Democrats think a political discussion with Cardi B is a path to victory, but Joe Biden can’t even handle that

What happens when a former stripper sits down to talk politics with a mumbling old man who may soon be the leader of the free world? Very little, except the acceleration of the Democratic Party’s decline.

Slammed for refusing to take questions from the press after announcing Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate last week, Democratic candidate Joe Biden sat down over the weekend not with a panel of top Washington journalists, but with former stripper and rapper Cardi B, in an interview for Elle Magazine.

At 77, Joe Biden is 50 years Cardi’s senior. Usually when politicians try to get down with the kids they embarrass themselves by trying and failing to ape the slang of the young –- Hillary Clinton’s “chillin’ in Cedar Rapids” and “Pokemon go to the polls” being two particularly nauseating examples from the 2016 campaign. However, Biden fails here because he somehow manages to sound less politically informed than a woman who recently grabbed headlines for rapping about her “wet a** p***y.”

Biden answered Cardi B’s simple questions with rambling platitudes. When she asks for “free college and Medicare,” Biden talks about after-school programs and urges viewers to “look at all the people who don’t have that kind of help.” After she repeats her interest in free education and universal healthcare, Biden talks about the history of the civil rights movement and how the “cell phone changed America.”

Cardi’s question about racial equality –- whatever that means – earns her a grandfatherly pat on the back from Biden, telling her that her “generation is changing it.” When Cardi asks Biden how the government can provide healthcare and education without bankrupting the population with taxes, Joe promises a modest bump in corporate tax – far below the hike needed to pay for Medicare For All, a proposal projected to cost around $52 trillion over ten years.

To be fair, the interview was never meant to be combative. But one has to wonder how Biden would fare against some actual, adversarial journalists. After all, this is a man who regularly forgets where he is, struggles to finish his sentences, and visibly brain-farts his way through even prepared statements. He even opened his interview with Cardi B by forgetting how many grandchildren he had (it’s seven, Joe, not five).

The video’s apparent use of chopping and edits also do little to reassure viewers that this is a serious candidate firing on all cylinders.

Yet this is the alternative to Donald Trump offered to America in November. After narrowing down a field of more than two dozen candidates, the Democratic party has chosen to nominate a man who can’t navigate a friendly political chat with a rapper famed for opening her latest number-one single with the refrain “there’s some whores in this house.”

Even if he could, would the public be any better off? If the bar for a presidential candidate is truly set as low as “answer easy questions from Cardi B,” then what does that say about the state of the Union? How much mental gymnastics do American liberals have to do to convince themselves that this is how the world’s only superpower chooses its commander-in-chief? 

That this is how the party proves itself worthy of undoing the supposed aberration that was Donald Trump’s election? Of restoring trust in America’s institutions and returning to the halcyon days of Roosevelt, Kennedy or Cllinton – or any of the noble pronouncements they’ve made over the last four years? 

Unlikely. Instead it looks a lot like the death rattle of a party driven to insanity by four years of Trump. One final piece of pandering before it shoves a clearly rattled old man into combat against a trash-talking titan. 

It’s just embarrassing that the whole world is along for the ride.

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