The last embarrassing episode with Joe Biden was the press conference during his visit to Vietnam.
Suddenly, while the meeting with the accompanying journalists was in full swing, the president blurted out: “I’m going to bed now.” Then, as if nothing had happened, he began answering questions again.
To be clear, it’s easy to plead senility if you don’t experience the effects of jet lag firsthand on tiring trips from one side of the Pacific to the other when the time zone between the American east coast and the other is 12 hours apart changes Far East (I know something about it). But Biden also loses himself at home in speeches that have no meaning or purpose.
His psychophysical state is part of the American paradox. A young nation where 20- and 30-year-olds dominate entire sectors of the economy heads into a ravine like a sleepwalker, preparing for an election campaign pitting two unpresentable old men against each other in an absurd 2020 remake.
The American paradox is the increasingly clear gap between a healthy economy and sick politics. However, even when it comes to the health of the economy, we cannot limit ourselves to appearances. If everything was going really well, why would Biden have fallen into an abyss in the polls?
Among the major economies, the American one is undoubtedly performing best: compared to Europe and China, one could say that it is doing well given its GDP growth and low unemployment (even if +5-6% of GDP growth that I recently read in As I mentioned in an editorial, are nominal and therefore include inflation. But Biden is not reaping the benefits; in fact, the polls have him on par with Donald Trump, despite the latter’s four indictments for 91 crimes.
Unfair? If you read major media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, watch CNN, and listen to many progressive commentators like Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, you would say that Americans are to blame: they don’t understand how lucky they are. The boldest self-critical Democratic gurus even go so far as to admit that this White House may have a miscommunication and doesn’t know how to “sell” its results well.
Every now and then a dissonant voice can be heard, even in the media chorus of Democratic sympathies, and that’s why I point it out to you because I think it’s valuable. A recent example is Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist who “dares” to write what the majority of his colleagues consider to be heresy. And that means: Biden is unpopular because he deserves it, America is not in good health at all, and Americans are dissatisfied for good reason. I’m quoting some of his thoughts here because I agree with them (I’ve written similar things, so I admit my bias).
Stephens begins by noting that all polls reveal a deep distrust of American public opinion. A majority thinks the nation is on the wrong path. Biden’s approval level at this point is even lower than what Trump achieved in the last year of his presidency, the most disastrous (between the pandemic and the scandals). What are the explanations?
First of all, a large part of the population is not at all convinced that the economy is flourishing. The cost of living is a crucial issue. It is true that the inflation rate is falling and is currently between 3% and 4% (depending on the metrics used), which means that it has halved in a year. In the worst case, it had reached a maximum of +9%. However, a declining inflation rate does not tell us where the cost of living is: price lists and tariffs have now digested the shock of the past and settled at significantly higher levels. Once we got through the pandemic, many prices experienced brutal increases; Now they are no longer rising as they were then, but they are no longer falling where they were before. Purchasing power has been damaged and the suffering remains.
We are in a situation that could be reminiscent in some ways of the shock of the transition to the euro, when many European consumers felt impoverished by too many explicit or hidden increases. Economists blamed public opinion for statistics that negated the shock, but consumers did their shopping and felt poorer. Something similar is happening in America today. “A dozen eggs – writes Stephens – cost 38% more than in January 2022. A chicken: +18%. “We’re paying 63% more for gas at the pump than we were when Biden became president.”
And then there is the deterioration of public order, the widespread violation of laws of all kinds, the daily spectacle of a country sliding into chaos. Stephens emphasizes that from New York to Chicago, attacks by youth gangs on the police are common and the perpetrators go unpunished. The escalation in murders appears to have finally reversed the trend; However, other crimes are increasing dramatically and are spiraling out of control. In a video on CorriereTv, I talked about the “progressive paradox” of Chicago, where car thefts are rampant and City Hall has seen fit to sue two Korean car brands for failing to protect their cars with adequate anti-theft devices. A devastating, revealing message, both from a legal and moral perspective, because it exonerates thieves. I have spoken on other occasions about drugstores – pharmacies and supermarkets – that have to keep most of the items for sale under lock and key and yet suffer raids that sometimes lead to bankruptcy and closure.
Added to this is the spectacle of entire metropolises where it has become normal to see “drug addicts reduced to zombies passed out on the sidewalks,” tent cities of homeless people from coast to coast, from the Brooklyn-Queens Bridge in New York to Seattle ” (I always quote Stephens). My San Francisco and Philadelphia are among the most desperate cases.
Finally, the migration crisis, which is encouraged by the fact that entire cities governed by a radical left define themselves as “sanctuaries,” that is, they refuse to apply federal laws against illegal immigration. New York is once again the extreme case: every night 57,000 illegal migrants ask for help and shelter, Mayor Eric Adams denounces that his city is collapsing due to the costs of housing destitute foreigners, but at the same time maintains the status of “sanctuary”, which it is entitled to a magnet for illegal immigrants. “No one can tell us,” Stephens writes, “how many migrants have crossed the border and remained in U.S. territory since Biden became president, but it is almost certainly in the millions.”
The icing on the cake is the president himself. Democrats quickly called for the resignation of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, who recently suffered two bouts of aphasia and mental absence; Instead, there is a kind of silence about Biden’s apparent physical and mental decline. As if they weren’t aware that this would be one of the right-wing arguments in the election campaign.
“But people are noticing and voting,” Stephens concludes. Who is the exact opposite of Donald Trump? However, he rejects the conformism of the left-wing elites, who have lost touch with the country’s everyday reality.