If Biden is a centrist, why do leftists love him now?
BLUF:
Look for Biden to keep citing “crises.” He has already gotten Congress to pass $1.9 trillion in what was called “COVID relief” but what was in addition a massive social welfare program. He is now pushing another $4 trillion in spending — the numbers Biden proposes are truly astronomical and unprecedented. Why would Americans support such wild moves? Because there’s a crisis! That’s what Biden hopes he can convince the public to believe.
JOE BIDEN, CRISIS MONGER. Just last week, this newsletter noted that the Biden White House has a tendency to over-use the word “crisis.” Senior staff routinely portray President Joe Biden as facing one crisis after another. Indeed, the administration came into office declaring that the nation faced four simultaneous crises — the COVID pandemic crisis, the related economic crisis, the climate crisis, and the racial equity crisis. Declaring so many crises allowed the White House to portray Biden as a president heroically battling enormous odds, even as it tended to exaggerate the problems facing the United States.
Last night, in his address to a joint session of Congress, Biden outdid himself, using “crisis” or “crises” ten times as he tried to whip up a sense of urgency to support his massive spending proposals and accompanying tax increases.
Biden used the theme of “crisis” to frame the entire 65-minute speech. “Tonight, I come to talk about crisis and opportunity,” he began. Biden said he inherited a nation “in crisis” on inauguration day. “The worst pandemic in a century,” Biden continued. “The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
All three characterizations were misleading or incomplete. “The country had come through most of the pandemic’s awful months when [Biden] took office,” radio host Hugh Hewitt noted Thursday morning. “The economy was roaring back to life before he took office, and no, 1/6 [the Capitol riot] was not worse than 9/11.”
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The COVID pandemic was indeed a crisis, but as Hewitt noted, cases had already begun to plunge before Biden entered the White House. The hard work of developing a vaccine in record time had been done. The number of vaccinations had begun a steady climb upward that continued after Biden took office.
Everyone knows that the economic plunge associated with COVID was of a unique and special and temporary nature. Unemployment soared as it never had before, and then it fell as it never had before. It is now falling on a monthly basis. Just look at this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The same is true of GDP. The bottom line is, the COVID economic meltdown was the result of a very specific and very identifiable circumstance. The economy was improving dramatically well before Biden took the oath of office. It was not nearly as bad as the Great Recession that began in 2008 — something Biden should know, since he served as vice president through much of it.
Finally, the Capitol riot was a terrible event, but it invites ridicule to say it was worse than any other “attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” What about the various terrible events that have happened in our history since 1865? September 11? Pearl Harbor? The unrest and riots of the 1960s? The Bonus Army?
The point is, Biden uses “crisis” as a rhetorical device to try to convince Americans that the nation is a wreck and that they need to support his multi-trillion dollar spending plans to hold off further disaster. As the speech went on, Biden cited the opioid “crisis,” the climate “crisis,” an “existential crisis” of American democracy, and the “crises of our time, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation, mass migration, cybersecurity, climate change, [and] pandemics.”
Indeed, Biden and many of his liberal and progressive supporters see a key challenge of his presidency as convincing Americans that things are so bad that sweeping, far-reaching, multi-trillion legislation is needed to “rebuild” the United States. Many on the left have urged Biden to style himself as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt of our times, as if our times were somehow comparable to the Great Depression. A liberal Washington Post columnist recently used another analogy, speculating that “this may be President Biden’s chance to seize a Sputnik moment” — a reference to the time in 1957 when the Soviet Union briefly took the lead in the space race, prompting the U.S. to jump-start the space program. This time, the thinking goes, the U.S. must invest in the Biden agenda, with its heavy focus on child care, health care, social spending, and equity issues, to somehow keep up with China’s spending on technology and military power.
Look for Biden to keep citing “crises.” He has already gotten Congress to pass $1.9 trillion in what was called “COVID relief” but what was in addition a massive social welfare program. He is now pushing another $4 trillion in spending — the numbers Biden proposes are truly astronomical and unprecedented. Why would Americans support such wild moves? Because there’s a crisis! That’s what Biden hopes he can convince the public to believe.