Democrats Have No Story to Sell the American People

BUCK: Here’s CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who is straight up. He’s not a right-wing radio host, right? I mean, he’s a finance guy, kind of a centrist, I think, on his politics. He’s a market guy. Right. Here he is slamming Biden’s anti-energy agenda. Play 17.

BUCK: Like I said, they hate fossil fuels and they’re lying to everybody about it. That’s what’s happening.

CLAY: It’s not a good combo, and increasingly, Biden is just flailing at windmills, Don Quixote style, trying to come up with reasons why he’s not responsible for everything going wrong. And the problem for him is that it’s really hard to move public opinion. And so, what many people won’t recognize is now that Biden has dropped — in the Real Clear Politics average of all the polls — under 40%, it is almost impossible for Biden. And if you look at the trend lines, it’s just continuing down.

People make up their minds, and people have made up their minds that Joe Biden is incompetent and that he doesn’t have answers to make the life of the average American better. And by the way, these are white, black, Asian, Hispanic, all of this tracking in congruency as the numbers are coming down. And what Biden ran on — what was his promise — one, “I’m not Donald Trump,” and two, he said that he would be responsible. Remember, they made a big deal about the adults are back in charge. Well, Biden speaking right now.

And when you’re flailing around and blaming Vladimir Putin, invading Ukraine for the increase in oil prices and when you are blaming all these external factors that you can’t control. And as you just said, as we finished off the second hour of the program, you’re left with a series of bad options in terms of politically. The best of the bad options by far is, “Let’s increase American overall oil and gas production.” That’s the best by far.

The problem with that is the Democrat Party is now held hostage by the Green New Deal. And if you increase aggressively the amount of oil and gas that you’re producing in the United States, politically, you get destroyed there. So, what do you do instead? And this is where DeSantis was kind of making fun of this. You go to Venezuela, you go to Saudi Arabia, you’re not going to Russia right now. But probably at some point in the future you’ll go back to Russia and you maybe have to go to Iran. Right?

All of these countries are producing oil and gas. And what Ron DeSantis pointing out it, hey, these are not different planets. If you’re opposed to the production of oil and gas and you’re in favor of the Green New Deal, it’s not like Venezuela doing it is somehow different than the United States doing it. The only big change is, instead of our money staying at home with American producing oil and gas companies, we’re shipping it overseas to these petro dictatorships where they are then gaining more political power because they have more money to distribute inside of their country and increase their political standing.

That’s where we are right now. And ultimately, this all ties in 8.6% inflation. You got the January 6th distraction that they’re trying. The Democrats have no story. But ultimately, what story do they have to sell to the American people about why Americans should vote for them in November? They will have been in charge. They have been 18 months. Five more months, they’re going to have been in charge nearly two years and every single thing Joe Biden touched is worse. All of it. The Bidas touch is the opposite of the Midas touch. Everything Biden touches turns to crap. There ain’t a single positive story they’ve got right now.

BUCK: Clay, I remember if you look back, there’s nothing is surprising here.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Any part of this that I think is hard for people to wrap their minds around is we said he’d be a Trojan Horse for the progressive left. He is. Trump said you’re going to have $6, $7, $8 a gallon gas. We do. We have been warning it. And I went back and said it last October, even talking about the recession that would be coming under Biden, and I think that’s now imminent.

But even you could even stretch it further to, “This is a guy who had run for president, what, three times previously?” And Democrats, we could take it out of the realm of, “Oh, you know, you and I, we have our views of the world and of politics, and we’re openly advocating for certain ideologies and conservatism and all the rest of it.”

Democrats knew this guy was a joke. I mean, he was a candidate… I remember in 2008 when he ran on the Democrat side early on before he became Obama’s vice president. I got invited by somebody and I was still working the government at the time, so I couldn’t do anything active politically. And it was like the third-tier candidates. It was the guy — who was the guy with the high voice from Ohio and kind of the…?

CLAY: Kucinich?

BUCK: Yes. Thank you, Kucinich. It was like Kucinich and Biden and one or two other people who I couldn’t name, and it was some kind of an open forum. You could ask them questions. But he was alongside Kucinich. I mean, this is not a guy who Democrats were taking seriously as a presidential candidate. He was a laughingstock. He was a joke. And yet you look at it. He ends up in this last election being the president.

And Kamala, who even in this last election couldn’t get any Democrats to vote for her, is the vice president? I mean, none of this is surprising is the part of this that I think is so interesting. And because of that, it’s the same thing with covid, right? You and I pushed for things that were just rational. We pushed ideas that were rational during covid, like, “Why are we doing this? “This doesn’t make any sense.”

And a lot of people now, even though they should be able to see that they were wrong, their brains cannot process the wrongness because it was so obvious that it’s humiliating. I think for a fair number of Democrats, some of them are crazy and they think Biden’s doing a great job. Fine. Not that many, though. Independents have clearly fled this guy and want nothing to do with him, and I think even a lot of Democrats are dealing with the cognitive dissonance of, “Well, he’s better than Trump.” But is he though? But is he better than Trump? You want to explain that one a little further.

CLAY: Yeah, and remember, the biggest news that Biden made when he ran for president in 2008 was when he called Barack Obama the first black guy who was “clean and articulate.” The funny thing to me about Biden is he’s always been bad at public speaking — this was before the dementia set in — and he’s always said things that are inappropriate and end up with his foot in his mouth. And now Democrats are trying to argue, “Well, one of the challenges that Biden has is, he can’t get out and speak as much to the general public because he’s 79 and covid’s continuing to circulate and all this stuff.”

Wait, what? The reason why Joe Biden can’t do a good job of being president is because Joe Biden wasn’t a particularly good candidate ever before running for president. He won in spite of himself in 2020, right — 2020 was a referendum on Trump — and that’s why I would say as we look forward and think about January 6th and what Democrats are trying to do — and I would say this to the Donald Trump campaign, because he’s going to run in 2024 — 2024 is not about Trump. To the extent that they are able to make it about Trump, that gives Democrats a chance to win because Trump is the Great Satan.

Biden is so incompetent and the Democrat-funded government in the House and the Senate has been so incompetent that as long as you make Biden the referendum point, that is the way to win. And I wonder on some level. Who’s going to announce first? Because I don’t think Democrats want Biden to run. But as soon as Trump runs, I think Democrats may be afraid that Biden’s the only guy they have who could potentially beat Trump, and so they really may try to drag him, Weekend at Bernie’s 2 style, across the finish line at 82 years old. You know.

BUCK: You and I are calling shots years in the future in the upper deck here, so I don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. But if Democrats really believe that it is going to be Trump, 100% it’s going to be Joe Biden as their candidate.

CLAY: Because they think he’s the only one who can win.

BUCK: They think that that it will be a replay and that they’ll be able to figure it out and he’ll win again. I don’t believe this thing about Hillary stepping in and I don’t see that if Trump is the nominee. If it’s not Trump as the Republican nominee, then you start thinking about some other scenarios because other Republican contenders — one in particular with a lot of people are thinking of these days who happen to be from a state that’s pretty warm and known for oranges — that Biden can’t, you know, line up against somebody who brings all… Biden’s age becomes even such a bigger issue against a younger opponent, etc. I just don’t think that they that’s not a matchup they’d want to have.

CLAY: Here’s a possibility that I think could play out. We know we talk a lot about the midterms. Soon after the midterms, Trump and Biden are going to have to make decisions. I think the Democrats could clear the deck for Joe Biden. “Nobody’s going to challenge him. He’s our guy. We’re going to try to drag him across the finish line at 82 years old,” and then I really think that Trump’s going to end up in a donnybrook against Ron DeSantis.

And so, Democrats might be picking Joe Biden, projecting that he’s going to go head-to-head against Donald Trump. And then what if DeSantis ends up the nominee? Then you’ve got 82-year-old Joe Biden going up against 43-year-old Ron DeSantis. Literally 40 years of age difference between the two of them. I think you’ve got to be careful there what you’re planning for. I just think Democrats are in an awful spot, because whoever Republicans end up nominating is going to win the election in 2024. I would put a lot of money on that.