White House Report Card: Biden’s long goodbye begins

This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden 157 days away from handing over the keys to the executive mansion, four years short of his goal but potentially with an OK legacy of handing them off to a new generation.

His long goodbye begins Monday when he addresses the Democratic National Convention for the last time as president, the result of being forced out by party elites who felt his polling wasn’t good enough to beat challenger and former President Donald Trump.

His replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris, has already won the nomination, but the Democratic Convention was already planned, so the party will go on.

Most polls show that she had made it an even race with Trump, though her media-driven momentum has slowed. Seven national polls released this week showed the race essentially tied. Harris leads in three of the seven.

For Biden, the week saw a couple of wins. Inflation appears tamed and is within the 2% bracket that the Federal Reserve wanted before cutting rates. Illegal immigration is also closer to Trump-era levels than the horror show of a year ago.

Democratic pollster John Zogby graded the week an “A,” citing the good inflation news. Conservative grader Jed Babbin came in with a “D-minus” and said the good economic news could be washed away by Harris’ “Soviet-style” economic ideas.

John Zogby

Grade: A

The annualized increase in inflation is continuing its downward spiral and is actually at its lowest in over two years under President Joe Biden. Without dissing her boss, Vice President Kamala Harris outlined her economic plans that included a kind of Biden-esque “Building Back Better Even Better” by merging working-class populism with FDR/LBJ/Biden government largesse.

This week’s polls show her growing her lead over former President Donald Trump nationwide while pulling ahead in several battleground states. While several pundits were giving up on Biden winning any southern rim states, thus making the northern blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania essential, her first leads in Arizona and Georgia have changed the dynamic.

Harris’ honeymoon will continue for a week with the Democratic National Convention planned to begin Monday. Trump, meanwhile, continues to act stale and foul.

Biden will appear before a made-for-movies moment at the convention, a planned “Thank you, Joe” event Monday night. To paraphrase Old Blue Eyes himself, ‘When I was 82, I had a very good week.”

Jed Babbin

Grade: D-

So President Joe Biden is still missing in action. He’s promising to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris in key states. That won’t go over well with anyone, especially Harris. Meanwhile, she was still imitating Biden’s 2020 campaign by hiding from the press and being silent on her policies. At least until Friday.

Harris’s economic policies were unveiled Friday in a “major” economic speech. At the top of her list was reducing food prices. Notably, the inflation of food prices was caused by her and Biden’s radical overspending. How’s she going to do this? By instituting a Soviet-style price control regime that will bring the force of government down on companies that are “price gouging.” Nothing about reducing government spending to reduce inflation. The price controls will mean a reduction in the availability of food just like it did back in the USSR.

Another of Harris’s major economic goals is to build three million homes for first-time home buyers, presumably at government expense. More radical spending, more inflation.

While all that is going on, a very big war is probably going to break out in the Middle East between Iran and Israel and Ukraine is invading Russia with Russia threatening to retaliate with weapons. And nobody is home at the White House.

I’m old enough to remember when grown-ups were in charge. Inflation was only a painful memory from the Jimmy Carter days and we weren’t so globally weak that our enemies thought they could get away with anything. It’s more than enough for us to miss the Nixon administration.

Next week is the Democrats’ convention. How many protesters will show up? It may turn into another 1968 when that DNC convention — also held in Chicago — was less in the news than the riots outside it were.

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John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His podcast with son and managing partner and pollster Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Their firm polls for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Follow him on X @ZogbyStrategies.

Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on X @jedbabbin.