Perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising that an election in 2020 that featured an unprecedented number of absentee ballots has produced an absentee president. But that’s apparently what we have now in the United States and the numbers don’t lie. The RNC is quickly moving to highlight this data during the final push toward the midterms and Joe Biden’s attendance record is on par with a perpetually absent high school student. Out of the 589 days since being sworn in, Biden has spent 234 of them either on vacation or on leisure trips having nothing to do with his official duties. Seventy percent of those days were spent at his mansion in Delaware. (That’s the same residence where a $500,000 border wall is being erected at taxpayer expense, unlike our country’s southern border.) So will the voters notice this and will it have any impact on the elections in November? (NY Post)

President Biden is taking heat for spending 40% of his days in office “on vacation” after he was away from the White House for two-thirds of August.

Biden’s weekend jaunts and vacations spanned 234 days — with seven in 10 of them spent at his homes in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware — out of 589 days in office.

RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told The Post that Republicans believe it’s a winning campaign issue — alongside concerns over the effects of Biden-era spending, including Democrats’ $1.9 trillion stimulus package last year and this year’s $437 billion environmental and health care bill.

There are some fairly typical defenses offered whenever the media bothers to notice that a president is taking a lot of time off. The most common is the argument that “the White House travels with the President” so he is always technically on call. He’s able to sign bills and take calls while he’s away from Washington, so he can do what needs to be done.

But that’s really just the bare minimum you should be able to expect from a president, right? Unless he’s traveling on official state business, the job is in Washington. That’s where his Cabinet is, along with all of the DC action that he’s supposedly steering. On top of that, Biden was quick to ensure that the visitor logs at his Delaware property were exempted from the Presidential Records Act, so the public really has no idea who he’s talking to or how much of his time is spent “working.” (Though all of the footage of him riding or falling off of bicycles suggests he’s not doing much work out on the bike path.)

The more cynical among us might argue that this isn’t such a bad thing. Every day that Joe Biden spends on vacation is one more day that he won’t be around to mess anything else up. But that really doesn’t sound like any way to run an airline, at least to me.

Keep in mind that Joe Biden has spent 234 days on vacation while the nation has struggled with a border crisis, an energy crisis, a supply chain crisis, skyrocketing prices, food shortages, and anywhere from one to three hot wars that could break out at any moment involving nuclear powers. One could persuasively make the argument that every one of those issues was at least in part created by the policies of Biden and his party. Shouldn’t he be on the job and riding herd over the situation to try to straighten things out?

The opposing argument might be that it really doesn’t matter if Uncle Joe is in the office because he’s not actually running the country anyway. By most accounts, that job has fallen to Ron Klain. So why not let the old man spend his time bicycling along the beach? Somehow I don’t expect the voters to go along with that sort of reasoning, however. Nobody voted for Ron Klain. They voted for Joe Biden. And he’s wound up ghosting us for nearly half of his time on the job.