First let me state the obvious oath of allegiance, that I will vote and donate money to Joe Biden should he win the nomination, and I believe all my fellow Democrats should do the same.
With that out of the way, I felt my stomach drop when I watched Pam Bondi’s presentation during the impeachment proceedings. She gave a highly speculative review of the whole Burisma / Hunter Biden saga from which hundreds of attack ads will be cut. Of course there is no legal basis for any assertion, but there doesn’t have to be.
Right now Republicans are laying the ground work for the attack line. It is not an attack that will be taken seriously in any legal sense, but it does hit Biden’s biggest strength as a politician. Joe was always the guy that took the train to the Senate. He was the working politician. One of the people.
We all know why Hunter Biden worked for Burisma. He was an entitled kid of a well known and influential politician, who cashed in on the opportunities that afforded him. At best the defense of him is that he is a brat, who lacked his father and brother’s sense of civic obligation. Before you get pissed at me, tell me the alternative answer to this attack.
I am a Buttigieg supporter, who recognizes that the inexperience label is probably going to be a hurdle that is too high to overcome. I am begging the Warren and Sanders camps to figure out, who they can live with, because I believe Biden will be chum in the water during a general election campaign. Fairly or not, we are going to spend the next 10 months answering an attack that we don’t won’t to answer.
I know Biden leads Trump in every national poll, but that will tighten once there are only two candidates. Maybe Trump takes a hit on the sham acquittal, but if the story becomes Trump was corrupt on Ukraine, but so was Biden, it will make it hard in the fall. Likewise the nepotism argument goes out the window.
The Trump campaign is using this Senate impeachment trial to lay the ground work for the general election, and we need to be aware of this now. For everyone, who says I’m being chicken little about this, remember the whole Hillary’s emails are overblown attitude in 2016.