RUTHFULLY YOURS

Now that the media have declared the election over and Joe Biden is president, the left is busy trying to conjure up a mandate for his administration. But if there is anything clear in this disaster of an election, it’s that Biden and his band of socialist Democrats have not been ordained to do anything.

On Friday, Biden said his voters have “given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.” On Sunday his deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said that Biden had “campaigned on an incredibly progressive and aggressive agenda” and that “he’s going to make good on those commitments.

Let’s leave aside the fact that there are still legal challenges and recounts, and despite what the media say, states have not certified their results. In other words, Trump hasn’t lost the election yet.

But assuming Biden prevails after all these challenges, what possible claim does he have to a mandate?

Despite what his campaign is now claiming, the only issue that Biden actually ran on was COVID-19, and even there he didn’t offer any solutions. All he did was blame President Donald Trump for the deaths it caused.

Everything else about his agenda was kept carefully hidden in Biden’s basement. At the Democratic convention, Biden’s agenda never came up, as speaker after speaker droned on about how empathetic he was.

Seriously, beyond a national mask mandate – on which Biden shifted positions half a dozen times – how many Biden voters could accurately describe any of his economic, environmental, or social policies?

Biden says he has a mandate for “action” on the economy. That is far from true. When asked, voters said they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy. And for good reason. Before the pandemic lockdowns, the economy was at historically low unemployment. Median family incomes shot up in 2019 at a rate never before seen. Minority groups were making substantial gains.

Once the lockdowns began to be lifted, the economy came roaring back, with unemployment already under 7%, and GDP growth in the last quarter making up two-thirds of the loss from the shutdown.

On top of that, even after the massive disruptions this year, most people say they are better off than they were four years ago.

The last thing voters want is Biden’s growth-killing mix of tax hikes and reregulation.

Nor do voters care about climate change, which is so far down on the list of priorities that it doesn’t even register as one. They are certainly not going to embrace Biden’s plan to eliminate the oil and gas industry, sharply raise utility rates, ban gas-powered cars, and impose prosperity killing carbon taxes.

What about “systemic racism”? If anything, the Democrats’ extremism on this issue cost them votes, including those cast by minorities. In fact, Trump claimed a bigger share of the non-white vote than any Republican since Richard Nixon in 1960, including substantial gains among Latinos in several states.

Beyond bashing Trump on the coronavirus, Biden’s entire campaign was built on the fact that he is not Donald Trump. That he’s a nice guy. That he can “bring people together.”

Finally, there are the election results themselves. Far from a mandate, voters made it clear that they do not support Biden and his leftist party’s agenda of court-packing, tax-hiking, defunding police, and enacting the Green New Deal.

First, Republicans gained seats in the House precisely because voters rejected the Biden-Harris agenda. Even Democrats are admitting to that.

Second, it’s likely that Republicans will retain control of the Senate after the runoffs in Georgia in January, which means that voters will have opted for legislative gridlock. (Unfortunately, there is plenty of damage Biden could do through regulations and executive orders.)

Third, Biden’s victory was the result of razor-thin margins of victory in states where Democrats had laid the groundwork for his win by pushing universal vote-by-mail schemes. Had all those voters who cast ballots early waited to get all the information they needed, Trump could be getting ready for a second term right now.

The only thing that Biden can credibly claim is that he is the luckiest man in the world. Had COVID-19 not hit, the economy would be roaring and Trump would have easily won a huge victory.

Had the pandemic not persisted all year, Biden could not have run his campaign from his basement, or kept his public appearances to a minimum. Instead, he would have been forced to run an aggressive campaign, with daily public appearances, where the press can ask questions, and where his declining mental faculties would have been glaringly apparent to everyone.

Of course, every president wants to declare that he has a mandate. But none in recent memory has been given as weak a hand as Joe Biden.