That time Joe Biden bought a house, and displayed his managerial ineptitude on a grand scale

I think we all know someone like this. He thinks he knows a lot more about how things work than he really does. And when he talks about how things work, he talks with so much confidence that you figure there must be some genuine knowledge behind it. He can’t be completely full of it.

He is (full of it).

Granted, he’s somehow stuck around a long time, so it’s hard to imagine the guy is completely clueless and inept. But once you start really paying attention to the things he says, you begin to wonder. If you put the guy in charge of something challenging . . . hoo boy.

When Joe Biden was vice president, he wasn’t in charge of anything. When he was in the U.S. Senate, he wasn’t in charge of anything. And he hasn’t had a job in the private sector in more than 50 years. To find out how Biden handles actual responsibility, we have to look at his private life.

At National Review, Kyle Smith reminds us that Joe Biden has already shown us what he’s made of. Back in the late ’70s, Biden thought he saw a huge real estate opportunity. It was a fixer-upper he thought he could buy cheap and make a few simple tweaks to. Kind of the way the Biden of today sees the presidency.

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But as Smith recounts in lurid and often comical detail, this did not go well:

A couple of years into his Senate career, Biden has a dream of living grandly by buying on the cheap a former du Pont manse, together with a huge chunk of land, for $200,000. The house was boarded up and soon, probably, to be torn down. But Biden saw something in it. Sure, it needed some fixing up. Never fear, Joe is here! Joe is a can-do fellow. The first winter he and Jill spent in the house, it used up 3,000 gallons of fuel oil. It turned out the third floor was wide open, to the stars. Squirrels were living up there. Oops. The judgment on display here is not great.

Next year, Biden starting selling off bits of the land for development to pay for improvements such as storm windows. Small problem here: One of the lots he sold off was his own driveway, and the new owner blocked it off so he couldn’t pass through it. So Joe built a second driveway, which turned into a swamp in winter. He sold off another piece of property that, it turned out, included the front of that second driveway, so he couldn’t use that one anymore either. So I built a third. He hated that one for being a dumpy little thing. Eight years went by, and he made a deal to buy back the original driveway, the one he sold off when he first bought the house. Which cost him a fortune in landscaping to reshape.

It’s worth the time to click over and read the whole thing.

Now to be fair, this was a long time ago. You might think, OK, surely Biden has learned some things since then. He’s more experienced now. He must have a better understanding of how thinks work than he did back then.

That’s a reasonable theory, but does Biden display any evidence that it’s true? Biden still runs around proposing insane ideas to problems he doesn’t understand. Witness his “plan” to address COVID, which consists of a) a bunch of things Trump is already doing; and b) a nationwide mask mandate Biden would lack the authority to impose as president. This is a guy who doesn’t understand the actual situation, and doesn’t have a clear sense of what he’s able to do.

Sounds like the guy who bought that house back in the ’70s.

Or what about Biden’s vow to jack the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, which would represent an increase of one-third from the current rate of 21 percent? This is a guy who complains that “families are reeling” and notes how many people are on unemployment. Yet he wants to confiscate more capital from the companies that could be hiring them. That’s the thinking of a guy who thinks he knows how things work, but really doesn’t.

Kind of like the guy who sold a piece of land to get money and found out he had sold his own driveway.

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Joe Biden has hung around in politics a long time, and knows how to say and do the basic things that make you sound passably competent in politics. But he doesn’t actually know how to run anything, nor does he know how to solve any problems. Because he’s never had to do it.

Biden is a classic case of a guy who you figure couldn’t be too inept, because he couldn’t have stuck around this long or done the things he’s done if he was.

He is. Washington really doesn’t root out its incompetents. Not if they are willing to play ball, and Biden has always been willing to play ball to preserve his own political viability.

And why should Biden learn anything substantive when he could get along just fine thinking the way he’s always thought? There’s no reason to believe he has. But maybe America wants to find out the hard way, which just goes to show the electorate doesn’t tend to learn much either.