ROGER KIMBALL: Are we back in the Obama White House?

[T]he consortium behind Biden is busy trying to put the old band back together. There’s John Kerry — remember him? — getting ready to ‘report for duty’ as Climate Envoy. There’s Jake Sullivan, tapped to be Biden’s national security adviser. You’ll remember him crowing about how brilliant Hillary Clinton’s handling of Benghazi was back in 2012. Later, Sullivan helped bury those 33,000 yoga and wedding emails from Hillary’s private email server while also pushing the Russia collusion fantasy that tripped up Gen. Mike Flynn and intruded on the first two-and-a-half years of Trump’s first term.

In fact, there are so many retreads and old familiars in the line-up someone made for Old Sleepy Joe that you might think you were back in the Obama White House. Maybe you will be. But I suppose this is where hope comes in. The idea behind the 2020 elections was to expunge not just Trump but the current of ‘deplorable’ sentiment that swept him into office in 2016. That certainly didn’t happen. Whoever turns out to be the winner of the top spot, the Trumpist impulse won down-ballot all over the country.

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Biden, on or past the threshold of senility, is the perfect embodiment of that flaccid pajama-boy spirit of fragile futility. Of course he wears a mask whenever he leaves his basement. Of course he is fixated on accusations that America is ‘systemically racist’ or insufficiently woke or imperfectly green or transphilic or globalist.

The hair shirt left ate those messages up coming from Obama, but (honest, no pun intended based on Biden’s aging faculties), Biden has no clue what he’s going to face from both sides of the aisle: the left consider him an elderly, utterly unwoke white guy, and as for the right, well: “At some future date reconciliation may be possible. But not until the last four years has been repaid in full.”

The check’s about to come due on a mighty big bill.