Susan Glasser says it’s not too early for Democrats to start panicking about Presidentish Joe Biden in this week’s The New Yorker magazine.
And she’s not alone among the lefty BosWash chattering class. For anyone paying attention to the semi-official mouthpieces of official Washington this week, it’s been impossible not to notice that the Establishment is growing very worried about Biden — and the damage he might cause them.
I’m not referring to Biden’s collapsing poll numbers, a story already nicely covered by PJ Media’s own Matt Margolis. Anyway, I’m far less interested in polls that can’t always be trusted than I am in what Biden’s fellow Democrats are willing to publically admit.
In that vein, The Hill went live Friday morning with a report that “Democrats are worried” that Biden is “being defined by a series of negative and disturbing images from Afghanistan and the border.”
By now everyone knows how badly Biden bungled his rushed bugout from Afghanistan, and the resulting hit he took in the polls was enough to make his entire party wince.
The border story — excuse me, the fake news from the border — is still developing, but not so slowly that Congresscritter Maxine Waters didn’t get right out in front of it, claiming that video of mounted Border Patrol agents not using whips to not whip illegal aliens “was worse than what we witnessed and slavery.”
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But following that same example, the most obvious example of just how badly the Democrats are panicking was Friday morning from right inside the White House.
Whoever briefs Biden felt the need to have him take the fake narrative even higher over the top than the likes of MSNBC’s Joy Reid had yet dared:
Biden on the lie that border patrol were using whips on illegal immigrants at the border:
"To see people treated like they did? Horses running them over? People being strapped? It's outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay." pic.twitter.com/Jx79KoYTy9
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 24, 2021
Even the White House has grown desperate enough to try a “Who you gonna believe, Joe or your own lyin’ eyes” over this one.
That’s not going to fly except with the hardcore lefties who would have a hard time leaving Biden even if it turned out his only surviving son had been selling Obama White House access to the highest bidders in China, Libya, and Ukraine like a drugged-upped, stripper-impregnating, child-abandoning total wanker.
OK, bad example, but you get my meaning: Biden’s outrageous statement is what Democrats feel they need to do just to shore up the basest of their base, because the rest of America won’t buy it.
When you’re scraping the bottom of that barrel, it isn’t the calm voice of reason telling you to do it. It’s members of your party’s progressive caucus, warning you that your entire domestic agenda “could fall apart” if they don’t get their way.
Nevertheless, Glasser wrote of Biden that “it is too soon now to consign him to the ash heap of history.”
Maybe that’s true, but Biden might be closer to the abyss that Glasser is willing to admit.
She continues:
What we might be seeing, instead, is a bit of a return to normalcy in American politics—the kind of normalcy in which a President’s job-approval rating goes up or down depending on how people think he is actually doing. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were also considered by many to be failed Presidents early on in their tenures, and saw their parties each lose their first midterm elections as a result; both went on to be among the most popular two-term Presidents of the modern era.
The examples of Reagan and Clinton are specious at best.
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Reagan, along with inflation-hawk Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, purposely engineered the brutal 1981-82 recession in order to end the country’s decade-long inflation. The resulting economic recovery — supercharged by Reagan’s tax and regulatory policies — lasted with only one brief interruption until the end of the 20th Century.
Does anyone see Biden and his inflation-dove crew turning on Reagan’s dime?
As for Clinton, he spent his first two years in office pretty much caving to his party’s left wing — after running as a moderate. Just like Joe Biden. But by losing the 1994 midterms, Clinton was presented a gift, albeit an unwelcome one.
In the person of new Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Clinton got a convenient public foil. But in having a fairly serious-minded GOP majority on Capitol Hill, Clinton was free to ignore his party’s progressive caucus (which wasn’t nearly as large, loud, and effing nuts as it is today) and govern from closer to the center. After that, Clinton did little to seriously undermine Reagan’s economic reforms, and in terms of getting the budget closer to balance, Clinton outperformed Reagan Himself.
Does anyone see the Biden White House doing anything like that, even after a drubbing in the 2022 midterms?
It’s impossible to predict whether the Biden White House will turn this thing around, but it is clear that their fellow Democrats are running out of patience with Slow Joe.
