Joe Biden’s Malaise Speech

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

 

I joked last night that this presidential social-media post was the modern equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s address on the “Crisis of Confidence” afflicting the country, what posterity remembers as his “malaise speech.” But the more I think about it, the less it resembles a joke:

At the risk of overinterpreting what is, on its face, a rote display of sympathy for the depressed alongside a popular Muppet, it’s also hard to avoid the impression that this self-affirmation’s targets are the depressives currently populating the White House.

 

The parallels aren’t perfect. The wheels hadn’t yet come entirely off the Carter presidency in the summer of 1979 when Carter mourned our collective “loss of unity and purpose as a nation.” But the doldrums in which the Carter presidency languished were reflected in that address, and the same mood is probably rampant inside the beleaguered Biden White House.

 

The tone of Biden’s post, like the infamous speech, is mopey and self-pitying. And why wouldn’t it be? Like the Carter presidency, the administration favored its moral obligation to house refugees over the public’s mistrust of large waves of migrants — and it suffered the political costs. It retails the narrative that persistent inflationary pressure on the economy is a function of excess demand and rapacious captains of industry — and maybe they believe it. But the exercise in blame-shifting hasn’t convinced the voting public. Like Carter, Biden’s diplomatic initiatives are unpopular. Its foreign policies are busily making for a more dangerous world. And as the Carter administration would soon be compelled to do, the Biden administration is implementing policies it had once rejected as unnecessarily provocative — an exercise in self-repudiation that would sap anyone’s confidence in their own abilities and judgment.

 

The mood conveyed in Biden’s melancholic post is one that suggests the need for immediate intervention to prevent its author from engaging in self-harm. It’s hardly reflective of the sunny optimism an incumbent president’s reelection bid needs to incept in voters’ minds if his team expects to be retained in the White House. But then, it’s hard to project a positive outlook when you’re bitter over your circumstances and resentful of the people (e.g., voters) who you believe have unjustly imposed them on you. If wallowing in self-indulgent despondency is what the Biden administration wants to occupy itself with, they’ll have all the time in the world after January 20, 2025.