April 18, 2022 at 1:50 p.m.
Is the president tone-deaf or hostage?
Is the president tone-deaf or hostage?
Each and every week, Biden pronouncements amount to angry missives and policy proposals the American people clearly reject. His handlers likewise stumble around with obviously lame excuses for bad outcome after bad outcome - excuses no one buys.
For months, the Biden team played down and even laughed about inflation. Now they say it's real and point their finger at "Putin's price hikes." Americans weren't born yesterday, though; everyone knows inflation was galloping away from the ranch well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In part, the Biden administration suffers from what all administrations suffer from - they think we are stupid. So no matter how bad the situation is, and no matter what the obvious reasons for it are, they think they can just spin the facts the way they want and the country will believe it.
But no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig - we are staying away from reptile metaphors this week - it's still a pig. You can tell people how good the economy is, but when they can't pay their bills, they know it isn't so good, and you can't spin an empty back account.
Politicians never learn this lesson.
But something else seems to be going on with this president. He not only tries to spin away the reality of how we got to where we are; he doubles down on the poisonous and unpopular policies to create even more damage.
Usually, presidents faced with a looming electoral crisis try to change course. The most famous example was Bill Clinton, who did an about-face when Democrats took a whipping in the 1994 mid-terms. After that, he suddenly advocated for welfare reform and work requirements, and became a tax cutter. He felt our pain, and the nation re-elected him.
In contrast, Uncle Joe does not seem to care one whit about reading the pulse of the nation. Gas and energy prices go up and he continues to refuse to unleash domestic energy production. In a time of revulsion against rising crime rates, he appoints criminal defense lawyers to judgeships. A parental revolt delivers the governorship to a Republican in Virginia, echoing concerns around the nation, but Biden and his team simply reaffirm their support for critical race theory and gender identity coaching in government schools.
Earlier this month, as we report in today's edition, Biden launched another assault on gun rights, saying that his proposed ghost gun rule - which would take another step toward a national gun registry - was just the tip of the iceberg of what he was planning when it comes to suppressing and destroying the Second Amendment.
Rather than take criminals off the street, Biden would prefer taking away guns from law-abiding people and instead let criminals and rioters have the streets. This at a time when Americans in every population group have been buying firearms in records numbers for self-defense, especially in minority communities and among women.
Normally, it would be tempting to just chalk it all up to the president's cognitive decline, but in this day and age a president is not a just a president but an administration, so they are all letting the catastrophes accumulate.
A powerful president might be able to have his will and way, except against the most entrenched bureaucrats and executive fiefdoms, but Biden is one of the weakest presidents in modern times. So they are all culpable.
The question is why.
One possibility is that they are politically tone-deaf, and this reason is the one most prevalent now in the pundit class. Insiders whisper that the White House is upset the president does not get more credit for his "historic achievements," as if bungling every possible policy area is a record-breaker, and maybe it is.
One of the most blatant tone-deaf messages being delivered by the White House is how good his record is on job creation, job growth, and low unemployment. To the administration, those numbers should stand on their own as proud accomplishments. But what the politicians in the Ivory towers fail to grasp is that they must be taken in the context of real life.
And in real life, those jobs' numbers funnel down to the only number that matters - the wages people take home. And the wages people take home are lagging inflation badly.
In other words, all that job growth, all that low unemployment - none of it means anything if people can't make ends meet. This is not a worry of elite politicians, or of talk show hosts who say they are more than willing to pay several dollars more for a gallon of gas.
This is what has happened in this country. For decades now there has been a rising inequality, fueled by the growth of monopolistic international corporations, government bureaucracies, and massive regulation, and all that was supersized in the pandemic, so much so that the very elite at the top have no idea what it's like at the bottom.
Nor do they care. The middle class is on its way out and the government can just take care of everybody else. If this is the outcome, then inflation, to the elite, is a good thing.
Beyond the tone deafness, there is the question of whether the president has simply been taken hostage by the progressives of his party. It could be that the president is simply regurgitating the most radical and counterproductive policies he is told to administer.
And what good would that do for the left-wing of the party if it led to a massive election loss in November? Well, for one thing, it would vanquish the Biden wing of the party and finally deliver the Democrats to the progressive left.
There are two things for certain in left-wing thinking. They believe a second coming of Trump in the 2024 election would be a disaster for the GOP, no matter who represents the Democrats. And they firmly believe that the left has more electoral strength than the Biden wing of the party at the grassroots. It's delusional because of the southern black vote - which was demonstrated in the 2020 primaries - but that's what they think.
To them the season of neoliberalism is over, and it's time for a progressive populism.
Unfortunately for them, the trend-line of the Biden administration is just the opposite. The neo-liberals are not only in control, they have been bolstered by the stunning rise from the dead of the neoconservatives.
Those people are more tone-deaf than radical, and they care not that they are tone-deaf so long as they can rule foreign policy and the security state. The progressive left can have domestic policy for all they care.
Meanwhile, the president walks around in his fog. He double-downs on the progressive left's radical domestic dreams and on the neocons' radical foreign policy fantasies.
All those dreams are creating nightmares in the heartland of America, but likely no one in Washington is going to awaken until the votes are counted in 2024.
Comments:
You must login to comment.