The joke survives the test of time and, under the circumstances, deserves repeating. As the late journalist Mickey Carroll told it, a suburban town with a population 90 percent Irish and 10 percent Jewish held a mayoral election involving two candidates — one Irish and one Jewish.
The Irish candidate won with — wouldn’t you know it? — 90 percent of the vote. Whereupon he immediately denounced the clannishness of the Jews!
The story offers a useful way to view Joe Biden’s calls for national unity. Let’s just say our president is as sincere as the fictional Irish mayor.
Biden won the right to pursue the leftist agenda he campaigned on. But his promise that he will also work for the Americans who didn’t vote for him is more fig leaf than honest invitation.
As John Mitchell famously said about Richard Nixon’s White House, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
Applying that standard to Biden, we should ignore the unity talk because everything he has done leans far left.
Again, he’s entitled — elections have consequences. But knitting together a fractured America around a far-left agenda was never going to work. And Biden knows it.
In fact, his actions suggest the “Kumbaya” appeal is not directed at Trump voters or even the public in general.
It’s really a disguised call to the factions in his own party to stick together, to give him a chance. I’ll keep you all happy, he’s saying, just watch.
Biden kept Dems together during the campaign because everyone wanted to dump Trump.
Now that he’s won, he’s got to find other ways to keep the fault lines from widening. Early signs show he believes he can straddle the divide by staffing his administration with establishment veterans and party warhorses while giving the passionate far left early policy victories.
