President Trump would be in much better shape right now if he’d campaigned and debated like the guy who showed up at last night’s debate. To use a boxing analogy, I think he won the match on points, but the margin gets better for him in the post-mortem. Former vice president Biden said some truly indefensible things. Starting this morning and continuing for the next ten days, Republicans will be whistling through the groove-yard of forgotten favorite video clips . . . or, better, GOP favorites that Biden would like to forget.In fact, the president wasted no time: He had a killer montage up on Twitter before midnight.Worst for Biden are the energy issues.First, there is the true thing Biden said that his camp is now desperately trying to walk back or restate: He wants to get rid of fossil fuels, in particular oil. “I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” he said. To put an exclamation point on it, he agreed with Trump that this “is a big statement.” Shortly after the debate, just how big this statement was began to sink in, so Biden went into damage control mode. He insisted he had just been talking about “getting rid of subsidies for fossil fuels.” But that was not true. As the several Biden and Kamala Harris statements in Trump’s tweet demonstrate, the Democratic ticket made their jihad against fossil fuels clear and unqualified, time and again.Second, and relatedly, there is the false thing that Biden said: He claimed he had never indicated he would ban fracking. To the contrary, he has said he’d get rid of fracking several times; and Kamala Harris — before she started insisting, with a straight face, that Biden had been “very clear” that he would not ban fracking — was herself emphatic in proclaiming the dogmatic Democratic Party position: “There’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.”If you check out that brief clip of Senator Harris that I just linked, notice — it’s impossible not to notice — the cheering crowd at the gleefully progressive CNN town hall. It will zero you in on the problem Biden-Harris faces: To get to the general election, they had to win the nomination of a party whose verve and lots of whose money is on the far left.That unavoidably involves the advocacy of lunatic positions that cannot be defended before the country writ large. They must now lie about what they’ve previously endorsed, making them seem even worse to the people who already opposed them and untrustworthy to the Left’s true believers whose enthusiastic support they need.It reminded me, again, of Senator Amy Klobuchar’s interview by Fox News’s Bret Baier back in February, when she’d just announced her nomination bid. He asked her about the then-newly minted Green New Deal. She said she’d vote for it . . . so then Bret walked her through its individual elements (full transition off fossil fuels, net-zero greenhouse emissions, paying people who won’t work, refurbishing every building in the U.S.), and she wouldn’t agree with any of them. Senator Klobuchar is smart and willing to work across party lines to address problems, so she’s more effective than most congressional Democrats. But she wanted to run for president, and knew she would not be viable as a Democratic candidate unless she voiced support for something she manifestly knew was batty.That is where Joe Biden is right now. He will rely on the media to obfuscate the deals he had to cut with the hard left to get the nomination — and rely on the hard left to bite its tongue to serve the mutual objective of defeating Trump. But he’s going to have a hard time, because the Left has forced Democratic aspirants to take clearly spoken, easy to grasp, crazy positions. On fossil fuels, fracking, and elements of the Green New Deal, there is no easy retreat for Biden into, say, the minutiae of complex legislation like Obamacare; there’s no redefining the terms of his prior positions (as Democrats have tried to do, unsuccessfully, with “Court-packing”).Biden and Harris are stuck with what they’ve said, and voters are going to be hearing it. A lot.The president exploited his talent for memorable labels in branding Hunter Biden’s computer the “laptop from hell.” That is also going to be a big problem for Biden over the next ten days.First, because he is too reliant on the mainstream media, which is still mulishly pretending this is not a story, Biden is behind the curve of the news. At the debate, he actually tried to play the discredited Russian Disinformation card to dismiss the emails showing Biden’s family cashing in on his political influence: “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. . . . Five former heads of the CIA — both parties — say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage.”This is just wrong. As I’ve pointed out a few times, there is no evidence that Hunter Biden’s own laptop, containing Hunter’s own emails and photos, is a product of Russian disinformation. And the 50 former intel officials Joe Biden referred to, a line-up of the Trump-deranged led by Obama CIA director and Russia “Collusion” architect John Brennan, did not say the laptop was Russian disinformation — they slyly said it bore “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” but conceded that they do not actually know any of the details, that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” and that they are relying on (Biden-friendly) press accounts. That is, they are just doing what Biden is doing: saying, “Russia, Russia, Russia” and hoping that will dissuade people from examining the story.Second, despite having every opportunity to state that the laptop materials are fabricated, Biden did not so state. The silence grows ever more deafening. In hedging their bets, the Biden-backing intel officials took pains to say, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails . . . are genuine.” They are forced to make that embarrassing admission because, as they well know, you don’t have to be an intel pro to grasp that if something is not genuine, the person in the best position to prove that is the something’s owner. The Bidens don’t dare deny the authenticity of the laptop.Third, the evidence of corruption is mounting. As our Zachary Evans details, Tony Bobulinski, who was involved in the Biden-China dealings, not only authenticates relevant emails but implicates Joe Biden himself in the lucrative transactions.This is a major corruption story. If House Democrats had had this kind of evidence against Trump, he would already have been impeached.In closing, I’ll repeat what I said two days ago about what, for purposes of the campaign, is the relevant Hunter Biden issue: > President Obama made Vice President Biden the point-man for administration foreign policy in Ukraine, China, and Russia. There is a lot that divides those three countries. The one thing that unites them is that, while Joe Biden was directly influencing American policy towards them, they all found it expedient to pay Hunter Biden millions of dollars.Up until last night, the problem for President Trump was that he was fumbling this. He was making the issue the purported failure of his own Justice Department and the FBI to act quickly on the Biden revelations, rather than hammering Biden on the corruption. He was helping Biden move the goalposts by the implication that the abuses of power and self-dealing are not important unless indictments are returned and arrests are made.In the debate, though, Trump righted the ship, laser-focusing on payments to the Biden family by entities tied to foreign powers (mainly awful, anti-American foreign regimes) while Joe Biden was overseeing U.S. policy toward them. If the president can stick to that script in a disciplined way, that’s going to be a big problem for the former vice president — one from which I don’t think the mainstream media will be able to barricade him.
