The Politics of Self-Pity
Joe Biden, the Rodney Dangerfield of American presidents
Republicans really don’t deserve their luck.
The GOP is still in thrall to Donald Trump, it has an alarmingly high number of lupen-populists and plain nuts in its House and Senate caucuses, and it’s burdened with a selection of eccentric 2022 congressional candidates, e.g. the inimitable Dr. Oz. In normal times all this might be expected to limit the incumbent party’s losses in the upcoming off-year election.
Ah, but there are not normal times. This is the Age of Joe.
If you stop to think about it, the 2020 presidential election did Republicans a couple of big favors. First, it removed Trump from the White House, hence from center stage. Second, it replaced him with Joe Biden. And as history shows, Joe Biden is an incompetent idiot and serial faubulist who knows from nothing about anything. He’s the guy, remember, who advised Barack Obama that it might not be a good idea to liquidate Osama bin Laden. (Say what you will about The Greatest President Who Absolutely Ever Was, but he knew better than to listen to his dim-bulb vice president.) So it was the safest bet in American politics that once Biden himself got to be president, he’d screw almost everything up.
So it has proved, hasn’t it?
And it turns out that in addition to being an incompetent idiot and serial fabulist, our absurd chief executive is a self-pitying whiner. Poor Joe, he gets no respect! Recent stories emanating from NBC and Politico portray a president who is furious about his dismal poll numbers (lower than Trump’s!), super annoyed with his staff and mad at the Democratic Party for not supporting him. According to NBC:
Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.
Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters’ confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say.
Let’s decode that, shall we? Biden is mad at his aides because they can’t figure out how to make a train wreck look like the Rose Parade, and because they follow him around with a dustpan and broom, cleaning up after his repeated gaffes.
And from Politico:
The plan is to put Biden on the road to highlight progress being made, even incrementally, in meeting the series of tests, with visits this week to California, where he will preside over a summit of Western Hemisphere allies, as well as New Mexico to push for his climate agenda. The administration will also set aside its reluctance to work with “a pariah” nation with hopes to spur oil production. And it plans to sharpen its attacks on Republicans, aiming to paint the GOP as out-of-touch with mainstream America on issues like gun safety and abortion, all while hoping the upcoming Jan. 6 congressional hearings will further color the party as too extremist and dangerous to return to power.
But first aides need to quell the finger-pointing that’s been erupting internally and the increasing concern over staff shakeups, according to five White House officials and Democrats close to the administration not authorized to publicly discuss internal conversations. They also increasingly are trying to soothe the greatest source of West Wing frustration, coming from behind the Resolute Desk.
The president has expressed exasperation that his poll numbers have sunk below those of Donald Trump, whom Biden routinely refers to in private as “the worst president” in history and an existential threat to the nation’s democracy.
Tissue, anybody?
A couple of observations are in order here. One is that nobody promised the President a rose garden. The presidency is the toughest job in American politics, one that Biden’s been after since the mid-1980s. Now that he has it, he sits around bitching about how hard it is. It isn’t easy being him! Another is that any organization, be it an infantry rifle platoon, a corporation or a presidential administration, derives its character from the character of its leadership. Joe Biden is the leader of his administration. He sets the tone. If the tone is dysfunctional, that’s on him.
It’s particularly annoying to hear of Biden’s complaints about his staff. They keep contradicting him. They coddle him too much. They don’t let him get out among the American people often enough. Excuse me? You’re the President of the United States, Mr. Biden. When you tell your staff to defecate, they should squat down and ask what color you prefer. If they don’t, you can have the Secret Service frog march them out of the White House. And if for some reason you can’t fire them, then you’re not the one in charge.
But cleaning house probably wouldn’t help. Some staffers have already jumped ship, most prominently Jen Psaki, lately the White House press secretary. To be sure, Psaki was a supercilious twit—no great loss, you might say. But her replacement, Karine Jean-Pierre, is clearly unready for prime time. Psaki was something of a master of the non-answer; Jean-Pierre often seems like she’s looking around for her cue cards. That’s how it tends to go for an administration in times of trouble: Whoever resigns or gets the push is replaced by someone just a little less competent.
Anyhow, if the big idea in the White House is to get Joe Biden out on the road, where his working-class shtick and famous powers of empathy can reconnect him and his party with the American people—the Democrats are doomed. Recently on FNC’s The Five, Dana Perino, who served as George W. Bush’s press secretary, remarked that no change of communications strategy has ever mitigated an actual crisis. Talk is cheap, in other words. With inflation vaporizing the purchasing power of people’s paychecks and retirement accounts, with recession looming, with crime on the rise, with the southern border in a state of chaos, with a shortage of baby formula, for crying out loud, who wants to hear about low unemployment and electric cars and ultra-MAGA? Who wants to hear the President tell them, in effect, that they’re suffering from false consciousness and that hey, everything’s really just fine and dandy?
Yeah, sure, I can hear the protests rising from the mists of the progressive fever swamp. It’s not Biden’s fault! He inherited a mess! It’s the Republicans’ fault for refusing to work with him! Etc., etc. and so forth. Uh-uh, comrades. That directly contradicts what Candidate Joe Biden and his campaign told us in 2020. He and his cohorts were the grownups, remember? Joe Biden was the seasoned veteran, the old Washington DC hand, who’d replace the chaos of The Ogre Trump with cool competence and normality.
It’s true that not all the problems besetting America at the moment are of Joe Biden’s making. But some are, in whole or in part. Anyhow Biden’s the man responsible for solving those problems—or at least mitigating them. He asked for the job, we gave it to him, and now we’re treated to the spectacle of a self-pitying old fool, pointing figures in every direction except toward the mirror, mad as hell that we, the ingrate American people, just don’t appreciate him.
As I said, the Republicans don’t deserve their luck. But America deserves better than Joe Biden and his cabal of mediocrities.