'Moderate' Joe Biden Is Walking a Tightrope To Win the Radical Democratic Base
Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi realizes that in order to win in 2020, Democrats can’t run on a platform so far left that it might as well come in the form of a little red book, like the quotations of Chairman Mao.
That yearning for a moderate who can win, plus Obama nostalgia and name recognition, are mostly responsible for Joe Biden taking a huge lead in the party’s presidential polls the minute he announced (let’s face it — if Americans really wanted a President Biden, they had plenty of chances before now. But when everything else on the buffet turns your stomach, that stale meatball you passed over twice starts to look pretty good.)
Unfortunately for Biden, he’s already butting up against the fatal flaw in his Party: to win the general election, a Democrat has to seem reasonably sane, but to win over the “progressives” in the primaries, a Democrat has to sound as crazy and leftwing as the bed bugs in Fidel Castro’s beard.
And so, “moderate centrist” Uncle Joe is already walking a tightrope and starting to slip.
When asked if “undocumented immigrants” (the syllabically-inflated PC term for “illegal aliens”) should be entitled to federal benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, Biden seemingly agreed that they should.
Well, here are his exact words:
“Look, I think that anyone who is in a situation where they are in need of health care, regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented, we have an obligation to see that they are cared for. That’s why I think we need more clinics in this country … By the way, a significant portion of undocumented folks in this country are there because they overstayed their visas. It’s not people breaking down gates coming across the border, so the biggest thing we got to do on this thing is tone down the rhetoric. We know why it’s happening. It’s to create fear and concern.”
OK, the facts: According to the DHS, there were a total of 739,478 visa overstays in the United States, compared to 563,204 illegal border crossings as of 2016. But as I’ve written previously, just since September, one percent of the entire populations of Honduras and Guatemala entered the U.S.
In March alone, there were 103,000 arrivals of undocumented migrants (i.e., “breaking down gates.”)
Besides, even if illegal visa overstays do outnumber illegal entrants, I don’t see why we are obligated to provide free health care to either. I admire Biden’s nimbleness in dodging the question by saying we need more clinics.
Of course, if anyone needs emergency medical care at a clinic, they should receive it. That’s just basic humanitarian decency.
The question was, are we obligated to provide people who are here illegally with full, free health coverage, like the Medicare that senior Americans who’ve paid into the system throughout their lives receive? He didn’t actually say yes, but he implied it.
The proper answer should be, “No, of course not. If I broke into your house, would you owe me free health care?”
This is always presented as an issue of compassion, that anyone who doesn’t want to provide free health care to illegal immigrants is mean, hard-hearted, racist, etc. That’s garbage. We show compassion by providing emergency care regardless of ability to pay, as well as a variety of other benefits that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.
But our government is already $22 trillion in debt. Seniors are struggling by on Social Security (average monthly benefit: $1461), doctors are being lowballed by Medicare, and worst of all, veterans are living on streets and in shelters and getting second-rate care, if they can survive the VA waiting lists. How it “compassionate” to let our own fellow Americans go on suffering while we spend billions more that we don’t have to provide more free benefits for people who aren’t even supposed to be here?
That’s a question that Americans in the general election will expect Biden to answer forthrightly and correctly. But if he wants the nomination, he’ll keep being pressured by the left to fully embrace free Medicare for all, including illegal immigrants, at any price. Rock, meet hard place.
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