Nate Silver has been a thorn in the
side of both Republicans and Democrats. The former didn’t appreciate
his liberal bias, while the latter was incensed that his projections
were mostly bearish on Democratic chances of victory in 2024. What
united both sides was Silver’s lengthy and, at times, elliptical
language when describing why he came to his decisions, especially when
it showed Trump was going to lose the popular vote but clinch the
Electoral College. Many saw this as a cop-out.
With the 2024 election over, Silver
listed a few reasons why Joe
Biden lost, most of which you already know. Yes, he sprinkled in his
leftish commentary, but Silver has been a vocal critic of Biden for
being too old, too ineffective, and waiting too long to drop out of the
race. Overall, his lengthy post on Biden’s failed presidency is mainly
on the money, except for a few paragraphs here and there, which we can
agree to disagree:
First, there were the supply chain
backlogs and rising inflation. This was right when it became hard to
claim that the early spring uptick in prices had been “transient.” In
fact, things were rapidly getting worse:
Second, there was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, including Kabul falling to the Taliban in mid-August.
Third,
there was immigration, which was surging to record levels on the
southern border after changes to asylum policy and an increase in demand
for labor…
Fourth, there was a spike in crime, with the homicide rate surging to its highest levels since 1996…
Fifth,
there was increasing fatigue with the racial reckoning, with
perceptions of Black Lives Matter turning negative at about the same
time that Biden’s approval ratings did…
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was still COVID — plenty of it…
Though
the case fatality rate was lower than in 2020 because of immune
protection from vaccines and previous infections, the number of new
cases rose sharply from June through September 2021 due to the Delta
variant — and then reached nearly three times their previous peak in
January 2022 amid Omicron. Moreover, there were the cultural battles
over COVID, which were more contentious than ever since Americans had
long ago lost their patience. Battles over airplane mask mandates,
vaccine passports, constantly changing CDC guidance, vaccines that
weren’t as effective at stopping transmission as those studies had
initially promised, and especially over school closures.
Last, there’s a lengthy bit about Joe Biden’s age and how it
handicapped him from governing, but there's no shocker there. Yet, as a
leader, Silver noted from Vox, no less, that Biden was incapable of
keeping the ship of state on a coherent course since he was often
paralyzed, thanks to the policy demands of the party’s far-left flanks.
Also, the Delaware liberal likely misread his mandate.
Ultimately,
he won Wisconsin, which tipped the race in Biden's favor, by only 0.6
percent while ignoring the red surge in urban areas, South Florida, and
South Texas; the latter saw Mr. Trump’s support quintuple in these
majority Latino border counties. It was the reddest of red flags for
Democrats, and what did they do: open the border and allow millions of
illegal alien rapists, drug dealers, and murderers to terrorize our
communities. When you peel back all the layers to this, Trump and the
GOP came within less than 50,000 votes of winning everything. As for COVID, you can promise normalcy and have that arrive two years later. Silver added Joe gambled heavily on the vaccines being the silver bullet, but they were not:
…while
perceptions of the direction of the country improved [after the 2022
midterms], Biden’s approval ratings did not — save for a half-year
reprieve in late 2022 that, happily for Democrats, coincided with a
relatively strong midterm for the party. Instead, they entered a slow
and steady decline beginning in early 2023, interrupted only by a brief
sympathy bounce after Biden was finally forced from the presidential
race in July 2024.
The reason for this — I think pretty obviously
— was mostly Biden’s advancing age. Even in the 2021 inauguration
speech, you hear a few slurred words. But based on plenty of subsequent
reporting, Biden’s condition was steadily and self-evidently getting
worse from roughly the midterms onward. Americans weren’t buying the
White House’s attempts to gaslight them about it and cover up his
shortcomings.
I’ve written a lot about Biden’s age. But it wasn’t
just an issue for his reelection bid — it also affected his ability to
govern effectively.
Dylan Matthews at Vox has a great,
well-researched critique of Biden’s inability to prioritize under the
American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. The government
spent more than it probably should have, especially at a time of rising
interest rates. And some of the programs Democrats did choose were
bogged down by other polycrisis priorities: climate provisions and
“racial equity” red tape. The spending was tremendously effective in
stimulating the jobs market but at the cost of higher inflation,
historically a bad trade-off from a presidential popularity standpoint.
And Biden didn’t have a lot of shiny objects to point to for all that
spending. Many infrastructure programs are only now coming online, in
fact, with Trump set to receive credit for them.
[…]
In
the end, Biden made what was essentially a triple devil’s bargain in
exchange for winning the 2020 nomination and the presidency. First, he
sold people on a quick return to normalcy from the pandemic when it
would instead take until summer 2022 thanks to reinfections, new
variants, and sharp divisions over mitigation measures. The extent to
which this is his fault isn’t so clear. I have plenty of critiques of
the White House’s handling of COVID — and plenty of critiques of Trump’s
— but COVID is a uniquely wicked problem. Biden gambled on COVID going
away when vaccines became widely available, and it didn’t work out. But
he made matters worse by promising not just to solve COVID but also to
save democracy and even deliver racial justice.
Second, he
misread his mandate between his savior complex and the constant whispers
in his ear from Democratic interest groups. Anointed by the party for
his electability, he instead governed as a fairly left-wing president,
from major issues like immigration and the size of the stimulus package
to others like student loan forgiveness and his administration’s
interpretation of Title IX. And he picked a vice president with a
mediocre electoral track record despite his misgivings based on pushback
from progressive groups, but then never really entrusted her with much
responsibility, or to replace him in office or on the ticket.
Third,
he reneged on what many voters took as an implicit promise to be a
one-term president. (Though he never said this outright, and recent
reporting suggests he wasn’t decided either way until midway through his
term.) Even in 2020, about half of voters questioned whether Biden had
the mental capabilities to serve effectively as president.
Biden was saved by the pandemic and ushered into an office he was ill-equipped to run. The man had run twice already and lost.
Yet, the overall theme here is that Biden is simply a terrible
politician. Wheeling and dealing as a senator in his prime is different
than being president, and the man couldn’t adapt; it was painfully
obvious. The withdrawal from Afghanistan also is overlooked, but I think
its impact on the electorate was immense.
I’m not the only one:
Jerry Dunleavy, who penned a book on our shambolic exit, also noted that
this event shredded Biden’s image as an empathetic leader. The man
checked his watch at Dover during the transfer of the 13 American
soldiers killed during the Abbey Gate terrorist attack. He reportedly
napped as grieving families waited to greet him and, after all that, got
snippy with them. The fall of Kabul also struck a massive blow to his
reputation as a foreign policy master. Biden was never a foreign policy
guru—it was just a myth peddled by liberal media circles.
While
he doesn’t say it explicitly, the list of critiques here points to an
utterly failed presidency marred by incompetence, stupidity, and an
engrossing arrogance.
No comments:
Post a Comment