“With just more than 200 days left until the 2022 election, there’s little evidence that President Joe Biden’s poll numbers are improving,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza lamented last week. “And there’s some data to suggest things are getting worse.”
Cillizza cites historical precedent and the latest Quinnipiac University poll as proof that disaster awaits Biden and the Democrats in November’s midterm elections. “Adding to the issues for Biden and Democrats is the fact that there is no obvious event waiting on the horizon that could turn things around for their side.”
He concludes that “It is a pretty dark time to be a Democrat facing voters this fall. And there’s no sign that things are going to get any brighter.”
So, what’s the media to do about it? Biden’s poll numbers are a disaster, and everything he’s tried to revive them has failed—and the media can’t exactly tell people things are better than they seem. Why not? Because the people feel the impact of Biden’s presidency on their wallets … and it hurts big time, regardless of the narrative the media pushes.
It appears the new strategy the media is taking is to claim that all the problems that Americans are lashing out at Biden over are simply issues out of his control.
“There’s just not much President Joe Biden can do about it,” insists CNN’s John Harwood. “There’s not much he can do to curb inflation. There’s not much he can do to stop migrants from reaching America’s southern border. Or to reduce crime, or to make vaccine resisters get shots that would hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic.”
Over at ABC News, anchor George Stephanopoulos also insists Biden is somehow powerless to do anything about inflation.
“When it comes to inflation, there’s not much the President can do about it,” he claimed on ABC’s This Week.
That’s weird because wasn’t Joe Biden going to swoop in and fix everything? Wasn’t it Joe Biden the elder statesman whose experience would “shut down the virus,” get us out of Afghanistan “responsibly, deliberately, and safely,” stand up to Putin, end our reliance on fossil fuels, and make us respected on the world stage, or something?
Apparently, the media thinks that the best way to defend Biden is to say he’s powerless to have any impact on anything. This, they’ve decided, is preferable to saying, “Biden’s policies suck, and he’s incompetent.”
Perhaps from their perspective, it is, but Americans can see that Joe Biden waged war on fossil fuels on day one of his presidency, and it’s worked. As a result, gas prices went up, fueling inflation. Americans also see that Joe Biden laid out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants at the border and that the weak-on-crime policies he embraces are destroying cities nationwide, and so on.
The same media that tried to blame everything on Trump and his policies now insists the president is essentially a bystander with no power to do anything to solve the nation’s problems.
The media sure has come a long way from cheering Obama when he claimed his winning the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” to insisting that Joe Biden is powerless to do anything about inflation and other issues Americans expect of a president.
The truth is, Joe Biden has more power to do something about inflation, immigration, crime, etc. The problem is that his policies aren’t working, and the media refuses to call him out for it.
