaling what is toxic air.'”
“She sounds, as a critic has said, like someone giving a book report on a book she has not read,” wrote Will, referencing pseudonymous Twitter media watchdog A.G. Hamilton. “Her style betrays a self-satisfied exaggeration of her aptitudes … she needs to prepare, but evidently doesn’t.”
“Complacency and arrogance make a ruinous compound,” he added.
A repeat of the 2020 Biden/Harris ticket in 2024 could result in the return of Donald Trump to high office, Will concluded.
“In 2024, the Republican Party might present the nation with a presidential nominee whose unfitness has been demonstrated,” he wrote. “After next Tuesday’s sobering election results, Democrats should resolve not to insult and imperil the nation by doing likewise.”
