‘Vinegar Joe’ Biden Thinks His Mistake Is Being Too Sweet to the GOP

President Biden is signaling that in the months ahead he’ll be cranking up the anger, insults, and shouting in an attempt to match all noise he says “the MAGA King” embodied. Brace yourselves for @JoeBiden mean tweets, and for less good governing as a result. The shift was foreshadowed in a recent Politico article, “Biden’s New Recipe for the Midterms: Less Honey, More Vinegar.” Perhaps because this White House has produced less honey than a beehive in the Antarctic, Politico later changed the headline to be more favorable to the president.Vinegar may be sweet for the decreasing number of Americans who view the president in a positive light — 37 percent, according to the latest NBC News poll — but the opposition won’t be cowed by an unpopular president who speaks loudly and carries a small stick.In his first 16 months as president, Mr. Biden has tried to conjure “unity” into existence with rhetoric rather than do the hard work of finding common ground, discarding the lessons of the U.S. Senate soon after he became frontrunner for his party’s nomination.Attempting the Triple Lindy dive for the center to win the general election, Mr. Biden said at a fundraiser, “[T]here’s an awful lot of really good Republicans,” and fell under attack from the left.Mr. Biden retreated, making it clear from that moment on that while he’d deliver the boilerplate about being president for all Americans, he’d blame the right for everything wrong. In 1972, Mr. Biden broke into politics with a campaign whispering that the Republican senator from Delaware, J. Caleb Boggs, was old, slow, and out of touch — the senator had “lost that twinkle in his eyes.”Back then, Mr. Biden also said nice things about Boggs, a political version of Mr. T’s “I pity the fool,” and beat an incumbent called unbeatable. Boggs was, by the way, 62 at the time, 17 years younger than the president is now. Successful politicians stay above the fray and maneuver between the far left and right as President Clinton did, which is why he was able to work with Republicans to advance his agenda. Newt Gingrich, a Republican former speaker of the House, once said that he’d walk out of the Oval Office in a trance, feel the spell lifting, and wonder what he’d agreed to in the throes of the president’s seduction. Together with a Republican Congress of the sort polls indicate Mr. Biden will face after November, Mr. Clinton was able to deliver the American people victories on issues from welfare, NAFTA, and criminal justice reform to AmeriCorps and balanced budgets. President Reagan employed similar powers, laughing off insults by Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a Massachusetts liberal. When O’Neill called the president an “amiable dunce,” he was half right, and not about the dunce part.As Samuel L. Jackson’s character says in “Pulp Fiction,” “personality goes a long way.” After Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in 1984, the Democratic presidential nominee said, “I think I would have voted for Reagan if I weren’t running, because he is a nice guy.” Reagan understood that no amount of vinegar would convince the other side to jettison its beliefs, so he would tell supporters that half a loaf was better than no loaf at all, a strategy that might have peeled off enough votes to pass a scaled-back version of Mr. Biden’s coveted Build Back Better plan.Snug in his carriage during a downpour, President McKinley once noticed a man getting soaked and offered shelter. The man hesitated. The president must not know he was a reporter who had written awful things about him yesterday and would again tomorrow.McKinley shrugged. He had recognized the man but thought he should be able to write his next insults dry. “I am a poor hater,” the president would say. Mr. Biden, however, seems ready to be good at it, and such men — see Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Wilson, Nixon — never deliver happy endings.President Biden may have grown frustrated with the number of flies he’s catching with the honey he’s drizzled out so far, but he’ll have far less luck going full vinegar — and even less trying to out-mean-tweet the MAGA King.

‘Vinegar Joe’ Biden Thinks His Mistake Is Being Too Sweet to the GOP

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