July 8, 2024

STEVEN MALANGA: Biden’s effort to use pandemic failures as a weapon against Donald Trump risks reminding voters of how much they dislike the president’s own policies.

In retrospect, what’s striking is how quickly Biden’s credibility on Covid eroded. When he took office, his favorable rating on Covid policy stood at a robust +27 points, according to YouGov’s historical polling data; just a year later, in January 2022, that figure stood at –12 points. By then, many Americans had grown weary of lockdowns and enraged by continued school closures as evidence mounted that they were unnecessary and harmful. Migration data showed a huge upswing in Americans moving from locked-down Democratic states to reopened-and-thriving Republican states. The press increasingly referred to a “post-pandemic” America even as Biden kept wearing his mask. Covid rapidly receded as an electoral issue.

Perhaps more significantly, as Covid faded into the background, voters’ perception of Biden on other matters soured. By September 2022, polls rated the president’s performance on a dozen issues—including the economy, education, foreign policy, government spending, immigration, and crime—even lower than his work on Covid. This may tell us something about why his campaign wants to talk about the virus again.

Biden’s latest gambit seems an exercise in wistfulness by his campaign, which managed to pull off an election victory that seemed unlikely early in 2020 thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime crisis. The Biden campaign is counting on Trump to ignore its attacks because what the former president once touted as his biggest Covid success—the fast-track campaign to develop and approve vaccines—is now regarded with much more public skepticism, something he doesn’t want voters to remember as they cast their ballots this fall. Even so, stressing how bad pandemic life was under Trump may serve only to remind voters of how much they’ve despised Biden’s Covid sequel.

Not least of which, this showstopper from Biden’s former chief of staff: White House Christmas message to unvaccinated: You’re looking at a winter of death for yourselves and your families:

From earlier in December of 2021: Biden’s Chief of Staff Can’t Stop Embarrassing Himself On Twitter:

The president’s chief of staff is arguably the most demanding job inside any White House. President Joe Biden’s top staffer, Ron Klain, isn’t making things easier for himself lately with the absurd things he’s posting on Twitter.

Klain is what we can only call a Very Online person. He is constantly tweeting and sharing other people’s posts to his half-million followers in an incessant effort to cheerlead for his boss and the Democratic Party more broadly. While this is the role of any outward-facing political staffer, Klain is taking his shilling so far that he’s now just making embarrassing public statements on the regular.

For example, Klain recently tweeted that “America is back at work” alongside this graph, which shows the opposite.

The Biden staffer boosted the graph hoping to show that the labor force participation rate, the percentage of people working or seeking work, is back to normal after the pandemic. Yet it actually shows that it’s still significantly below pre-pandemic levels, even a year and nine months later. Anyone with eyes can clearly see this.

In actuality, we are 8.2 million jobs below the pre-pandemic trend, according to economist Aaron Sojourner. So much for America being “back at work.”

But hey, Barry sent Joe to Detroit to fix things during the pandemic. Problem solved!

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll