BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Peggy Noonan: The Endless Loop of Covid-19. The current moment is much like 20 months ago. It is no governmental triumph that this is so.

The president often sounds to me like a man trying to perceive what the public wants and deliver it, which in fairness is what most politicians do. But he and his people are not necessarily good perceivers. On the pandemic, he isn’t sure if they want reassurance or an acting out of shared indignation or a stirring Churchillian vow—“I’m gonna shut down the virus, not the country,” he said during the 2020 campaign. But people know when you’re telling them what you think they want to hear, and they experience it as talking down to them. They wouldn’t mind that so much if they thought the politician talking down was their intellectual or ethical superior, but they don’t often get to feel that way.

A problem for the president is that when he tries to convey resolution or strength he often takes on tics—a lowered voice, a whispering into the mic, an overenunciation—that in his political youth were charming, but in old age are less so. I always thought in the 2020 campaign that his age was an unacknowledged benefit: the assumption was he must be moderate, old people are, what else is the point of being old? As he came in his first year to seem less moderate his age became less a benefit.

Is it naïveté or gaslighting that Noonan thinks that Biden is actually running the show in “his” White House?

Given the content of her December column headlined “Kamala Harris Needs to Get Serious,” I’m inclined to go with the latter.

As Don Surber wrote in September: Maureen Dowd & Peggy Noonan Should Retire.