Biden Is Unpopular Because Of Bad Policies, Not Bad Messaging

When it comes to the departing president, the old quip rings true: For Joe Biden, denial is not just a river in Africa.

In an exit interview with Susan Page of USA Today, Biden tried to defend his failed administration by claiming that voters just did not understand what he and fellow Democrats had accomplished. It isn’t a new tactic — for decades, Democrats have used this rationalization to justify their unpopular policies — but it explains why working-class voters deserted Biden’s party in droves last November and likely will continue to do so unless they change course.

Didn’t Take Enough Credit???

In the interview, Biden claimed his presidency floundered because he didn’t take enough credit for what he had accomplished:

BIDEN: I shouldn’t admit this, but I will. I don’t think that Donald Trump knows as much substantively as I do about these things. But when we came along with the rescue plan, guess what? He signed his name for that check, the first check that went out to those families, all of which he opposes now. But [inaudible] “Trump gave me $7,500 for my family.” So I don’t think I’ve been very good at-

PAGE: Taking credit?

BIDEN: Or not so much me, but establish that the government did this for you. It wasn’t… It was… Anyway…

Prior to his incoherent “anyway” trail-off, Biden sounds almost as self-serving as a job applicant in an interview claiming his greatest fault is that he works too hard and cares too much.

Typical Democrat Excuses

Fortunately or unfortunately, Biden’s statement represents but the latest instance in a genre of Democrat excuses, whereby they insult voters by claiming the electorate just didn’t understand all the wonderful things government did for them. 

As he ran for reelection in 2012, Barack Obama claimed in an interview with Charlie Rose that his biggest mistake as president was being too focused on “getting the policy right. … [T]he nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”

As I noted at the time of the Rose interview, Obama spent most of the debate around Obamacare “telling stories” as part of his attempt to sell the law — for instance, what in 2013 became Politifact’s “Lie of the Year”: “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” But that irony didn’t stop Obama from claiming that his fault lay in his policy messaging rather than the policies themselves.

Two decades before Obamacare, another Chicago-based politician also blamed voters for political blowback to unpopular policies, in a less subtle way than his Windy City successor. While being chased down a street by a mob of seniors angry that their taxes were being raised to pay for a new Medicare benefit (which Congress eventually repealed), Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., then the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, responded, “I don’t think they [i.e., his constituents] understand what, you know, what the government’s trying to do for them, is the problem. … I don’t think they understand what’s going on.”

I don’t think they understand what the government’s trying to do for them. If ever a series of words exemplified Ronald Reagan’s axiom that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” Rostenkowski’s did.

Taking ‘Credit’ for Bad Policies 

When it comes to the departing president, he can take all the “credit” he wants for his policies. Because, as the title of a recent Wall Street Journal column on this issue explained, the problem doesn’t lie in Joe Biden’s messaging: “It’s Biden’s Policies, Stupid!”

Biden’s comments to Page suggested his belief that “free” handouts will appease voters and that he should have promoted Democrats’ Covid spending binge more strongly. But those trillions in government spending — which, to be fair, started under President Trump — sparked the inflation that has sapped the American economy over the past few years. All of this was both predictable and predicted, even by Democrats like Larry Summers.

Of course, Biden “forgot” this history during his interview, claiming that “the interest rate was 9% when we came into office in the beginning.” Biden likely meant the inflation rate, not the interest rate, but neither was anywhere near 9 percent when Biden took office in January 2021 — although interest rates later had to rise to counteract the gusher of spending coming from Joe Biden’s Washington.

The fact is, Americans voted for Trump not because he gave them government checks but because he allowed them to prosper themselves. Real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) incomes rose to record levels during the first few years of his presidency. Because of the crushing effects of “Bidenflation,” family incomes still have yet to recover to their pre-Covid levels. That history, and not anything about a government check, echoed in most Americans’ minds when they went into the voting booth on Nov. 5.

Democrats will have little chance of regaining political power until they understand that their unpopularity stems not from their messaging, or Biden’s advanced age, but the policies they have put forward. Perhaps the party should remember that one of the best self-help tools is also one of the simplest: a mirror. Joe Biden and Democrats ought to use it.