Quick Take: The Taranto Principle Has Finally Drained the Democrat Bench

Why Joe Biden is the "best" they have.

In 2008, American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell enshrined what would be called The Taranto Effect, named after James Taranto who was then an editorialist and publisher of the Wall Street Journal’s daily column Best of the Web Today.

Here’s The Taranto Principle in Tyrrell’s words:

Formulated by the inimitable Wall Street Journal editorialist James Taranto, the principle posits that when the liberal mainstream press indulges a liberal politician’s deceits or fails to hold the politician accountable for his misbehavior, it encourages the politician to ascend to a higher level of misbehavior.

Easy ladies, Taranto is married.

In practice, this means the Democrats, with their media enablers, will tend to foist weak, corrupt and incompetent candidates upon the American people - until such time as that weakness, corruptness or incompetence can no longer be hidden or denied, even by the mainstream media.

This is where we are today with Joe Biden as president. This is where we were in 2016 with Hillary Clinton and in 2020 with a field so bereft of actual talent that the Democrats defaulted to Joe Biden. Since then, the Democrats can’t blame the media for doing their job - they’ve covered for Biden at every step.

But seriously? In 2024, 81-year old, physically feeble, mentally deficient Joseph Robinette Biden is the Democrat standard-bearer? A man thoroughly corrupted by foreign influence peddling schemes and now deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial for illegally taking, holding and disseminating classified information? That’s their best? And it’s only now that the mainstream media is developing a sense of shame about it? I’d talk about his miserable failures as president, but that would just be mean.

There’s a reason Biden was the Democrat nominee in 2020 and will have to be again in 2024: as Zach Mayo cried out in An Officer and a Gentleman - “I got no where else to go!” They have no bench, there is no fallback.

Democrats can’t quit Joe Biden cuz they got nowhere else to go!

Contrast this with the Republican’s nominee-apparent Donald Trump. Trump’s been through an invented media hoax-charade about Russia collusion, an (admittedly ridiculous) 25th Amendment brush of his own, two Kabuki sham-peachments, four (hopelessly politicized) criminal indictments totaling 91 felony charges and a blizzard of personal lawsuits. Say what you want about Trump, but the guy can clearly navigate simultaneous fields of fire and chew gum at the same time. Our candidate’s been vetted - hard!

Will all future Republican presidential candidates have to get a mug shot?

The Republicans have a very deep bench beyond Trump - Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and from the “moderate” wing, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. And these are just the first tier candidates.

There’s a flip-side (or corollary) to The Principle that goes something like this: because the mainstream media goes to such extremes to find (or invent) smears against Republicans, the Republican field (or bench) is consistently stronger and more resilient than the Democrats’. Our candidates have to be better, tougher, smarter and cleaner.

Forty years of media enabling weak, corrupt and incompetent Democrats has drained their bench of talent while turning the Republicans into a (comparative) Dream Team. That doesn’t mean every candidate with an (R) after his name is an exemplar - we have our duds too. But our duds are duds for the same reason all Democrats are duds - the media enabled them. What our duds never seem to figure out is that the media are there for them only so long as they advance the progressive agenda. See John “Maverick” McCain and Willard “Mitt” Romney.