On the eve of the 2020 Iowa caucuses, Politico lobbed a grenade in
Joe Biden’s
direction. It was a story noting that the former vice president was trying to play the
Obama
card—even though Barack Obama hadn’t endorsed the man who had served him faithfully for eight years. The money quote was cutting: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [expletive] things up.”
With three weeks to go to the Nov. 8 midterms, many vulnerable Democratic candidates are no doubt thinking the same thing. It isn’t only that President Biden’s policies aren’t working. It’s that he continues to insist they are—against the everyday experience of ordinary Americans.
In an Oct. 11 CNN interview, Mr. Biden again suggested that if there is a problem, it is the failure to appreciate just how great he has been. “Name me a president, in recent history, who’s gotten as much done, as I have, in the first two years,” he said. “Not a joke. You may not like what I got done. But the vast majority of the American people do like what I got done.”
His approval ratings—and the reluctance of Democratic candidates to appear with him in public—say otherwise.
In Los Angeles on Thursday Mr. Biden claimed he was making “some progress” against inflation, even as the latest figures showed consumer prices were up 8.2% over last year. He made a similar claim when he told us that in July we had zero inflation for the month, while ignoring that prices were up 8.5% over the previous July, a near 40-year high.
Mr. Biden’s statements reflect a popular Beltway belief that with the right messaging, unpleasant reality simply vanishes. Call $740 billion in green spending the Inflation Reduction Act and—voilà!—you’re defeating inflation. Or boast that you have more accomplishments than any other president two years in and somehow voters will forget that your No. 1 achievement is, as this newspaper has said, a decline in the living standards of the American people.
Which points to the challenge for Democratic candidates. All midterm elections are referendums on the president. But this year Democrats are particularly vulnerable because the Biden White House, on the issues that voters care most about, gives them nothing believable to say.
Some Democratic elders have sounded the alarm. On Friday Mr. Obama said too many Democrats were still reacting to
Donald Trump
and that the woke approach to politics leaves Democrats coming across as “buzzkills.”
Others cautioned about thinking abortion trumps all other issues. Former Clinton adviser
James Carville
told the Associated Press abortion is “a good issue” but warned that “if you just sit there and they’re pummeling you on crime and pummeling you on the cost of living, you’ve got to be more aggressive than just yelling abortion every other word.”
Two-time contender for the Democratic nomination Sen.
Bernie Sanders
and former Obama adviser
David Axelrod
have echoed these themes. Of course they are right—but only up to a point. The reason Democratic candidates talk about Trump and abortion is that they don’t have anything good to say on crime or the cost of living. And they don’t have anything good to say because President Biden largely adopted the Sanders agenda, and they all voted for it.
The best example of Democratic incoherence is White House spokeswoman
Karine Jean-Pierre.
When asked to answer yes or no whether President Biden thinks big cities are safe, this is how she answered: “It is not a yes-or-no question. It is very much a question of what has he done . . . to make sure that cities . . . have the funding and have what they need to protect their community, and that is what the president has done.”
When asked if the president deserves the blame for gasoline prices going up since he had claimed credit when they were going down, she said, “So it’s a lot more nuanced than that.”
Ditto for the border. Every day American TV screens are filled with images of people crossing the border, and then arriving in some U.S. city courtesy of a
Greg Abbott
bus or one of Mr. Biden’s midnight flights. Yet the border czar, Vice President
Kamala Harris,
tells us the border is secure, and anyway it’s Mr. Trump’s fault. Anyone think these answers persuade voters in a tight race?
It didn’t have to be this way. Upon winning the election, Mr. Biden said it was time to “stop treating our opponents as our enemy” and “to rebuild the backbone of the nation—the middle class.” They were exactly the right words and right priorities. But instead of delivering on them, he has called half of Americans semi-fascists and launched a spending spree designed to reshape America radically. And he did it in part because he wanted to prove to the world (and especially to the Obama people who had always condescended to him) that he would be a more transformational president than his former boss.
Which brings us back to Mr. Obama’s 2020 assessment of Joe. How right he was.
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