Biden falling so fast that even a Clinton-Trump rematch in 2024 looks better (opinion)

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – Things have gotten so bad for President Joe Biden that there’s actually talk of Hillary Clinton running for president, for a third time, in 2024.

The same Hillary Clinton who lost the race for the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama in 2008.

And the same Hillary Clinton defeated by Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

This is where two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have led us, to a possible Trump-Clinton rematch?

The last time a sitting Democratic president was this embattled was 1980, when Sen. Ted Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination.

Carter beat Kennedy in the primary, but got buried by the Ronald Reagan landslide in the general election.

But you can hardly blame anyone for looking past Biden.

Inflation is surging and Biden can’t get key parts of his agenda passed even with his party in control of the White House and Congress.

And there seems no end in sight to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even though the omicron variant, while more transmissible, has proven to be less lethal than what came before. And even though the omicron peak looks to be of far shorter duration as well.

But big chunks of the world came to a virtual standstill nonetheless in recent weeks as omicron raced through the population.

There have been school closures and calls for remote learning, even though kids are at far less risk from the virus.

There are new indoor mask mandates and new vaccine booster mandates, even though the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s vaccine mandate for private companies.

There are shutdowns, shortages and service interruptions that are beyond the ability of any public official to control, because workers stay home after testing positive for the virus whether they have symptoms or not.

How long can it go on? Even some of those who willingly went along with all the pandemic restrictions these last two years are starting to chafe.

They don’t want to stand outside in the winter cold in order to get tested. They’re done with being shut in their homes. They’re tired of the empty shelves in the supermarket. They’re fed up with store and restaurant closures.

But we finally got some clarity about COVID hospitalizations in New York when Gov. Kathy Hochul said that 42 percent of those in the hospital for COVID in the state were actually hospitalized for other causes first before then testing positive for the virus. That number is closer to 50 percent in New York City.

That should help us keep the current “COVID hospital surge” in some perspective. It should help us keep the omicron surge itself in perspective.

There has also been alarmist talk about pediatric COVID hospitalizations.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had claimed that there were 100,000 children in U.S. hospitals with COVID, “in serious condition, many on ventilators.”

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had to correct the justice, saying that there were actually just 3,500 kids in the hospital with COVID.

It’s no good thing that people continue to fall ill with COVID and continue to be hospitalized. It’s bad if even one child is in the hospital because of the virus.

But there’s a big difference between a bad situation and a public health disaster. And now even Democrats like Hochul are parsing things more carefully.

All this lands on Biden’s desk. He’s the person who pledged to take down the virus. Voters going to the polls in this year’s mid-term elections are fair to judge him based on that. It’s fair to judge Biden based on ever-increasing gas and food prices.

Maybe it’s time for Biden to say we need to manage the virus and not be stopped in our tracks by it anymore. Maybe that would help him turn things around.

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