Get a load of — and a laugh from — the latest political advice coming from the White House.
Concerned about President Biden’s age and habit of falling, aides want him to shorten the distance he walks in public and wear softer, more flexible shoes to help keep him upright.
Not since the late campaign whiz David Garth told New York’s Ed Koch and other clients to wear more blue on television has political advice been so basic.
And with good reason, for, as even the propaganda media realize, it’s “not a good look” when the leader of the free world repeatedly falls up the steps of Air Force One.
Especially when that same frail-looking president celebrated his 81st birthday with another embarrassing performance.
Yet it strikes me that the strategists are willfully confusing the symptoms of Biden’s political problems with the substance.
His advanced age and public befuddlement would be concerning but not a deal breaker if everything in America was going gangbusters and voters wanted more of the same.
But that’s far from the case, so the president’s handlers would be closer to a solution if they invoked James Carville’s evergreen warning to candidates that “It’s the economy, stupid.”
It’s always the economy, although in Biden’s case, it’s the economy and many other things, too.
An accurate warning to him requires a sweeping statement along the lines of “It’s the policies, stupid.”
All of the policies.
Consider that approval of his performance has been negative ever since his chaotic, deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.
Not since then have polls showed him with majority approval, and the gap is wide.
It now stands at 41% approval against 56% disapproval, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls for October and November.
That 15-point gap is bad, but when voters are asked about six specific issues, the disapproval gap grows.
In fact, the margins are shockingly lopsided.
Disastrous findings
Based on the averages, respondents of all parties disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy by 38-59 percent, a gap of 21 points. On inflation, he’s underwater by a stunning 30 points, 33%-63%.
On crime, it’s 37%-58%, and it’s the same on foreign policy. On immigration, it’s the same as inflation, 33% approval, 63% disapproval.
The closest he comes to break even is a 13-point deficit in his handling of Ukraine, where he gets 42% approval against 55% disapproval.
On the basic test of whether America is on the right track or wrong track, just 25% say the right track, against 66% who say wrong track. The 41-point spread is staggering.
For the White House, the explanation for these disastrous findings is that it’s about the president’s age and stiff, shaky gait. How convenient.
In fact, public worries about his age and optics are better understood as proxies for the unpopularity of his policies and agenda.
Making sure the president doesn’t fall in public again won’t change voters’ minds about the economy or crime.
To be fair, Biden’s rampant failures, along with his age and stumbles, have caused concern all year, but most Dems were willing to downplay them as long as it looked as if the election would be a rematch with Donald Trump.
Many party leaders and media handmaidens bought Biden’s claim that he’s the only person who could beat Trump, and their hatred of Trump blinded them to voters’ concerns.
Worries grew slightly in recent months when some surveys showed Trump close to or beating Biden next November.
Then two weeks ago, a bombshell dropped and the worries instantly turned to panic.
Unpopular agenda
That’s when a New York Times/Siena College survey showed Trump ahead in five of six battleground states, putting him on a possible path to 300 electoral votes and victory.
That poll got widespread attention in part because the Times has been riding shotgun for Biden all along and has never stopped its daily demonizing of Trump.
That bias oddly gave the poll results an extra dose of credibility, and the Gray Lady’s front-page display of the findings was seen as a warning shot across the president’s bow.
Still, anybody who really cared should have realized the reasons for Trump’s surge had long been obvious in the issue polls.
Biden’s agenda was overwhelmingly unpopular and even becoming more so.
No doubt some of that unpopularity stems from the belief of many Americans that Democratic prosecutors, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, are engaged in blatant election interference by repeatedly targeting the leading GOP contender and trying to lock him up.
But even that didn’t matter to most Dems as long as the bottom line showed Biden prevailing next year.
Their sudden awakening notwithstanding, there is still at least one big blind spot among many on the left: the compelling evidence House GOP probers have uncovered in their impeachment inquiry.
Corruption in plain sight
The fact that Hunter Biden got outrageously lenient treatment from Garland until IRS whistleblowers courageously came forward is not widely known because the Times and others on the party bus have ignored or downplayed the facts.
In a recent conversation with a devoted Times reader, I realized he had no idea what the Hunter Biden case was about. Nor did he know that Joe Biden had received at least $240,000 from his brother, Jim Biden, soon after the family got paid in 2017 by a Chinese firm and another client of its influence-peddling scheme.
The payments prove Joe directly benefited from the selling of his name and vice presidency, but the Times, Washington Post, CNN and others continue moving the goalposts to protect Biden. They do this by keeping key facts from their readers and viewers, making them censors.
The good news is that it’s not working. Polls show a majority of Americans already believe the president’s conduct was either unethical or illegal in his family’s schemes.
That’s another factor in so many voters turning sour on the president and the impact of it is certain to grow as more evidence of his role emerges.
All of which gives Dems one more reason to panic about going into battle in 2024 with Joe Biden at the top of their ticket.
Adams has Dem armor
Reader Ronald Wieck accuses me of being an idealist for writing that Mayor Adams could have trouble defending his record to voters in two years.
“Adams doesn’t need to defend anything,” Wieck writes. “Superman has that big ‘S’ on his chest and Adams has that big ‘D’ next to his name. The kryptonite that topples Democrats infesting big cities has yet to be discovered.”
Past time to denazify NY
The shocking rise of antisemitism in New York and elsewhere leads reader Jim Trageser to endorse the return to a historic playbook, writing: “We need to mount the kind of denazification effort here that Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall instituted in Germany and Austria in 1945.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
