President Joe Biden is setting the stage to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election, former Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah wrote Monday in an Op-Ed for Fox News.
Chaffetz cited five factors he said are clues:
• The lack of campaign staff.
• Limited travel.
• The Kamala Harris factor.
• Biden’s response to the Hawaii disaster.
• The president’s dealing with the burgeoning scandal around his son, Hunter, which has enveloped him as well.
The former congressman, who retired from the House in 2017, wrote that the 80-year-old candidate’s campaign team is “a tiny skeleton crew of staffers working exclusively out of his home state of Delaware.”
“As of last quarter, he had just four people on the payroll, all working out of the party offices,” he wrote, adding that “there seems to be little urgency to mount a full-scale campaign and the first primary votes are five months away.”
Chaffetz said Biden’s campaign travel has been limited and politically questionable, noting that the president visited deep-red Utah instead of trying his hand in nearby Nevada or Colorado.
As for Biden’s trip to Arizona, “he proclaimed the Grand Canyon to be one of the ‘nine wonders’ of the world and full of ‘ironic’ species. He has always been a gaffe machine, but with the election ramping up, his new wilderness grab does nothing to expand his base in critical Arizona. In fact, it polarizes voters,” Chaffetz wrote.
Vice President Harris is little-used, he noted: “Her portfolio is minimal. She is nowhere for solving the immigration and human trafficking crisis. She is also supposedly tackling AI. We are not yet sure she can spell ‘AI’ or lead the critical thinking to put necessary guard rails on this emerging technology.”
Biden, who visited Maui on Monday, brushed off initial questions about the fires there with a “no comment” that Chaffetz said was “inexplicable.”
“Did he really not have anything to say to those desperate people fighting for their lives as he sunned himself on the beach? This was an opportunity for a president to flex his political muscle,” he wrote.
As for the Hunter Biden scandal, Chaffetz wrote, “With real, substantive evidence surfacing that the president’s son took payments from foreign entities in exchange for access to his father, the campaign seems to be locking down.”
In sum, the former congressman said Biden “isn’t sharing his vision for the future. He is hiding — hiding from the press, hiding from the scandals and hiding from his own incompetence as a commander-in-chief. By the end of this calendar year, I, for one, anticipate he won’t be a candidate in 2024.”
That would be good news for Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is trying to persuade Biden to step aside, according to The Washington Post.
“I want him to preserve his legacy, not to compromise it. And this is exactly why I’m asking — pass the torch, open the stage,” Phillips said, adding that he “felt compelled to raise my voice in the face of what I consider to be an unwillingness to confront the truth right now.”
From the halls of power to a liberal Massachusetts enclave, the message is the same.
In an Op-Ed last week in The Berkshire Eagle, Steve Nelson said the president should withdraw from the race.
“I don’t think Biden has the physical and mental energy to fully exploit a president’s most powerful tool: the bully pulpit,” Nelson wrote, adding that he “is not someone who is up to it.”
“It didn’t have to be this way. Joe could have been a hero by stepping aside to allow a new generation of Democratic candidates to rise,” the Williamstown resident wrote. “He could have said that he was going to focus his remaining time in office working for the American people and for international peace. That would have been an admirable legacy.
“But like too many in powerful positions, he can’t let go. Yet he must,” Nelson said.
“Yes, it’s a risk changing horses in midstream, but clinging to the hope that Biden can win is by far the greater risk. Any signs of further decline from aging will doom his candidacy,” he wrote.
“There is still time to rally behind another candidate and force Biden from the race, as Eugene McCarthy forced out Lyndon Johnson eight months before the 1968 general election.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
