You may have noticed that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has tried to keep a certain old Democrat, President Joe Biden, as far away from the spotlight as possible.
It doubtlessly has its reasons for this, particularly considering the fact that Harris inherited the nomination from Biden after Biden’s campaign unraveled following the June 27 debate debacle, which revealed what we should have all known from the get-go: This was not a man in compos mentis.
However, it doesn’t help when, to convince the pockets of the electorate that usually do vote Democrat but are stubbornly clinging to Donald Trump in the polls — the working-class, “the brothers” (as former President Obama so memorably put it) and other minorities, and particularly the young — you send another doddering Democrat out in the field to essentially cut an ad for your opposition.
William Jefferson Clinton, in case you hadn’t noticed, is only three years younger than Joe Biden. He may be sharper mentally — indeed, I’ve seen chipmunks that fit this criteria — but looking at him after a long absence from the spotlight, you realize what people in their late 70s are generally like, particularly when their diet, for so long, consisted of Big Macs and adultery.
Clinton visited the swing state of Georgia on Sunday, an event most people didn’t take note of; despite being a former president, Clinton carries baggage that goes beyond just fast food and consensual sex outside of wedlock, and it’s to the point where even Ben Stiller is a more effective surrogate for the campaign. But Clinton can still theoretically turn out the working-class Southern vote, and once upon a time, he was called “America’s first black president.”
Surely that’ll help, right?
Not when you go down to Georgia and basically criticize the Biden administration for not properly vetting illegal immigrants — a job that, in case you don’t remember, Kamala Harris could have taken up if she’d decided to make it a priority — and say that this led to the killing of a University of Georgia student, Laken Riley, allegedly by an illegal alien.
“You got a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you? They made an ad about a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” Clinton said. “Yeah, well, if they had all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn’t have happened.”
“But if they are all properly vetted, that doesn’t happen, and America is not havin’ enough babies to keep our populations up,” Clinton continued. “So we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work.”
Would a Kamala Harris presidency seriously damage the country?
The clip didn’t really go viral until mid-Monday, when people started noticing ol’ Slick Willy wasn’t looking so slick anymore, particularly as it pertained to the Biden-Harris administration’s vetting of illegal immigrants or the focus on birth rates.
WATCH: Bill Clinton admits Laken Riley “probably” wouldn’t have been raped and bludgeoned to death if Kamala did her job — then says we need more immigrants because we don’t “have enough babies” pic.twitter.com/vhO5AediDk
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 14, 2024
I mean, until he proposed illegal immigration done properly (whatever this means) as a solution to a birth rate that’s below replacement rates, I was halfway expecting him to accidentally make a claim about “childless cat ladies” — except not sarcastically, like J.D. Vance did, but in all seriousness.
And, as people noted, this was basically the last thing that undecided voters needed to hear to be swayed to Harris-Walz:
We appreciate you campaigning for Trump, Bill.
— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) October 14, 2024
Someone get this man a MAGA hat
— Jack (@jackunheard) October 14, 2024
Bill Clinton says Laken Riley’s death “probably wouldn’t have happened” if Kamala did her job at the border, continues on to imply that we need illegal immigrants for cheap labor.
He was supposed to be campaigning FOR Kamala. YIKES. pic.twitter.com/k55Ee8rVH3
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 14, 2024
That, by the way, is the official Trump War Room account, connected to the campaign, giving big ups to Bill Clinton. I’m assuming that didn’t go as planned.
There’s no real additional context in Clinton’s remarks that fully clarifies this to make Kamala Harris or the Biden administration she comes from look good.
Whether or not you buy that she was ever a “border czar,” most people who have paid any sort of attention know that Harris was given the unenviable job of dealing with the border crisis early in Joe Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office, but that the purview was more or less hers to dictate.
Harris — who one not unreasonably assumes realized she was being set up by an administration that wanted her to be the fall gal for its failed policies, not the president — limited this purview to so-called “root causes,” which basically involved a few interviews and a handful of desultory meetings in which she got multinational corporations to agree to token investments in the region.
Thus, because the crisis was being handled by no one — since no one wanted to assume responsibility either for the record number of illegal immigrant encounters by Border Patrol or for instituting border security measures and incurring the wrath of the activist left — it festered until it couldn’t be ignored, and Joe Biden had to step in with a meaningless half-hearted, half-closure of the barn door long after the horse was in another state.
If you haven’t been paying attention to any of that and are just tuning in to the last weeks of a neck-and-neck presidential race, you probably know enough, however, to know this: Donald Trump promises more border security as president; Kamala Harris promises less. It’s much, much too late an hour for any Democrat, especially Harris, to rebrand themselves as a border hawk.
Therefore, arguing proper vetting of these illegal immigrants — including the man accused of killing Laken Riley — feels like Bill Clinton channeling Joe Biden and saying the quiet part out loud when he shouldn’t because he’s too old to know the difference.
And, as for the idea that cheap immigrant labor and offshoring is the wave of the future — a classic Clinton administration policy — please note that the past quarter-century has more or less disabused both parties of that talking point.
The Democrats only pull out “immigrants do jobs Americans won’t” as a last resort these days, not a first, and try to reframe illegal migration as a moral issue. Republicans, obviously, don’t believe anyone has a moral right to illegally reside in any country, and pretty much everyone not named Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush has discarded the old “illegal immigration = cheap labor” axiom.
Instead, Clinton sounds positively Vance-like when it comes to family policies. Yes, we should be pro-natal in America. Yes, low birthrates are a problem. It’s almost like he was throwing a bit of shade at the “Childless Cat Ladies for Kamala.”
By admitting that the price we pay for importing new Americans illegally is vetting to see if organized criminals or sociopaths are crossing the border, he’s essentially saying that the price we’re paying for making parenthood and family life onerous and uncool is having to make extra sure we’re not letting potential future lifetime prison residents in. Thanks for pointing that out, I guess?
Not that any of the aging Democrats have done Harris any good in the closing weeks of the campaign; Obama’s lecture to “the brothers” who refuse to get in line to vote Kamala was particularly painful to watch, almost as if he was forced out of retirement to deliver another “eat our peas” lecture with such obvious indifference that it was like watching Peyton Manning QB a charity flag football game when he’d literally rather be doing anything else.
However, say this for doddering Uncle Joe Biden: All of the time he was giving you reasons to vote against the Democratic ticket, at least he seemed to be, because he had long passed the point of diminishing returns. Bill Clinton is still mentally there, don’t get me wrong. He just still seems to think the year is 1996 and “triangulation” with neoliberal orthodoxy is the way to win votes. Donald Trump welcomes your cringey, accidental endorsement, Slick Willy.
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