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Biden needs to get lucky because his skill set is poor.
-- Traditional Gang of 500 proverb
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1. Out of Diet Coke
2. Out of White Cloud toilet paper
3. Out of diet peach yogurt.
4. Out of Thomas' Bagel Thins
5. Out of lactose free milk
6. Out of free COVID tests at the library.
-- The daily lament of the Gang of 300,000,000
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On this occasion of the eve of a very rare Joe Biden press conference marking one year in office, all patriots are rooting for the American president’s success.
Some, to be sure, root harder than others.
The path to any sort of first-term political comeback (like, Reagan or, say, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush) surely includes some combination of luck, skill, decisiveness, and, unfortunately, the heroic combating of some domestic or foreign threat that brings the nation together under the compelling leadership of the commander in chief.
Short of a Martian invasion that President Biden repelled, even those with the most vivid imaginations might struggle to come up with the scenario that gets the POTUS approval ratings back into the 50s – or even into the high 40s.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jerry Seib took so many notes at Sunday’s Gang of 500 special brunch at Lauriol Plaza that he got not one but TWO columns out of it.
The first is a classic of the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand genre.
These two paragraphs give you an idea of what’s in there:
For Mr. Biden and his party, the key question is whether his rapid slide in popularity in the second half of 2021 was the temporary result of the messy process of getting things done in a closely divided Washington, or a descent to levels of popularity that will remain a drag on his party.
In any case, there is a long way to go before the election, and ample time in today’s sped-up political environment for the landscape to change. In the end, Democrats will want the election to be about the things they have done to help the country get through the pandemic, and to help working Americans pull ahead on daily challenges. Republicans will want to focus voters’ minds on immigration, crime and a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan that they will portray as a kind of metaphor for disappointing Democratic leadership.
The other Seib special posits that Team Biden-Harris-Klain-Pelosi-Schumer has a month and change before the State of the Union address to figure out a presto chango route.
Among the ideas floated: make “progress against the coronavirus”; “move aggressively and visibly to shrink the supply-chain bottlenecks creating the shortages that fuel inflation” (but/and with a nod to “there is a limit to what the Biden administration can do” here); and, most helpfully, “figure out a strategy for BBB.”
Then there is another pair of stories, both essential reading Washington Post pieces whose cross purposes tease into sharp relief as well as anything else the pickle in which the president finds himself.
One says House Democratic moderates are making the case to Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer for a full rethink of the legislative and communications strategy for 2022.
The other piece is one of the most important written in a while about the state of the Democrats, with a reminder about the party climate in which Joe Biden won the nomination in 2020:
Donald Schneider, who served as a senior GOP aide on the House Ways and Means Committee, pointed out that even less liberal candidates such as then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) proposed more than $10 trillion in new spending on climate alone. Sanders proposed more than $50 trillion in new spending, with $30 trillion on Medicare-for-all. Warren pushed more than $20 trillion in tax hikes.
Now, Democrats are hoping to salvage a package worth $1.75 trillion.
“In hindsight, it was a total rethink of the system as a whole — enormous, unprecedented expansions of government — that was both shocking for the time and completely unrealistic,” Schneider said.
Most ominously for Mr. Biden, for the second straight day, a leading columnist has used the “I” word in initiating last rites, in this case the Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker, who writes in equal parts sorrow and pity about the incumbent president:
Has there ever been a figure a year into his term reduced to such impotence that his aides are impelled to whine to friendly media about the “disrespect” shown him by a first-term senator? Can you imagine Lyndon Johnson’s acolytes doing that for him? Ronald Reagan’s ?
So Joe Biden needs luck, skill, and an opportunity (or two) to turn around the conditions being experienced by the American people, and, thus, his polling numbers, and, thus, his presidency.
Based on interviews with 14 million Americans (or so), here is the consensus conventional wisdom about the possible comeback trails, each ranked using the WWoN Luck O’ the Bidens Scale®:
4 shamrocks: Take your point and the goals will come.
3 shamrocks: As happy as Larry!
2 shamrocks: Away with the fairies.
1 shamrock: Look at the state o'you!
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1. Putin caves.
2. The president makes personnel change that substantively and symbolically shake the Gang of 500 by the lapels, causing them to columnize anew.
3. The president performs at his press conference like he is JFK, Ronald Reagan, and Kelly Clarkson all rolled into one.
4. The coronavirus is brought meaningfully under control.
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention topper Rochelle Walensky fulfills the promise she makes in a new Wall Street Journal interview to communicate “CDC policy more clearly,” becoming the Norman Schwarzkopf of the pandemic.
6. Using the power of a government website and the efficient distribution of the United States Postal Service, the home testing kit bottleneck disappears.
7. Inflation is brought fully under control.
8. Midterm history is defied and Democrats keep control of the House and Senate, despite this (which tracks with the private polling of almost everyone involved in a 2022 race):
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On average, Americans' political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%).
However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter….
Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.
The Democratic lead in the first quarter was the largest for the party since the fourth quarter of 2012, when Democrats also had a nine-point advantage. Democrats held larger, double-digit advantages in isolated quarters between 1992 and 1999 and nearly continuously between mid-2006 and early 2009.
The GOP has held as much as a five-point advantage in a total of only four quarters since 1991. The Republicans last held a five-point advantage in party identification and leaning in early 1995, after winning control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s. Republicans had a larger advantage only in the first quarter of 1991, after the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War led by then-President George H.W. Bush.
9. Pass the voting and BBB bills.
10. Get the border under control with toughness and humanity.
11. Jujitsu an adverse Supreme Court decision on abortion.
12. Work with Congress, governors, and mayors to get crime under control.
13. Wait for Donald Trump to bail out the entire Democratic Party.
Only time will tell…..