Choosing A Bus Driver
By
Leonard Zwelling
A reader presented me with a good question from Twitter the
other day.
If you were at a bus stop waiting for the school bus with
your child and the bus arrived with Joe Biden at the wheel, would you let your
kid on the bus?
Answer: no! Impaired driver.
Unfortunately, I also responded that I wouldn’t let my kid on
the bus if Donald Trump were driving either. He couldn’t keep his monkey mind
on the road.
Why has the American political system come to the place with
such awful choices for the highest office in the land—two old men who shouldn’t
even be driving a school bus.
Let’s start with Biden.
He has tried to grab the presidential nomination before when
he was younger and more with it. He failed then. Why might he succeed now?
The Democratic field was wide but not deep. The few people
ready to assume executive power, the governors like Jay Inslee, never caught on.
Instead, a bunch of senators with little executive chops gained popularity—for a
while. Of course, there was Mayor Pete who is an executive but of a city of
about 100,000 in racial turmoil. Then came the South Carolina primary when all
the rest of the Democratic field beside Biden displayed no ability to excite
the African-American vote essentially giving the nomination to Biden and
confirming that the Democratic Party is a collection of factions with various
interests, but no vision for the country besides Bernie’s socialism, which is,
frankly, un-American. Biden got the nod by default.
Trump is the incumbent so, of course, will be the Republican
nominee, but he too went through a crowded primary in 2016 and won by default
over many more qualified leaders who just did not excite the Republican base.
Now the GOP is stuck with a standard bearer who bears no resemblance to a real
Republican or even a real conservative. He’s more of a nationalist-isolationist
whose ideas about America went out the window in 1941. (See The Plot Against America for Trump
before Trump, Charles Lindbergh).
In other words, neither of these guys has any right to even pretend
to be ready for the presidency, but one of the two will be the next president
barring some unexpected occurrence. What is unfortunate is that in the case of
the school bus driver, you can always home school your kid. There’s no comparable
choice for the country. The best we can hope for is that Biden selects an
excellent vice presidential candidate and he and she win after which she
invokes the 25th Amendment stating, “if he can’t drive a bus, he can’t
run the country” and gets sufficient backing to move Biden back to the basement
in Delaware and assume the Oval Office. This might amount to an administrative
coup, but when the bus driver shouldn’t have a license, what else are you going
to do?
I still say vote for Biden. At least he might ask for
directions.
I am far more pessimistic about the country due to the
mediocrity of the presidential choices than I am because of the coronavirus,
the economic downturn and the racial unrest. The next president will have to
address these problems and neither of the old men running is ready to do that.
It’s going to take a woman and that woman is the Democratic vice presidential
nominee. Let’s hope that Biden can focus enough to get this right, choose a
winner and then step aside. If he really wants to serve his country as
president, he should do so for a very short period of time.
