October 18, 2021 at 10:12 a.m.
I never promised you a Rose Garden
I never promised you a Rose Garden
Former President Donald Trump is leading Biden in multiple surveys, while Biden's approval rating has slumped to the high 30s and his support among independents has imploded catastrophically.
There are the obvious reasons. Inflation is rising faster than wages, eroding the economic position of average Americans; the Covid-19 vaccines turned out not to be the magic bullet that Big Pharma said they were; the Afghanistan withdrawal - if that's the right word - was a human and geopolitical disaster, humiliating us around the world; the crisis at the border, assuming there is still a border, is another human and political tragedy.
And this is just Biden's first year in office.
Throughout it all, the president has shown himself to be ... well, let's just say he's not what he used to be mentally, and he has taken to flights of fantasy. Much of his administration has apparently taken flight with him.
You know, that inflation thing, it's temporary, Biden and treasury secretary Janet Yellen have said all year. They're still saying it. Only it's not, as even some Federal Reserve officials are now admitting.
Here's Raphael Bostic this past week, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: "[I]t is becoming increasingly clear that the feature of this [inflationary] episode that has animated price pressures - mainly the intense and widespread supply chain disruptions - will not be brief. Data from multiple sources point to these lasting longer than most initially thought. By this definition, then, the forces are not transitory."
Then there's Afghanistan. The president assured us it would be no repeat of the Saigon fiasco of the Vietnam War - he was right, it was way worse - and then, as people fell from the sky and body parts were found in the wheel wells of planes, he proclaimed it all a big success, the stranded Americans he left behind notwithstanding.
There's Covid. The president and his administration bet the farm that we would vaccinate our way out of the pandemic, but the virus just wouldn't cooperate. So we are still trying to vaccinate our way out of what is now endemic rather than pandemic, meaning Covid vaccination will be likely about as successful as flu vaccines - useful and perhaps even necessary in some population groups but no panacea and needless for many.
And the border problem. What border problem? ask the president and the vice president.
With so much fantasy afoot, it is little wonder the president has fled to a fake White House set for some of his presentations, and even less wonder that Kamala Harris's YouTube session with students on space last week turned out to be fake, too. They were child actors.
The fake set - despite the national media's defense of Biden's use of it - and the child actors are problematic because they are symbolic of the mindset of the administration. They live and make policy in a Hollywood world of props and fictional characters. They can't see beyond the stage lights.They can't read beyond their own script. They can't look at the real world and into the eyes of real Americans.
All this has taken its toll on Biden's popularity, but there's one other thing that we believe is at the center of his popularity decline: He's mean.
At the beginning of the year, the national press fawned over grandfatherly Uncle Joe and his choices of ice cream. They oohed and cooed at his promise to heal and unite us. That seems like a lifetime ago. Instead, the year has shown us the real Joe Biden - dismissive, self-centered, arrogant, authoritarian, and getting angrier by the day.
Joe Biden - at least this Joe Biden - isn't a very likable person, and the American people are realizing just that: They don't like him.
Examples are legion. When Biden met with the families of the 13 soldiers killed by ISIS-K in Afghanistan, he miffed grieving relatives by focusing his remarks on his late son, Beau, instead of honoring those who died. He followed that by looking at his watch while their bodies were escorted from the transport plane.
In the speech in which he declared the Afghanistan withdrawal a success, Biden adopted an aggressive and defiant tone, and resorted at times to shouting. The president also blamed those left behind for their own situation, saying the administration had reached out nearly a score of times to tell them to leave.
Perhaps, but the administration was also saying the government wasn't going to collapse. Which script were they supposed to read - the one where the sky was falling and they should leave, or the one in which the president said the sky wasn't falling - and why in the world would you heap abuse on those who made the wrong choice?
Of course, the president's announcement of a vaccine mandate for 100 million Americans takes the cake. The problem isn't just the mandate, which is an authoritarian principle even many pro-vaccine Americans reject, it's also the way he delivered it, angrily pointing his finger at 80 million Americans and saying his patience was "running thin" with those who refused to surrender to his thinking.
Get vaccinated or lose your livelihood was what the president was saying. And yet, no one in his administration ever explained why, in Biden's words, the mandate was needed "to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers."
Who could blame Americans for asking: Wait, isn't that what the vaccine itself is supposed to do, to protect those who get the shot? So why do we need a mandate? What threat do the unvaccinated pose, except to themselves?
Instead, the president laid down his authoritarian rule and talked with disdain to the deplorables he addressed: "My message to unvaccinated Americans is this: What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see? We have made vaccinations free, safe and convenient. The vaccine is FDA approved. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We've been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us."
Blood is on your hands, the president was saying.
Not since Jimmy Carter has a president talked like this to Americans, and maybe Biden is even worse than Carter. But both men were maligning Americans and blaming them for problems those presidents' policies had helped cause.
In Carter's case, after a term spent spinning various foreign and domestic crises out of thin air, and blaming innocent Americans for them, he ultimately retreated to the Rose Garden to wait for his fantasies to come true.
Biden has retreated to a stage set, complete with a digital picture of the Rose Garden. At least Carter could walk around and smell real flowers. In the Biden administration, even the flowers are fake.
Now that we think about it though, we admit he never did promise us a real Rose Garden, or, for that matter, even a real presidency.
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