The Biden We Were Told about Never Existed

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, September 15, 2023

 

The gap between the image of Joe Biden that is peddled in the press and the reality of Joe Biden as he exists here on earth has always been uncomfortably wide, but, as we hurtle toward the end of the third year of his presidency, the gulch has come to resemble the Mariana Trench. There is a point in every breakup at which the partner who has fallen out of love comes to realize that, for some time now, he has been more attached to the idea of his paramour than to the actuality. It has developed in fits and starts, and been a long time coming, but, at long last, the American electorate seems to have reached that point with this president. On the questions that matter, there will be no more fluctuations. They know who Joe Biden is, and who Joe Biden is not, and, after extended consideration, they do not like him.

 

Given the parlous state of the Republican Party, it is more possible than it should be that Biden will win a second term. If he does so, it will be in spite of his public image, not because of it. In 2020, Biden’s marketing team cast the candidate as a decent, honest, vigorous man, who would unite the country, restore competence to the White House, and deliver an economy of which all Americans could be proud. In 2024, such claims will inspire bitter laughter. Today, Biden serves one purpose, and one purpose alone: to beat Donald Trump. The rest is stuff and nonsense.

 

Not that this has prevented the press from insisting otherwise. Indeed, the more that the public signals that it can see precisely who Joe Biden is, the more Joe Biden’s acolytes stamp their feet. In increasingly flustered tones, we are told that Biden is presiding over an economy that is so remarkably good that it deserves to be christened “Bidenomics”; that Biden is so intrinsically honest that all suggestions to the contrary are self-evidently political; and that, despite his being an octogenarian, Biden is so unusually energetic that his staff finds it hard to keep up with him. Whether these lines are advanced as the result of myopia, desperation, or a hubristic desire to proselytize is unclear. But, whatever their intention, the ploy is not working — and it is not going to work. The public knows what it is seeing, and it has no great incentive to pretend otherwise.

 

That Joe Biden has voluntarily (nay, enthusiastically) loaned his name to the state of the American economy is one of the greatest mysteries of our time. There is no group of Americans, not any region in the United States, in which a majority believes that the economy is getting better. Seventy percent of Americans believe that the economy is getting worse. Among white respondents, that number is 70 percent; among African Americans, it is 58 percent; among Hispanics, it is 77 percent. Seventy percent of men think it’s getting worse, as do 70 percent of women. In the South, that number is 73 percent; in the Midwest, it is 66 percent; in the West, it is 72 percent. Eighty-four percent see their cost of living rising, 71 percent are eating out less often, 58 percent are postponing or canceling vacations, 68 percent are cutting back spending on clothes. Joe Biden calls this “Bidenomics.” Americans call it “horrible,” “awful,” “bad,” “shambles,” and more, and 60 percent of them blame Joe Biden for this personally.

 

The same is true of Biden’s age. Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe that Biden is “too old to be effective for four more years” — a group that includes 89 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of independents, and 69 percent of Democrats. These numbers are not an outlier; they show up in poll after poll after poll, every time the question is asked. As with their conception of the state of the economy, voters cannot be pushed away from this view by rank naysaying and false sophistication. They can see their grocery bills, and their interest rates, and their wages, and they can see Joe Biden’s senility, and they cannot be talked out of seeing them by Sunday-show smooth-talking or by memes that depict the president as a superhero. “I see all the symptoms my grandpa had,” a voter told the Associated Press last month. What, I wonder, could the successful response be to that? “No, you don’t”?

 

And then there is the man’s trustworthiness — or, as he likes to put it, his “word as a Biden.” To his delusional fans, the president is Mason Weems’s George Washington, conceding regretfully to his father, “I can’t tell a lie.” To the public, he is a slippery lifetime politician. In 2020, just over half of voters bought the idea that Biden was honest. In 2023, only a third do. Why? Because Joe Biden is not honest. He lies constantly — about issues big and small. He sedulously refuses to level with the public, whether the topic is inflation, Afghanistan, his role in creating jobs, or anything else. And, as we learn by the day, he has been far more closely involved in his son’s corruption than his emphatic denials have allowed.

 

What’s that word Biden likes? Malarkey?