At the recently concluded Democratic National Committee’s Winter Meeting, President Biden faced "zero meaningful opposition to his leadership of the Democratic Party and an unobstructed path to renomination next year," reports NBC News.
"During the three-day gathering of elected officials, activists, union leaders, operatives and donors this weekend, serious dissent or discontentment with Biden was almost impossible to find, even after hours at the hotel bar, where alcohol and opinions flowed freely."
The Wall Street Journal editorial board, on the other hand, is in a tizzy — especially about the DNC having moved South Carolina to the front of the primary-states pack. "Imagine if the Republican Party rigged its presidential nominating calendar to help Donald Trump slide past states where he’s politically weak. Would that go down easily with the GOP or the press corps?"
But the Journal's observation is a silly irrelevancy, since in reality the GOP's power brokers would do whatever they could to stiff Donald Trump in the early primaries. He's an electoral time bomb and they know it, hence they're more than happy to permit New Hampshire to be the first primary state: Gov. Ron DeSantis is killing Trump there among likely Republican voters, by double digits.
National committees are presidents' personal institutions, always have been, always will be. After all, the president is the leader of his party. The Journal's board, however, smells skulduggery afoot: "All of this [S.C. business] is being done at the request—please don’t say orders—of the Biden White House."
The editorial board then piles yet another irrelevancy onto its griping — a complaint totally in the interest of helping Democrats, don't you know. "The main benefit of the early New Hampshire and Iowa contests is that they give voters a chance at close-up vetting, and they give long-shot candidates a chance to elevate an issue or emerge from obscurity."
Yet South Carolina is also a small state, one ready-made for close-up vetting and less expensive political ads. And unlike Iowa and New Hampshire, the state's demographics conform far more to those of Biden's party.
So why is The Wall Street Journal editorial board so bent out of shape over Joe Biden and South Carolina? I suppose with inflation coming down (along with Chinese balloons) and unemployment at 3.4% — the lowest since 1969 — a relative non-kerfuffle over the scheduling of primary states was about all it had to bitch about.