I hate to say I told you so, but … well, plenty of people warned that Joe Biden had never been anything more than twenty pounds of manure in a ten-pound bag. Literally nothing in Biden’s five decades in Washington recommended him for executive leadership. The only thing recommending Biden in 2020 was that he wasn’t Donald Trump, which was barely enough to get Biden elected — with vocal support from the McCains, for understandable personal reasons.

Has that support expired among crossover voters? Meghan McCain’s inaugural column at the Daily Mail suggests that the scales have fully fallen from her eyes, but that’s not the most interesting aspect of this cri de coeur:

No one is healing. Nothing is healed. The wound Donald Trump ripped open has done nothing but fester since Scranton Joe was inaugurated.

Eight months since President Biden was sworn into office, the anticipation of a tone change and ‘return to normalcy’ has utterly disappeared. The man I once considered a friend and confidante has morphed into a feckless and unreliable leader I no longer recognize. He gives all the signs of stubborn cantankerous naiveté, surrounded by idiotic sycophants anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes around politics should easily recognize as the worst type of corrupt bureaucrats.

Biden’s policies have broken with his rhetoric of unity to create more division and distrust. Inflation has exploded. Americans are paying more at the pump and the grocery and soon for their kids’ holiday toys. The schools are supposed to be reopened, but in-person learning is inconsistent and can be pulled away with the speed of a positive test. The vaccine booster shots, which Biden promised at the beginning of the month, ran into a brick wall of FDA policy. New government mandates are testing the limits of executive power.

The man who promised he would shut down the virus, not the country, is doing the opposite.

We could go on at length about how most of this was apparent to anyone who watched Joe Biden for any significant interval, but what’s the point? Biden was a family friend to the McCains, and Trump made a perverse point of insulting Meghan’s father even after his death. I don’t agree with her vote choice — I voted for Trump — but her choice and that of her mother were certainly understandable.

On the other hand, when did her “intuition” arise?

My intuition has proved right. He is on the path to become worse than Jimmy Carter, who author Steve Hayward described as a man who ran for office promising ‘a government as good as the people’ and ended his term by saying the people were no good.

Didn’t she support Biden all the way to Election Day? Maybe it would have been better to just say, I was wrong and leave it at that.

Let’s instead focus on the micro and macro implications of Meghan’s reversal. In regard to the former, her mother Cindy is still a Biden nominee for an ambassadorial role at the United Nations. That was seen as a repayment for her support in 2020, but it also was motivated at least in some part by Biden’s claim to be a unifier. It will be difficult to dump Cindy McCain from the nomination now and not make it look even more awkward than it has already become, but he also has to wonder just how much Cindy still supports him. If Cindy McCain walks away, it will be a big blow to Biden’s claim on the middle, and if he fires her, it would only get worse.

Macro: Biden came into office with at least some lift in the middle and on the Never-Trump right for being the Not-Trump. That got an unexpected goose from the January 6 Capitol riot, helping Biden to collect even more goodwill than might be expected from such a close election. Biden has dissipated that in record time and in the historic disgrace of abandoning Americans in Afghanistan, as well as his more mundane incompetencies. Most of these supporters had much less excuse than Meghan McCain has for being surprised at Biden turning out to be the same incompetent gasbag that Biden has always been. They have also been quieter than McCain, at least thus far, about their buyer’s regret for helping put Biden in charge.

It’s this point that makes Meghan’s column fascinating. Will it provide a catalyst for other prominent “Republicans for Biden” to denounce their floundering candidate? Or are they still sticking by him? In my next post, I’ll discuss a potential confidence-crisis cascade brewing in the polling. If so, that’s the demographic that will drive it — and it won’t stop there, just as it didn’t for Jimmy Carter.

In the meantime, enjoy Meghan’s column … if you can get past the 600-plus Daily Mail scripts that chokes browsers and drags computing to a crawl. It’s worth it in this instance.

Update: AJ Kaufman has more thoughts over at our sister site PJ Media. He concludes:

Let’s hope McCain continues to write and speak truth to power. With a legacy media — particularly inane CNN hosts and socialists on MSNBC — clearly focused on concocting hideous stories to make our heroes look bad, with no remorse, it’s needed.