If you want to venture over to cloud-cuckoo land, your best waystop might just be the White House, where Joe Biden is now giving interviews to friendly, swampy, elitist reporters.

According to Axios, citing an interview from the New Yorker:

Between the lines: Osnos interviewed Biden for epic profiles in 2014 and 2020 (with rare access during COVID). Those spawned a book about Biden that was published just before he won the presidency.

• Osnos, who spent 40 minutes with Biden on Jan. 17, writes that POTUS "betrays no doubts" despite discouraging polls. He "projects a defiant belief in himself ... a conviction that borders on serenity."
• Osnos asked Biden if there was ever a time when he considered not running again. "No," he replied. "I'm running again because I think two things: No. 1, I'm really proud of my record, and I want to keep it going. I'm optimistic about the future. ... And, secondly, I look out there, and I say: 'O.K., we're just — most of what I've done is just kicking in now.'"

Biden indeed does think he's going to win all right.

The New Yorker's interviewer of the boob, Evan Osnos, reports:

Back in the Oval Office, where winter sun shone through glass doors, I asked Biden if it was possible for him to reach voters who had those beliefs [that Trump would be the best president]. He treated the question as a provocation: “Well, first of all, remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win? And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave?” He flashed a tense smile. “And I told you there wasn’t going to be any red wave. And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again? And we won every contested race out there.” He let that sink in for an instant and said, “In 2024, I think you’re going to see the same thing.”

He's convinced himself in his own mind that he's going to win, despite a scary slew of polls showing that he's desperately behind.

As John Podhoretz wrote in Commentary yesterday:

First, the simple practical math. NYT-Sienna confirms results we’ve been seeing for months now. It features Trump winning by 4 nationally—and remember that even in victory in 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by 3 points. Trump has not historically done well in national polling. If you go back and add up the number of days in the 2016 and the 2020 electoral races, you find that Trump led in the poll averages on exactly 5 days out of 600—and never for a single day against Biden.

Now get this. On October 18, 2023, Biden and Trump were tied in the RCP average of all polling. Since that day, 135 days ago, Trump has led. Every single day. Not by a huge amount, mind you—his largest margin came on January 26, when he led by 4.3 points. As I write, his lead is 2.3 points. Still, the point stands. It may have taken him 8 years in presidential politics to achieve it, but Trump is now a steady polling favorite.

When people hate survey results, they usually say things like “it’s just one poll” or “it’s a snapshot in time” or “a week is a lifetime in politics.”  It keeps them from becoming Dr. Frasenberger. Michael Tyler of the Biden campaign offered a ready response to the bad news: “Polling continues to be at odds with how Americans vote, and consistently overestimates Donald Trump while underestimating President Biden.”

I’m sorry, but this is simply untrue, and Democrats should not take false comfort. Historically, Democrats have overpolled in presidential contests. In 2016, the polling average overestimated Clinton’s victory in the popular vote, coming out at 3.2 rather than the final result of 2.1 percent. In 2020, the final Real Clear Politics average had Biden up 7.2 percent, but he only won by 4.5 percent. And the state-level polling in 2020 was in some races disastrously off—in the Democrats’ favor. The final poll average in Wisconsin in 2020 had Biden up by 6.7 and he won by only 0.7 percent. In Florida, the final average had Biden winning by about a point; Trump won by 3.3.

Podhoretz's observations get even more brutal and damning for Biden, the further you read.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks he's going to get replaced, too.

By August, Democratic donors and politicos may well conclude that the only way to rid the party of both is to release Biden’s delegates, open up the convention, and let candidates fight over the now-free delegates. Harris then will not be nominated, but not through a backroom, Machiavellian removal of a black woman. Instead, she will “fairly” lose an “open” and “transparent” free-for-all of various Democratic want-to-be replacements and recede into a sober and judicious Mike Pence-like retirement.

The problem with this scenario, of course, is that late-season convention or post-convention machinations in the modern era don’t work out too well.

...

About two weeks after the 1972 Democratic convention, a desperate George McGovern and the Democratic hierarchy removed Vice President running mate Sen. Thomas Eagleton from the ticket due to revelations of little-known past electric shock treatments given to combat depression. After futile efforts, the Democrats settled on the Kennedy clan’s Sargent Shriver, who had never run for office. McGovern would have lost anyway to an incumbent Nixon. But the margin of defeat in one of the greatest landslides in presidential history was often attributable to the sheer chaos of changing a vice presidential candidate so late in the campaign.

In sum, the Democrats can—and may have to—replace Joe Biden, and they can ensure that Kamala Harris is not the nominee, but the means of doing so will be chaotic and messy and will wound the winner for the rest of the campaign.

Biden, though, is unfazed. He's telling himself this:

I asked Biden if there was ever a time when he doubted that he would run again. “No,” he said. “But, look, if I didn’t think that the policies I put in place were best for the country, I don’t think I’d be doing it again. I’m running again because I think two things: No. 1, I’m really proud of my record, and I want to keep it going. I’m optimistic about the future.” He continued, “And, secondly, I look out there, and I say, ‘O.K., we’re just—most of what I’ve done is just kicking in now.’ ”

He's proud of his record? Did I read that right? If so, his problem is not senility, which Osnos says he didn't see, he's delusional.

This is the president who brought us the epic failure of an open border with some ten or twenty million unvetted foreigners rolling in. A crime wave is starting. The border badlands have become the Wild West, complete with bandits. Illegals are getting their own hospital units, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Human trafficking, child labor, actual slavery, fentanyl smuggling, and fentanyl deaths are at record levels, and many of these plagues barely existed before Biden came along. Crime in general is now going unpunished -- bringing more of it. Inflationary money-printing may have paused but Democrats have not stopped spending, and prices remain high -- at groceries, gas stations, apartment rentals, services and more. Not all of that can be linked to high oil prices which Joe contributed to by suppressing American energy production -- and that's because what we are talking about is bona fide inflation brought on by government spending. The national debt is climbing at an exponential rate now because Joe can't stop himself. Two-tier justice, the Hunter Biden nexis of pocket-lining corruption affecting the entire Biden clan, the disastrous pullout in Afghanistan, China thumbing its nose at us, sending its spies, balloons, and illegal police stations here as well as challenging sea lanes in the South China Sea, is more of Biden's failure. The Ukraine and Israel wars can be added to his tally, the latter brought on by the fundings from Iran, the Russia-allied hellhole he still thinks he can cut a deal with, the former brought on by his perceived weakness dating from Afghanistan plus, as Vlad Putin has stated, his predictability, a fine thing to see in an enemy. Venezuela, of course, is a mess and Mexico is destabilizing as cartels grow fat and empowered from Biden's open border.

Everything Biden has done is a failure, it's hard to think of any success at all, and yet .... Biden is "proud" of his record.

Sound like someone who will step aside from the Democrat nomination as many pundits have been predicting?

Based on these lunatic readings from him, he seems to think he's a legend in his own mind. He won't exit, He must be confident in the capacity of the Democrat machine to rig and cheat because the polls aren't with him and the trend is not his friend. 

Whether that's true is yet to be seen, but right now, we have a president so firmly out of reality it's bizarre.

Image: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED