Joe Biden: Closet Republican?
It is nearly incomprehensible that a sane, self-preserving politician would embrace such positions.
A recent Rasmussen poll discloses that about 50% of the electorate would like to impeach President Biden. The numbers include more than 30% of Democrats and upwards of 40% of independents. This is despite mostly positive coverage from the mainstream press during the first year of his presidency.
What is going on here?
To the outside observer this would appear to be the result of Mr. Biden’s sponsoring various programs and policies that are astonishingly unpopular with most Americans. It is nearly incomprehensible that a sane, self-preserving politician would embrace such positions.
I wrote an earlier op-ed suggesting that the Biden budget might have been designed in Beijing, so favorable was it to Chinese aspirations of world domination. His current agenda looks as if it might have been devised by the Republican National Committee, so favorable is it to Republican aspirations of domestic political domination.
Let me count the ways, starting with Mr. Biden’s hysterical (in the sense of panicky, not funny) advocacy of the voting rights bill, HR1. He alternately shrieks, or whispers, that our democracy depends on it. Among its many puzzling provisions it would ban any requirements for voter ID. This is politically counterintuitive as most polls show voter ID is supported by something like 70 percent of the voters, even a majority of those supposedly at risk of suppression.
Take Mr. Biden’s border policy. The contrast between Mr. Biden’s shrill support of extreme antiseptic measures when it comes to Covid among citizens versus the welcome mat for unmasked, unvaxed, and untested aliens is startling. This wave of untested individuals is a visual that should rally GOP voters new and old.
And it’s not just disease that’s wandering across our southern border. Our southern border has become the preferred route of the lucrative fentanyl importing industry. The connection between the leaky border and spiking drug overdose deaths is hard to miss. It’s difficult to imagine who might be in favor of Mr. Biden’s wide open border policy and yet he persists at this political peril.
Last but not least, we have the Biden-concocted inflation led by the price of gasoline at the pump. Cancel Keystone Pipeline, gas prices soar — another readymade GOP visual. Mr. Biden’s solution: Beg Russia to pump more oil, while he prohibits any domestic development of oil and gas reserves on federal lands.
In addition to polling sentiment for Mr. Biden’s impeachment, Rasmussen also runs a daily tracking poll on President Biden’s approval rating. He focuses particularly on a subset of that poll that measures voter intensity, those who strongly approve versus those who strongly disapprove.
The pre-Afghanistan numbers generally had a net disapproval difference of around 10 percentage points. Post-Afghanistan the disapproval margin has hovered between 25 percent and 30 percent and as of today’s poll shows no sign of improving. While polls do not an election make, they are the best indicators we have of the political health of a president. This one would seem to be on life support.
We could go on in this vein, but you get the point. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates supposedly said that Mr. Biden has been on the wrong side of every major foreign policy issue of his time. It appears he would like to expand his resume to include domestic issues as well.
Given President Biden’s apparent cognitive challenges, speculation keeps cropping up about who is really running things in the White House. Some have suggested the chief of staff, Ron Klain, others Susan Rice, and some even suggest the powers are no longer separated and that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is the puppeteer.
Could this be why she decided to run again? Obviously none of us outsiders really know. But judging from the effect the Biden agenda is having on the political winds it just might as well be Donald Trump.
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Mr. Childs’s most recent column in the Sun was “The Surrender Budget.”