Joe Biden is supposed to be Mr. Empathy. And Democratic strategists are reportedly worried that he’s not tapping into that supposed character advantage Mr. Biden has over former President Donald Trump. The Los Angeles Times’ Doyle McManus had a lengthy column about the disappearance of this “superpower.”
The weird thing is that Mr. Empathy is dead. It’s a narrative with more bullet holes than Sonny Corleone on the Long Island Causeway for apparent reasons: the president is mentally shot. Most of this country thinks Biden is too old to run for president. At least 60 percent feel he doesn’t deserve a second term. Forty percent say they’re poorer than they were four years ago. His State of the Union address, a 60-minute yelling exercise at Republicans, which some on television laughably said showed he was cogent and ready for a fight, is long gone, smothered by the nationwide pro-Hamas protests on college campuses that led to Biden having his Charlottesville moment.
The president cannot be Mr. Empathy if he must cozy up to antisemites and those who support Hamas. If he held this supposed “superpower,” its last gasp was in 2020 when Biden won because of a pandemic. Biden needs to have political skills to harness the empathy card, and not only is he too far gone to channel it, but he has also never had much political skill. It’s why he serially exaggerated his accomplishments, for which he has little. This habit dates to his disastrous 1988 presidential run. Let Joe be Joe is going to be etched on the whiteboards, but it’s a suicidal play for Democrats—Joe can’t hack it. With no pandemic to shield them, America is going to find out quickly that this tired, stupid, and lucky old man is the very reason why the world is a mess: the smell of weakness could be detected from Everest (via LA Times):
"I wouldn’t go out there and extol the miracle of the Biden economy,” said David Axelrod, who helped Barack Obama win two presidential elections.
“The right strategy is to say, 'Look, we’ve made a lot of progress … [but] the way people experience this economy is the way I did when I was growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania,'" Axelrod said in an interview with conservative pundit Bill Kristol. "'How much did you pay for the groceries? How do you afford the gas, the rent? These continue to be a problem and I’m fighting that fight.'”
“The message needs to start with empathy and focus on prices, which is the issue that matters most to voters,” said Stanley Greenberg, who helped Bill Clinton win the presidency in 1992. Otherwise, he said, “people just get angrier and angrier.”
During the 2020 campaign, when Americans were reeling from the human and economic costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden spoke often of his personal history — his upbringing in a family of modest means, the death of his first wife and baby daughter in a 1972 highway crash, the 2015 death of his son Beau — and his feeling of kinship with others who suffered losses.
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Voters are in a sour mood. An Economist/YouGov poll released last week found that 67% of Americans believe the country is “on the wrong track" and 39% believe the economy is in a recession. (It isn’t.) Only 20% say they believe the economy will improve if Biden is reelected. Twice as many, 44%, said they believe the economy will get better if Trump wins.
The president still gets some credit for empathy, but less than before. In 2020, the Quinnipiac poll reported that 61% of voters said they believed Biden “cares about the average American”; this year, the same poll found that number had declined to 51%.
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“Bottom line: Be more like Joe from Scranton and less like President Biden from Washington,” Axelrod said.
Biden aides say, sometimes in unprintable language, that they don't need so much free advice. Politico reported last year that the president called Axelrod "a prick."
The article itself perfectly captures what a fraudulent empathizer this Delaware liberal is and has been. The man who has been part of winning campaigns gives his solid advice, and he calls him a “prick.” Yes, Joe was part of the 2008 and 2012 Democratic tickets with Obama, but vice presidents need to have a pulse. And even then, Obama’s staff mocked Biden for his bumbling demeanor. They all knew he was picked to quell some Democratic voter anxiety about having a black man at the top of the ticket.
Forget about Beau: Biden has killed him all over again by trying to create a fake story about him dying in Iraq. Brain cancer isn’t a combat death, nor is it like losing someone when a bridge collapses. Biden invoked Beau, who he can’t remember when he died, during a visit to the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which was destroyed when a container ship hit its support structures. It’s always been a nasty exercise in political exploitation.
With inflation remaining high and the Biden team’s gross arrogance about how it was transitory, all that signals is that they don’t care about working families, who rightly consider such price increases a tax hike.
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