Washington Examiner “Secrets” columnist Paul Bedard posted a pair of “weekly report cards” from pollsters that graded Joe Biden very poorly, going on to ask rhetorically of the president was intentionally performing badly.
The column, “White House Report Card: Is Biden this bad on purpose?” begins with Bedard recapping the president’s atrocious week.
“This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden stumbling through yet another bad week dotted with defeats, sinking polls, confusing announcements, and the continued implosion in the office of his even more unpopular vice president, Kamala Harris,” Bedard wrote.
“The cherry on top was Friday’s near 1,000-point drop of the Dow Jones and rising mortgage rates to nearly 6%, double where they were at Christmas,” he added.
Bedard then posted grade card reviews from Democratic pollster John Zogby and conservative analyst Jed Babbin, both of whom gave Biden a “D” or worse, a rare grade for presidents.
Zogby:
Grade D
Stasis. A fancier word for stuck.” That is where we begin in grading Biden’s week.
He had three polls showing him at 43% approval, a modest uptick. But then polls came out late this week, including Gallup, showing him 41%. The same as his overall average. New polls also showed the GOP leading in the congressional generic, an imperfect measure, but the one we have always used. There simply is no good news for Biden coming from pollsters.
There was the unfortunate confusion about wearing masks. Regardless of which way any appeal of a Florida judge’s ruling striking down a mandate for wearing masks on airplanes may turn, that genie is out of the bottle. Anti-maskers are empowered, liberated, gone. There is no turning back. Cities such as Philadelphia passed a mask mandate and rescinded it all in one week.
I like Biden, and I want him to succeed. I feel he has accomplished a lot in a short period, but he has lost control of his own narrative. It is getting late for him to find his mojo for 2022.
Short of regaining ownership of his own story, he can only hope for a GOP implosion from infighting and going too far, when they should be running out the clock. The president can only find solace this week in the assurance that the opposition is working overtime on that implosion.
Babin
Grade D-
It was another miserable week for the Biden White House. The misery index, the sum of the inflation rate (8.5%) and the unemployment rate (3.6%), totals 12.1. Anything over 10 indicates significant misery (malaise?) among the public.
Biden’s poll numbers aren’t down to the level President Richard Nixon’s were when he had to resign, but they’re close.
The administration hit a bunch of other low points this week. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data indicate that the administration is violating court orders by not reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for illegal immigrants seeking asylum. And remember the incident last year when border agents on horseback were accused of “whipping” migrants? Biden was one of the first to accuse his federal agents of brutality. Now, there has been a full investigation of the matter that exonerated them of wrongdoing. And the White House is refusing to release the report or apologize.
The White House, with gasoline prices already in the stratosphere, announced it wanted higher taxes on energy to help pay for the “green transition.” Answering critics of Biden’s shutdown of oil and gas leasing to drill on federal lands, some lands were released for leases and drilling, but there’s a problem. But the Biden team is raising fees on drilling to the point that it’s commercially unprofitable. And there’s no move to unblock the Keystone XL pipeline or others that could alleviate the problem of high costs at the pump.
The only fun part of the week came when the White House accused congressional Republicans of wanting to raise taxes on the middle class. Even the Biden-worshipping, Trump-hating Washington Post gave them three Pinocchios for that whopper.
That would be more than enough for a week of really bad political judgments, but there’s more. The Biden regime is loosening U.S. patent rules, enabling China and other nations to copy American technology without fear of liability and enabling them to leapfrog our research with their own. (China has been stealing about $600 billion in intellectual property per year for at least a decade. Now it’s going to be more or less legal.) Biden doesn’t care.
But he does care about his pals. Biden’s 2023 budget includes a reported $790 million in earmarks for organizations with close ties to administration officials. Corruption? Nothing to see here, everybody. Just move along.
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