Make a Birthday Wish to Joe Biden: You’ll Need It with These Horrible Approval and Poll Numbers
Get plenty of insight (and laughs) from the latest policy advice coming from the White House.
Concerned about President Biden’s age and his habit of falling, his advisers want him to shorten the distance he walks in public and wear softer, more flexible shoes to help him stay upright.
Not since the latest campaign genius, David Garth, told New York’s Ed Koch and other clients to wear more blue on television, political advice has been so basic.
And rightly so, because, as even the propaganda media realizes, “it doesn’t look good” when the leader of the free world repeatedly falls down the stairs of Air Force One.
Especially when that same frail-looking president celebrated his 81st birthday with another embarrassing performance.
However, it strikes me that strategists are intentionally confusing the symptoms of Biden’s political problems with the substance.
His advanced age and public confusion would be worrying, but not decisive, if everything in America were a great success and voters wanted more of the same.
But that’s far from the case, so the president’s advisers would be closer to a solution if they invoked James Carville’s eternal warning to candidates: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
It’s always the economy, although in Biden’s case it’s the economy and many other things too.
An accurate warning to him requires a sweeping statement like, “It’s the policies, stupid.”
All policies.
Consider that approval of his performance has been negative since his chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.
Since then, polls have not shown him with majority approval, and the gap is wide.
He now has 41% approval to 56% disapproval, according to RealClearPolitics’ average of polls from October and November.
That 15-point gap is bad, but when voters are asked about six specific issues, the disapproval gap grows.
In fact, the margins are surprisingly lopsided.
Disastrous finds
According to averages, respondents of all parties disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy by 38 to 59 percent, a difference of 21 points. Regarding inflation, it is below the level of 30 points, 33% -63%.
In terms of crime, it is 37% to 58%, and the same occurs in foreign policy. Regarding immigration, the same thing happens as inflation: 33% approval, 63% disapproval.
The closest he is to reaching the break-even point is a 13-point deficit in his management of Ukraine, where he obtains 42% approval compared to 55% disapproval.
On the basic test of whether the United States is on the right or wrong path, only 25% say it is on the right path, compared to 66% who say it is on the wrong path. The difference of 41 points is astonishing.
For the White House, the explanation for these disastrous findings is that it is the president’s age and his stiff, shaky walk. How convenient.
Indeed, public concerns about his age and optics are best understood as indicators of the unpopularity of his policies and agenda.
Making sure the president doesn’t fall again in public won’t change voters’ minds on the economy or crime.
To be fair, Biden’s rampant failures, along with his age and stumbles, have caused concern all year, but most Democrats were willing to downplay them whenever it looked like the election would be a rematch with Donald Trump.
Many party leaders and media servants believed Biden’s claim that he is the only person who could beat Trump, and their hatred of Trump blinded them to voters’ concerns.
Concerns rose slightly in recent months when some polls showed Trump coming close to or beating Biden next November.
Then, two weeks ago, a bomb dropped and worries instantly turned to panic.
unpopular agenda
That’s when a New York Times/Siena College poll showed Trump ahead in five of the six battleground states, putting him on a possible path to 300 electoral votes and victory.
That poll attracted widespread attention in part because the Times has been supporting Biden all along and has never stopped daily demonizing Trump.
Interestingly, that bias gave the poll results an extra dose of credibility, and the Gray Lady’s presentation of the results on the cover was seen as a warning shot across the president’s bow.
Still, anyone who really cared should have realized that the reasons for Trump’s rise had long been obvious in the polls.
Biden’s agenda was overwhelmingly unpopular and increasingly so.
No doubt some of that unpopularity stems from the belief among many Americans that Democratic prosecutors, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, are engaging in blatant election interference by repeatedly attacking the Republican front-runner and trying to lock him up.
But even that didn’t matter to most Democrats, as long as the final result showed Biden would prevail next year.
Despite their sudden awakening, there is still at least one major blind spot among many on the left: the compelling evidence that GOP investigators have uncovered in their impeachment inquiry.
Corruption in sight
The fact that Hunter Biden received outrageously lenient treatment from Garland until IRS whistleblowers bravely came forward is not widely known because the Times and others on the party bus have ignored or downplayed the facts.
In a recent conversation with a devoted Times reader, I realized he had no idea what the Hunter Biden case was about. He also didn’t know that Joe Biden had received at least $240,000 from his brother, Jim Biden, shortly after the family received a payment in 2017 from a Chinese company and another client of his influence-peddling scheme.
The payments show that Joe directly benefited from the sale of his name and his vice presidency, but the Times, the Washington Post, CNN and others continue to move the goalposts to protect Biden. They do this by hiding key data from their readers and viewers, turning them into censors.
The good news is that it is not working. Polls show that a majority of Americans already believe the president’s conduct was unethical or illegal in his family’s plans.
That’s another factor why so many voters have turned sour on the president, and its impact is sure to grow as more evidence of his role emerges.
All of which gives Democrats one more reason to panic about going into battle in 2024 with Joe Biden at the top of their ticket.
Adams has Democratic armor
Reader Ronald Wieck accuses me of being idealistic for writing that Mayor Adams might have trouble defending his record to voters two years from now.
“Adams doesn’t need to defend anything,” Wieck writes. “Superman has that big ‘S’ on his chest and Adams has that big ‘D’ next to his name. The kryptonite that overthrows the Democrats infesting big cities has not yet been discovered.”
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It’s time to denazify New York
The shocking rise of anti-Semitism in New York and elsewhere leads reader Jim Trageser to endorse a return to a historical manual, writing: “We need to mount here the kind of denazification effort that Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall instituted in Germany and Austria in 1945 “
