The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Inside the Biden Bubble

Posted on | June 13, 2022 | Comments Off on Inside the Biden Bubble

A foolish boast from Biden’s chief of staff:

Less than three weeks after the White House claimed President Joe Biden’s approval ratings were on the upswing, an average of recent surveys show more Americans disapprove of his job performance than ever.
According to a RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls from May 18 to June 9, just over 39 percent of Americans say they approve of Biden’s job as president. That number marks a new low for Biden, who has not seen a poll showing his approval rating above 44 percent since the first week of May.
The poll stands in direct conflict with the claim put forth by White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a 2021 Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year, that Biden’s poll numbers were looking up. “I hate to spoil the narrative but this poll shows @potus approval rating moving up,” Klain wrote.
Klain celebrated a May 22 poll from CBS News finding that just 44 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the presidency. Despite 56 percent of respondents saying they disapprove of Biden’s job performance, Klain tweeted that the poll showed “public confidence on the two biggest problems [Biden] inherited: COVID and jobs.”
While Biden claims in interviews that he doesn’t follow or “believe” polling, his chief counselor Klain regularly remarks on and shares them on social media. In private, Biden “has expressed exasperation that his poll numbers have sunk below those of Donald Trump,” Politico reported earlier this month.

The reality of Biden’s historic unpopularity:

On May 7, Biden was about 10 points underwater — 52.7 disapprove to 42.5 approve — in the RCP average. At that point, Biden had been less than 10 points underwater on four consecutive polls — Economist/YouGov (-4), Reuters/Ipsos (-6), Rasmussen Reports (-8) and IBD/TIPP (-8). But there is such a thing as a “dead cat bounce” in polling. No matter how unpopular you may be, when you get near the absolute bottom, you’ll have occasional upticks. And 40% approval is pretty much rock-bottom for any president. To get lower than that, not only are you hated by the opposition and most independents, but even your own partisans start hating you. So as any president’s approval number approaches 40%, he’s going to experience a few “good” days when this or that poll has him at 43% or whatever. And that was what Ron Klain was looking at when he proclaimed on May 22 that the latest CBS Poll was “good news” for Biden. But this “dead cat bounce” could only last so long in a political environment where inflation is raging out of control and the president doesn’t seem to have a clue. Sure enough, when the next Reuters/Ipsos poll came out, it had Biden 23 points underwater — 36% approve, 59% disapprove — a number so shocking that you might suspect a sampling error. Biden’s slump was confirmed, however, by several subsequent polls: Politico/Morning Consult (-19), Rasmussen Reports (-20) and Quinnipiac (-21). And apparently nobody in the Biden White House understands what happened, least of all Joe Biden himself.

Just how out of touch is Biden? On Tuesday, there were primaries in several states, but the big news was in California, where San Francisco voted to recall their Soros-sponsored left-wing district attorney Chesa Boudin. It wasn’t even close — 55%-45% — a shocking result in one of America’s most liberal cities. So the next day, as Biden prepared to board Air Force One, he gave the press this statement:

I think the voters sent a clear message last night: Both parties have to step up and do something about crime, as well as gun violence.
And I sent, as you recall — with the first major bill we passed, we gave the states and localities billions of dollars — billions of dollars they have — and I encouraged them to use it to hire police officers and reform their police departments. Very few have done it.
In addition to that, I sent to Congress a request for $300 million in this year’s budget to deal with hiring cops, to retrain cops, as well as to make sure they are adequately dispersed around the communities.
It’s time they move. It’s time to states and the localities spend the money they have to deal with crime, as well as retrain police officers, as well as provide for more community policing.
It’s time to get on with doing that. And that’s what I think the message last night from the American public was in all the primaries.

Are you freakin’ kidding me with this? “Both parties”?

Pray tell, can Joe Biden name a single Republican official who lost last Tuesday over the issue of crime? And where was the evidence that what got Chesa Boudin thrown out of office had anything to do “states and localities” failing to spend the federal money to hire more cops? In point of fact — although I’m sure whoever wrote that little speech for Biden doesn’t care about facts — the problem in San Francisco was not so much that they didn’t have enough police, but rather that Boudin’s office kept turning loose the criminals that the cops arrested.

Inside the Biden bubble, however, either they don’t know the facts or they think they can get away with this kind of dishonest spin, and one gets the impression that Biden is so completely out of touch — so insulated from reality — that he doesn’t even know what the problems are, much less have any idea how to fix them. Consider the problem of record-high gas prices, which Biden bloviated about again last week:

Pressed to explain the supposedly unexpected further increase in the rate of inflation, Biden offered a couple of golden oldies from his basket of distractions. . . . Biden trotted out his “Putin price hike” excuse, even though Biden had been in denial for most of 2021 about inflation running away in the US — offering lame excuses that had even tired out the Washington Post editorial board by early January, well before the invasion.
Biden spent even more time on his “corporate greed” attack lines, undaunted by their failure for the last several months. He went out of his way to attack ExxonMobil specifically, who he claimed not only “made more money than God” but also didn’t pay taxes:

“Why don’t you tell them what Exxon’s profits were this year? This quarter? Exxon made more money than God this year,” he said in remarks at the Port of Los Angeles. “Exxon, start investing. Start paying your taxes.”

I doubt Joe Biden even knows what ExxonMobil’s taxes or profits are, but it’s easy enough to check.

Read the whole thing because the truth is almost diametrically opposite of Biden’s assertion. Exxon pays billions in taxes, and their profit margin is lower than many other companies, e.g., Goldman Sachs. Is Joe Biden going to start publicly chastising Goldman Sachs? I don’t think so.

The larger point, however, is that Joe Biden doesn’t understand economics well enough to know what causes inflation. He thinks it’s just a problem of political perception, and that as long as he can deflect blame away from himself, then it doesn’t matter what the real problem is.

They tell me 81 million people voted to elect Joe Biden, and certainly not all the clueless fools in America are in the White House.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

Category: Joe Biden

Comments

Comments are closed.