Joe Biden's campaign is floundering, and none of its attempts to reboot his campaign have gained traction. His State of the Union address provided only a fleeting boost, and his pretending to be tough on immigration hasn't worked either. The upcoming debate on Thursday is largely seen as Biden's make-or-break moment. According to reports, party leaders may force him out if he fails to perform. But there may be another trick up his sleeve to save his campaign.
We all know that Joe Biden has spent the entirety of his presidency pandering to various groups. Heck, even during his campaign, he promised to pick a female running mate and a black woman to the Supreme Court. It was a painfully obvious acknowledgment that he needed to compensate for being just another old white man when his party is so over old white men.
Yet none of his pandering has worked. Polls have been showing for months now that Biden has been bleeding support from black voters, young voters, Hispanic voters, heck, even women voters. It's long been believed that if the Democrats lose their monopoly on the black vote, they wouldn't have any power. CNN's Harry Enten recently highlighted a poll showing that Trump's support among black voters had surged from 9% to 21% since 2020, and Biden's had declined from 86% to 70%. While polls aren't the same thing as votes, they indicate a trend that spells doom for Biden and potentially the Democratic Party in the long term.
Yet there may be something Biden might try to win them back.
As the Washington Post notes, Biden loves to boast about his accomplishments that pander to black Americans—such as making Juneteenth a federal holiday—but "one item not on Biden’s list is reparations, the long overdue but still controversial payments to the descendants of enslaved people in compensation for that original sin."
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A couple of Harvard University professors say the time has come for Biden to impose reparations, and the Washington Post does everything it can to boost their position. The paper claims that the authors—a white woman and a black man who is the descendent of slaves—make the case in a "convincing fashion" that the federal government “already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans.”
They note that the government has already funded “reparatory compensation programs” for "nonracial harms," which is "regular and routine” and “that America provides reparations to nearly everyone but Black Americans, even for comparably severe harms.”
The study recommends a presidentially appointed national commission to study reparations—which sounds exactly like something Joe Biden could and would do to appear proactive on the issue before the election to bribe black Americans to vote for him.
Of course, we know how that would turn out. We saw what happened in California last year, when the state’s reparations task force proposed a figure of $1.2 million for each black person in the state after two years of studying the issue. Yet Gov. Gavin Newsom, a prospective Democratic presidential candidate, rejected the task force's findings. There is no justification to make people who had nothing to do with slavery pay reparations to people who were never enslaved, and if California wouldn't do it, the nation certainly won't, but it would be just like Biden to make black Americans think reparations are coming to win back their vote. That's basically what he did in 2022 with his student loan forgiveness plan, which was eventually shot down by the Supreme Court. Sure, Biden has found workarounds, but clearly, he's an old hand at bribing voters before elections.
So, don't be surprised if Biden announces a presidential reparations task force before the election.
