By Judson Berger
Friday, May 03, 2024
Do you ever get the sense that, in this close election
between two historically loathed people, all it would take to win would be for
one of them to antagonize voters just a little less?
On the bright side for him, President Biden has
considerable room to work with — as it seems his administration and allies have
been intent on aggravating people as much as possible in quotidian aspects of
their lives. And in bigger ways: The FAFSA debacle, for one, has left a huge, Healthcare.gov-sized crater in his government’s reputation,
leaving many students — and their parents — in limbo during college-acceptance season. But the
annoyances and threatened disruptions are mounting apart from that, often the
result not of agency ball-dropping but deliberate regulatory choices. The recent decision to backpedal on a proposed menthol-cigarette ban is one
indication Biden realizes the tendency could be hurting him.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how abysmal Biden’s polling has
been lately,” Rich Lowry writes. The president’s latest quarterly average
approval rating, per Gallup, is under 39 percent and, for that period, lower than any of the previous nine presidents’. A
brutal CNN poll released on Sunday showed not only Biden
trailing Donald Trump by six points while the latter stands trial,
but 61 percent viewing his presidency as a failure. Jim Geraghty provides his usual spot-on diagnosis of the underlying
political problem:
This presidential election is a
battle between two candidates and campaigns whose primary concerns and worries
are light-years away from those of the majority of the electorate.
Trump, true to form, aims to make the race about how
unfairly he’s been treated, about the “stolen” 2020 election, etc. And Biden,
Jim writes, “would love for this year’s election to be about forgiving student
loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control, abortion,” and so forth.
Yet poll after poll show it’s the economy and
inflation/cost of living, along with immigration, that weigh on voters’ minds.
Instead of focusing narrowly on those things, the Biden
administration is pursuing the above laundry list, while also:
• Botching the rollout of new college financial-aid
forms. This can’t be stressed enough. Jim writes here about how the Department of Education
fumbled the congressionally mandated overhaul of the Free Application for
Federal Student Aid system. Per the Associated Press, the muck-up has, for some, delayed
college decisions by months and raised concerns that many students will simply
not attend: “Across the United States, the number of students who have
successfully submitted the FAFSA is down 29% from this time last year.” In
Jim’s words, “God help you if you have a high-school senior applying to
colleges this year.”
• Finalizing a rule that is meant to raise wages for au
pairs but could make the program too expensive for many families,
and potentially even double the cost.
• Pursuing EPA regulations meant to move manufacturers and drivers
away from gas-powered cars and toward electric vehicles and hybrids — on a
timetable that seems to underplay the enormous amount of work still needed to
build out the charging infrastructure and improve the EV experience
itself. As NR’s editorial on the push noted, EVs were just 7.6 percent of new car sales last year.
• Pursuing a range of rules that seem designed to torment
businesses, dealing with everything from overtime policies to noncompete clauses to emissions disclosures to independent contractors. Some of these emanate from
independent agencies — but independent agencies run by people Biden appointed,
so the president’s separation from these disruptions is limited. These measures
won’t all necessarily redound to the benefit of employees, either.
• Until recently, trying to ban menthol cigarettes.
As National Review’s editorial explains, proponents of the latter idea considered it an act of
racial benevolence, but that assumption inevitably collided with the likely
consequences of the rule:
Menthols are popular among black
smokers, so banning them would help improve disparate racial health outcomes,
the argument goes.
Like many “anti-racist” arguments,
this one sounds more racist the more you think about it. Not being able to ban
a product in general but settling for only banning the version of it popular
with black people doesn’t put very much faith in the decision-making abilities
of black people, who are fully capable of evaluating their decisions just like
anyone else. . . . A national ban on the type of cigarette preferred by black
smokers increases the chances for black people to confront law enforcement and
face penalties for evading a ban that most white smokers wouldn’t face.
So the administration announced it’s shelving the idea.
It’s a start. What Biden’s government should do, more
broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism.
Noah Rothman’s magazine piece last year on “the war on things that
work” is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been
“waging a crusade against convenience.” This includes, especially at the state
level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn
equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New
Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear
given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it’s priceless) — and “the only observable
effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and
noticeably more annoying.”
Democrats, do you ever
look at Trump’s Truth Social feed and feel like Jon Lovitz? Maybe stuff
like this is why.
Speaking of: The administration’s persistent efforts to
wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially
while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet
another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn’t invidious enough, one has
to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college
students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making
their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .
Reagan once asked, “Are you
better off than you were four years ago?” The 2024 version might be: Are
you more or less annoyed?
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