By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, October 12, 2021
We’ve got ships sitting 17 miles offshore, waiting nine days each for
access to the port of Savannah. The backlogs and delays in international
shipping are so severe that a supply-chain consultant told the Wall Street Journal this weekend,
“If it wasn’t on the water four weeks ago, it’s not going to be here for
Christmas.” The U.S. has 10.9
million unfilled jobs, another record, while the workforce-participation rate drags, particularly among
women, despite the reopening of the nation’s schools. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Grocery prices are skyrocketing. In the words of CNN, “America’s economic recovery has hit a
roadblock.” And the total U.S. public debt has reached $28.4 trillion.
If you look at the state of the country, there’s only one
fitting reaction that comes to mind: “Let’s go Brandon.”
If you’re looking for a laugh amidst all the bad news,
there’s the remarkable phenomenon of Joe Biden fans stumbling around in shock
that things are going so poorly. CNN warns that, “Mounting problems test Biden’s presidency and Democrats’ hold
on power.” FiveThirtyEight asks, “Why Has Biden’s Approval Rating Gotten So Low So Quickly?” Politico offers a headline that is a quote from
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg: “The president’s decline is
alarming.” (No, that’s not a reference to Biden’s mental abilities or memory.)
The story accompanying that headline has some equally alarming quotes from
other strategists:
“There is a malaise,” said Sarah
Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist who became a vocal supporter of
Biden in 2020, and led the focus group of Democratic voters. “People don’t feel
like their lives have been improved. They did sort of feel that promises aren’t
being kept.”
Joe Biden isn’t keeping his promises? Who could have seen
that coming?
One of the reasons that covering presidential campaigns
is less interesting than it used to be is that the primaries — and to a certain
extent, the general election — have turned into contests in which candidates
can make the biggest, most grandiose, and most unrealistic promises, and often,
these candidates are numbskulls who doesn’t have the slightest idea how to
bring those promises to fruition. Lest you think Joe Biden was the realistic
one in the Democratic primary compared to Bernie Sanders, allow me to remind you that in June 2019, Biden pledged that,
“I’ve worked so hard in my career that, I promise you, if I’m elected
president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes
America: We’re going to cure cancer.”
Once a loudmouth career politician has pledged to cure
the most dreaded of diseases that kills almost
600,000 Americans every year, promising “I’m going to shut down the virus”
is easy.
Biden also promised to cut prescription-drug prices by 60
percent, put Social Security on a path to solvency, make public colleges and
universities tuition-free for families who earn less than $125,000 a year, and
to create 4.4 million jobs by September 2021. Biden
doesn’t know how to do any of this. He just thinks that if he throws money at a
problem, it will get solved.
As for “shutting down the virus,” the administration’s
current stance is that the reason the pandemic is still a problem in American
life is because of the unvaccinated. Okay, but 95 percent of American seniors, 78.2 percent of American
adults, and 76.4 percent of all eligible Americans have gotten at least one
shot. That’s pretty darn good! We’ve vaccinated almost all of the most
vulnerable, and we’ve certainly vaccinated just about all of those who are
vulnerable and willing. Why shouldn’t life be getting back to normal now?
Now, the New York Times reports that,
“Almost all the eligible adults who remain unvaccinated in the United States
are hard-core refusers, and the arrival of boosters is making efforts to coax
them as well as those who are still hesitating even more difficult. In
the September vaccine monitor survey from the Kaiser
Family Foundation, 71 percent of unvaccinated respondents said the need for
boosters indicated that the vaccines were not working.”
The administration’s messaging on boosters has been
a mess, and Biden’s getting all of the grief of having a federal-employer
vaccine mandate without the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
actually releasing a federal-employer vaccine mandate. But mostly, Americans
see that the guy who pledged to “shut down the virus” hasn’t shut it down, ten
months into his presidency.
Joe Biden is supposed to be an experienced hand at
Capitol Hill deal-making, but he seems really vague on what he wants out of a
spending deal; he shocked his allies by whipping against his own bipartisan
infrastructure deal, saying it should be put on the back burner until the
much bigger Build Back Better spending bill has enough votes to pass. Biden can
go out into the states and stump for his bill, but his approval ratings
are weak; no wavering Democrat fears him.
Biden’s not much of an orator. He clearly doesn’t like
getting into the details of policy, and when he speaks off the cuff, Jen
Psaki usually has to do cleanup a day later. Biden’s own special envoy for
climate, John Kerry, has not-so-subtly suggested that Biden doesn’t understand the
consequences of his policy initiatives. Biden seems to have absorbed
liberal historians’ suggestion that he can be the next Franklin Roosevelt or
Lyndon Johnson, but ignores the fact that he doesn’t have large, like-minded
congressional majorities.
Ironically, there was one role Biden might have excelled
in, the one he posed in while winning the Democratic primary: the moderate,
wise elder statesman who tells the progressive wing of his party “no” when they
go too far. But that’s the role Biden has chosen to abdicate.
As Charlie Cooke asked last week, what is Biden good at?
In the eyes of Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, this is the true
horror found in recent focus groups of Pennsylvania Democrats: “Not one of
them liked Biden personally. They all viewed him as a normal, lying politician. None
of them believed that Republicans were to blame for the administration’s
failures.”
Credit the members of that focus group for remembering
who controls what in Washington. A side effect of a party’s having the White
House, a slim House majority, and a nominal Senate majority is that the public
sees that ruling party as responsible for what government does — even if
getting all 50 senators in one party to agree is difficult.
You probably noticed this contradiction in the
debt-ceiling fight. All year long, congressional Democrats have insisted that
even if their majorities are slim, they are not obligated to make any
concessions to Republicans in their massive spending bills. After all, they’ve
got the majorities, as long as everyone in the party is unified. But the moment
Democrats realized voting to raise the debt ceiling was going to end up 2022
attack ads, they insisted the debt ceiling couldn’t be raised unless Mitch
McConnell and Republicans helped. But it doesn’t work both ways.
Democrats control the White House and Congress, and
they’re responsible for what the executive and legislative branches have done
since January 20 — and with that comes de facto responsibility for the state of
the country.
By the way, you know what’s remarkable about everything I
listed above? I didn’t even mention Afghanistan. Maybe that focus group sees
Biden as just another lying politician because at least 100 American citizens,
an unknown but considerable number of U.S. green-card holders, and more than
100,000 Afghan allies who qualified for Special Immigrant Visas remain trapped
in Afghanistan, despite the president’s promise that, “If there’s American
citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out.”
A Policy That Requires Denying the Truth Is Not a Good
Policy
One of the darkest aspects of our time is the impulse to conceal truth if it contradicts a preferred
narrative:
On June 22, Scott Smith was
arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, a meeting that
was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally
opposed a policy on transgender students.
What people did not know is that
weeks prior on May 28, Smith says, a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a
girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted
Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.
Juvenile records are sealed, but
Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that a boy was charged
with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of
forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school. . . .
Minutes before Smith’s arrest, the
Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) superintendent lectured the public that
concerns about the transgender policy were misplaced because the school system
had no record of any assault occurring in any school bathroom.
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