The worst nightmare for an incumbent President is to receive a serious intra-party nomination challenge. In recent history, it has happened three times. In 1976, a conservative challenger, former California Governor Ronald Reagan, made a valiant attempt that almost succeeded in denying the GOP nomination for President Gerald Ford.
In 1980, U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) vigorously challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. In 1992, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan offered Republican Party voters an alternative to moderate President George H. W. Bush.
While none of these intra-party nomination challenges were successful, the incumbent Presidents were weakened and eventually lost the presidential race to their opponents in the general election.
In the upcoming 2024 election, a similar scenario is emerging in the Democratic Party. This week, incumbent President Joe Biden announced in a video that he is running for re-election. To say his announcement “landed with a thud” is an understatement.
Biden is very unpopular with the American people. In a recent Gallup poll, only 37% of respondents approve of Biden’s performance, while an astounding 59% disapprove of his presidency.
Who can blame outraged Americans as they witness the destruction of our economy, border security, energy production, national security, and international standing? Couple these massive problems with the debacle of our withdrawal in Afghanistan, the mishandling of our involvement in the war in Ukraine, the woke transformation of our military and the building crime and drug crises in our cities, it is understandable that 70% of Americans do not want Biden to run for a second term as President.
With a weakened incumbent, two Democratic Party challengers have emerged: Marianne Williamson, author and spiritual guru, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental attorney. Williamson ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020, while Kennedy is a member of one of the most iconic political families in American history.
The latest Fox News poll among Democratic primary voters shows Biden at only 62% support, while both of his challengers are gaining ground. The poll indicated that Kennedy registered 19% support, while Williamson was at 9%.
While Biden has a large margin, it is uncomfortable that almost one-third of the Democratic Party primary electorate prefers another candidate. These problems are occurring even though Biden has received almost universal support and few, if any, hostile questions from the lapdog press.
The love fest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the latest example of the media’s support of President Biden. At the dinner, he said, “Yeah I know, I just announced my re-election campaign,” which generated huge applause from the liberal journalists.
He joked, “In a lot of ways, this dinner sums up my first two years in office: I’ll talk for 10 minutes, take zero questions and cheerfully walk away.” As conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings noted, this joke showed how Biden was “mocking” the media in attendance. Regarding the media, Jennings believed that Biden was “not laughing with you,” but “laughing at you.”
Clearly, the media will work overtime to support Biden and suppress the chances of Kennedy or Williamson. For example, on Thursday, ABC News blatantly censored Kennedy in an interview conducted by reporter Linsey Davis.
ABC News obviously did not care for the claims that Kennedy was making about vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry. According to Kennedy, “47 USC 315 makes it illegal for TV networks to censor Presidential candidates but Thursday, ABC showed its contempt for the law, democracy, and its audience by cutting most of the content of my interview.”
The censorship involved Kennedy’s comments about the government’s actions during the COVID pandemic. He said, he will be “happy to supply citations to support every statement I made” and lamented that “Instead of journalism, the public saw a hatchet job. Instead of information, they got defamation and unsheathed Pharma propaganda.”
In his response to such blatant censorship, Kennedy asked, “How can democracy function without a free and unbiased press?” If elected President, Kennedy promised to “free FCC from its corporate captors and force the agency to follow the law by revoking the licenses of networks that put the mercantile ambitions of advertisers ahead of the public interest.”
Among other interesting comments Kennedy has recently made, he also voiced opposition to biological males competing against women in sports. In a CNN interview, Kennedy said, “I am against people participating in women’s sports who are biologically male. I think women have worked too hard to develop women’s sports over the past 30 years. I watched it happen, and I don’t think that’s fair.”
With his stance against transgender males participating in women’s sports, COVID vaccines and the war in Ukraine, Kennedy is in direct opposition to Biden and the major leaders in the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Not surprisingly, the DNC canceled the 2024 presidential primary debates.
Also, the risk of Kennedy or Williamson outshining the mentally incompetent 80-year-old Biden is too great. In 2020, Biden “won” the election by employing a “basement strategy” and conducting few events or interviews. Obviously, he will employ a similar strategy in 2024.
This pathetic scheme, supported by the DNC, will deprive Democratic primary voters of the opportunity of seeing how these challengers fare against Biden. Williamson tweeted that “Too many people are too smart to accept this.”
Kennedy claimed that the Democrats have “rigged the system.” He also noted that New Hampshire lost their status as “first in the nation primary” because “President Biden didn’t do well there; he came in fifth.” He blasted the DNC for the move which has happened at a time when there are “many Americans who are concerned about election integrity.”
Sadly, such corruption is nothing new for Democrats, who are experts at manipulating party nomination contests. For example, in 2016, without the DNC rigging it for her, Hillary Clinton would have lost the presidential nomination to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). The DNC is fixing it again for Biden to win the nomination in 2024.
Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and his award-winning program, “Ringside Politics,” airs Saturdays from Noon until 1 p.m. CT nationally on Real America's Voice TV Network & AmericasVoice.News and weekdays from 7-11 a.m. CT on WGSO 990-AM & Wgso.com. He is a political columnist, the author of America's Last Chance and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on Crouere.net. For more information, email him at jcrouere@gmail.com