The night before President Biden departed Washington to celebrate Thanksgiving on Nantucket, Mass., he gathered his closest aides for a meeting in the White House residence.
After pardoning a pair of turkeys, an annual White House tradition, Biden delivered some stern words for the small group assembled: His poll numbers were unacceptably low and he wanted to know what his team and his campaign were doing about it. He complained that his economic message had done little to move the ball, even as the economy was growing and unemployment was falling, according to people familiar with his comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.For months, the president and first lady Jill Biden have told aides and friends they are frustrated by the president’s low approval rating and the polls that show him trailing former president Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination — and in recent weeks, they have grown upset that they are not making more progress.
Let the violins play for poor Dirty Joe. Doesn’t your heart just split in two that he’s so unappreciated?
And he’s certainly unappreciated. Have you seen the Monmouth poll? Yikes…
That isn’t even the worst survey out there. Pew actually has Biden at 33 percent in a poll released Friday.
But Bidenomics is a huge win, we’re told. How can the folks be so sour on Dirty Joe when the economy is doing so well?
“Wait, what?” you ask. Yes, your betters in the Democrat Party are howling at you for your inattention to how America is just rocking and rolling right now. To wit…
What we have here, clearly, is something of a disconnect. Do people just hate Joe Biden so much that Bidenomics’ success or failure doesn’t even matter?
Well, yes. But, of course, the people who hate Biden that much didn’t vote for him to begin with and never will vote for him. Team Biden has made sure of that by filling up a mini-gulag in the federal prisons with Jan. 6 protesters, siccing the FBI on parents protesting racial agitation and transgender ideology at school boards, and, strangely enough, investigating Catholics who attend Latin mass. Economics doesn’t much matter when you’re practicing actual tyranny on a supposedly free people, and nobody is being fooled.
Especially when the nonstop demoralization and politicization of everyday life that Democrats and the Left have made their primary project since Barack Obama happened to this country — something I describe thoroughly in Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama. And it not only continues apace but is even more pervasive than ever. All the movies and TV shows push leftist propaganda that regular Americans are irritated by, everyone understands they’re not allowed to complain even when Democrat Senate staffers produce gay porn films in hearing rooms (and then pretend to be persecuted when they’re fired for it), and your quality of life is continually downgraded in the name of race, or sex, or the climate, or all of the above.
Macy’s drops a commercial spot pushing their Christmas offerings and features gift-giving not just between two gay men but two lesbians as well, but you aren’t supposed to remark about that, or about the persistent demands that you take another COVID jab, or complain about the armies of homeless and illegals gathering under highway overpasses in your city.
So maybe it isn’t all economics.
But it is economics. Team Biden might pretend everything is cool, but it isn’t.
Think you’ve whipped inflation? It’s now estimated that the average monthly payment on a new home in America has gone up NINETY PERCENT since January of 2021.
Oh, but that isn’t getting worse anymore, so it’s a success. And this is Team Biden’s narrative; inflation is back down to manageable levels, so it’s just a Republican talking point and it isn’t real.
Seriously?
Here’s an example of somebody who’ll never buy the Bidenomics narrative. Let’s call her Ms. Smith. She’s a divorced mom in her 30s with two kids and a middling job as, say, the bookkeeper for a used car dealership.
Ms. Smith has been piling up credit card debt with a 20-plus percent interest for two years now just to keep a roof over her head and food in her kids’ bellies. She can’t get more child support from the ex; he’s in the same situation she is — in fact, he’s struggling so much that he isn’t as regular with those payments as she needs him to be.
And maybe the price for everything at the grocery store or the shopping mall where she’s buying her kids new sneakers or jeans isn’t exactly getting worse. But who cares about that? She’s still cutting down to the absolute bare necessities and can’t find any extra ways to squeeze out that paycheck, and she’s further and further down a hole every month.
Do you think Ms. Smith is placated by the idea that inflation is back down to normal levels? Prices aren’t back down to normal levels.
Then there’s the fact that car prices are absolutely through the roof, thanks to the stupid EV mandates Biden has imposed on the industry and the disruptions to the supply chain those mistakes, and others, have inflicted. So Ms. Smith’s eight-year-old Honda Accord gets more and more rickety all the time, she’s getting a Check Engine light, and in normal times she’d trade it in for something newer with more life in it. But now? The new car prices going through the roof have dragged used car prices through the roof as well, so she can’t afford a replacement. If she tries to trade in that Accord, she’ll be lucky to get something that isn’t even older and more beat up than what she has. So instead she’s about to go further into debt to pay the several hundred (or thousand) dollars to fix whatever is causing that Check Engine light.
Try to sell the house and downsize to take advantage of a smaller mortgage? Not happening. Not when the mortgage on the house she’s living in is at 3 percent and a new mortgage will be 8 percent. That’ll chew up any savings she could possibly get out of selling — not to mention housing prices themselves are up, which is a good thing if she sells but a disaster when she tries to buy something else.
The squeeze is on, a whole lot of it comes from stupid policies, and — let’s be honest — nefarious behavior on the part of Team Biden’s pals around the world.
Beef prices through the sky? That’s not surprising when you have institutional capital and people like Bill Gates buying up farmland, efforts to kill off the cattle industry through regulation here and in other places (they’re even trying to slaughter cows “for the climate” in Ireland and Holland, among other countries), and the elites are now pushing fake meat and even insects as protein sources while squeezing ranching and meat processing. And now Wall Street wants to push something called “Natural Asset Companies,” which would monetize pulling land out of commerce to “save the planet,” and, in so doing, further hamstring agriculture, mining, timber, and other harvesting of raw materials.
Which will make the price of everything continue to rise. There is no end in sight with people like Team Biden (more like Team Obama, but you already knew that) in control.
And there are the cheap shots they take against your quality of life while they tell you it’s for your own good.
Your “energy-efficient” dishwasher that is supposed to save water doesn’t actually get dishes clean. Meanwhile, you’re told not to pre-wash the dishes in the sink beforehand because that’s bad for the environment. They want to take away your water heater, they keep screwing around with what coolant you can use in your home air conditioner, and they won’t let you have a gas stove. You’re on edge waiting for the next modern convenience they want to cancel.
And you’re on edge about something else. Because Ms. Smith notices that thanks to the federal government’s Section Eight machinations and other abuses, her once-safe suburb isn’t so safe anymore. Her best friend just got carjacked, and the store next to her work was looted by a band of thugs and the home office decided to shutter it. The crime they talk about on the news is real to her. It isn’t some GOP talking point. And she’s terrified for her kids, not to mention herself. Sometimes she’s alone when she leaves to go home and she’s uncomfortable with the idea of carrying a gun; she wonders if pepper spray is enough in the event the animals would come for her.
She remembers that just a few years ago she never thought about things like these.
You can’t make plans. You can’t get ahead. At your job, they want to run you through woke DEI and ESG seminars, and you can’t afford to refuse to participate, or quit, because you’re under water already.
And your free time is a forgotten pleasure. You don’t have it anymore, because you’re forced to take up a side hustle:
Those side-hustle jobs represent time lost with kids, family, and friends that ordinary Americans will never get back, and in millions of cases, the money coming out of them isn’t going toward a new house, or a college fund, or retirement — it’s going toward debt service.
Four years ago, this was a country where people were getting ahead. Four years ago, consumer confidence was through the sky, people were optimistic about their personal finances, average household net worth was rising as were real wages, and debt was ticking downward.
Four years ago, there was an economy that worked.
Now? Now we’re stuck with a corporate-fascist oligarchy for an economy, a hyper-corrupt government gaslighting the citizenry as it whipsaws them, a national debt that makes for an impending and inevitable collapse, and a country in decline to match the cognitive state of a president nobody truly believes is in control.
And all Team Biden offers is more gaslighting and a fraudulent, theatrical pretense of shock that the folks don’t buy the narrative.
The disdain and disrespect for the folks we see now is more pronounced than ever. What’s new is that it’s more mutual than ever.
Team Biden — Team Obama, really — has given the American people reason to distrust and even despise our government and our elites. That’s why the mood is so sour and Dirty Joe and all of his men can’t put him back together again. If we had a Republican Party that was a worthy receptacle for this outrage, we’d have the 2024 wave election that failed to materialize last year.