January 23, 2024
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Is Biden a weak incumbent? Biden’s first test in 2024 comes in New Hampshire primary.
By Robert Romano
President Joe Biden’s first test in his 2024 reelection bid will come today, Jan. 23, in the New Hampshire primary, versus U.S. Rep. Tim Phillips (D-Minn.) and Marianne Williamson, wherein Biden will not even appear on the ballot, but is nonetheless favored to win via a coordinated write-in campaign.
Biden and Democrats had planned to have South Carolina go first on Feb. 3, 2024, where Biden performs better, and are currently suppressing the results of the Iowa caucuses until Super Tuesday. The rationale is easy to understand: Biden lost Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020, and poor showings in both in 2024 might expose weaknesses in his reelection bid very early in the process, leading to calls for him to abdicate the nomination.
New Hampshire responded by moving their primary up to Jan. 23, creating the possibility that Biden would be embarrassed in New Hampshire anyway, leading to the write-in campaign. In the most recent polling, where Biden has led 100 percent of the polls, for example the WHDH-TV-Emerson poll taken Jan. 18 to Jan. 20, shows Biden garnering 61 percent to Phillips’ 16 percent and Williamson’s 5 percent.
Can Biden do better than what the polls show? Or will he do worse?
Biden’s plan to bypass New Hampshire is not without merit, owing to his performance in South Carolina that catapulted his campaign after he replicated Bill Clinton’s 1992 comeback win for the Democratic nomination after losing Iowa and New Hampshire.
And yet, New Hampshire remains an important test, where other sitting presidents have been exposed as weak incumbents and went on to eventual defeat.
In 1952, Harry Truman actually lost the New Hampshire primary to Estes Kefauver, prompting Truman to withdraw from the race rather than face Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1968, Lyndon Johnson similarly did not appear on the New Hampshire ballot, but a last minute bid for a write-in campaign allowed Johnson to barely prevail against Eugene McCarthy, who garnered 42 percent of the vote in the primary to Johnson’s 49 percent. Johnson’s weakness with independents ultimately prompted him to withdraw from the race.
In 1980, another Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, surprised incumbent President Jimmy Carter by running for president, and picked up 37.3 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, signaling Carter’s weakness with swing voters that would prove fatal in a 44-state landslide by Ronald Reagan.
And in 1992, George H.W. Bush faced Pat Buchanan in the primaries, who although he did not win a single state, managed a very similar 37.5 percent in New Hampshire, demonstrating that there was a sizeable portion of Republicans and independents who were either considering voting for the eventual Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton, or Ross Perot.
Biden’s initial hope to break the New Hampshire jinx in 2024, as in 2020, was to forego its judgment. Now he will find out whether that was a good plan or not, or if it ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the write-in bid fails to prevent Phillips and Williamson from having decent enough showings that invariably exposes Biden’s weakness in the general election — once again leading to calls for the sitting president to step aside.
Biden’s best argument will remain that in modern history, no stealth candidate chosen after a sitting president stood aside has ever won. He can cite Harry Truman’s comeback victory in 1948, where he trailed Thomas Dewey in much of the polls throughout the year but ultimately prevailed. Whereas, standing aside in 1952, and Johnson again doing so in 1968, were of little use to the incumbent party.
Much will depend on what Biden’s margin of victory tonight is, assuming it is a victory as the polls show. As usual, stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/01/is-biden-a-weak-incumbent-bidens-first-test-in-2024-comes-in-the-new-hampshire-primary/
10 percent of student debt borrowers refusing to pay their loans out of entitlement
By Rick Manning
The New York Post reports that “nearly 9 million Americans failed to make their first [student loan] payment” after a resumption of payments following a Supreme Court decision overturning President Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive $500 billion of loans.
69 percent in a survey by Intelligent.com say they cannot afford to pay them, others still are waiting until Sept. 2024 when bigger penalties go into effect but there is also about 10 percent who are simply refusing to pay out of some weird sense of entitlement built around a belief that if enough people refuse, there is nothing the federal government can do about it.
Currently, the federal government is owed approximately $1.75 trillion dollars in student debt. And one of the repercussions of government actions to limit the economic impact of Covid is that when the three and one-half year pause on the requirement to repay student loans ended in October of 2023, many borrowers simply got out of the habit of paying.
It is also likely that many who budgeted to pay the student loan debt replaced that debt with a mortgage, car payment or some other form of debt under the assumption that the Biden administration without consulting Congress would wipe the student debt away. They were wrong.
Now with the increased capacity to organize online, and the outsized impact of “internet influencers” surveys indicate that about 900,000 of student loan debtors are simply refusing to repay the debt in a mass civil disobedience effort. But there is no great moral push behind it, instead it is merely a movement built around the idea that they can get away with it, so why not?
The bad news for the Redditors and Tiktokkers who believe they can’t be touched is that they can. The federal government has the Social Security numbers for every student loan debtor. The IRS has the Social Security numbers of every person who has a job or independent business which is not on the black market. All the federal government needs to do to begin collecting these loans is to forcibly deduct the loan amounts as automatic deductions from each of the non-payers paychecks until they come to the government to make other arrangements.
As someone who in his youth went to the personnel department of the company I worked for trying to figure out a way that I could boycott having money taken out of my paycheck over my personal disagreement with a federal government policy that threatened to take over the steel industry, I sympathize with moral attempts to deny the feds money. But taking out a loan, benefitting from the product that you received in exchange for that borrowing, and refusing to repay that loan because you don’t want to must be punished.
At the very least it needs to be reflected on a credit score like a personal bankruptcy, so home lenders and others can make a fully informed decision about the reliability of potential liabilities and price the loans accordingly.
When then-President Barack Obama shoved a federal takeover of student loans into the Obamacare health care legislation, it was inevitable that student loan repayments would become a political football. Those who choose to not pay and have no intention of ever repaying these obligations, must face consequences for this theft from the federal treasury. Perhaps even more importantly, the federal government student loan experiment has failed, and the system needs to be re-privatized with reforms put into place to hold the colleges themselves accountable for defaults by their students and graduates.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/01/10-percent-of-student-debt-borrowers-refusing-to-pay-their-loans-out-of-entitlement/
Millions of Americans Refuse To Repay Student Loans
