Kimberley Strassel: Trump Is Beating Trump

I think everybody realizes this.

   It sometimes seems like a race to the bottom between the two frontmen: the red team's nutty, antipresidential trainwreck and the ever-diminishing blue-team offering, who seems to have a death-grip on one coat-tail of his party's increasingly loony lunatic fringe, now in the driver's seat. At least Biden seems to have summoned the wherewithal to say that he's against abolishing police...so...I guess there are some limits to his bullyability.

   Still seems to me that the left crossed the bounds of sense long ago, leaving us with no real choice if we care about salvaging the tattered remnants of liberal Constitutionalism. But most people I know strenuously disagree. And who knows? Biden does seem to be a centrist at heart. I just don't think that helps anymore. He's a mere frontman in that--to switch metaphors--he doesn't even have much of a grip on the reigns. He's holding onto the saddle horn for dear life, as his party loses its goddamned mind and races hell-bent for leather toward the leftward cliff. 

   The other guy is implementing lots of good policies and making lots of good appointments (and some bad ones, too). Some of these may actually may be necessary in order to save the republic. But his demeanor is so repulsively antipresidential...it's as if he thinks that he can only win by alienating swing voters. He's pathological. As I may have mentioned, he has no business anywhere near the Oval Office. Demeanor matters. And he's harming the cause of the centrist right by feeding the extremist left's view that all opposition to them is based on cruelty. As if it had to be said: that isn't at all true. But it's the false belief that drives many people toward the bleeding-heart left. 

   Who knows? Maybe Biden would return us to the sane center. If I thought so, I'd contribute to him, volunteer for him, and vote for him gratefully and in a heartbeat. Sadly, I think the odds that he will are very low. But not zero...not zero... Such are our slender threads of hope these days.