Elex desk: Biden Is the Chaos Candidate
Joe Biden vowed to “end Donald Trump’s chaos,” notes Fred Bauer at City Journal, but now “growing instability abroad combined with inflation, immigration, and identity politics at home jeopardize Biden’s reelection bid.” After the “massive swings” seen here and in Europe in the fortunes of both left and right, “it’s notable that the race between Biden and Trump is still close.” Why? “Progressive identity politics has hampered Biden’s ability to maneuver on Israel” as well on immigration. “Inflation has similarly angered the electorate.” Biden “staked his presidency” on “merging lunch-bucket economics with graduate school cultural politics,” but “populist economics and progressives’ cultural imperatives don’t always align.” All bad news “for a president who campaigned on restoring normalcy.”
Conservative: Dishonest or Demented? Doesn’t Matter
President Biden keeps repeating his false claim that the inflation rate was 9% when he took office, when it was actually 1.4% — but: “Not close to true is an apt description of the Biden economic message,” sneers The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman. Biden’s “volume of falsehoods on this particular subject certainly suggests a pattern of dishonesty,” but also comes from a man special counsel Robert Hur says suffers “severe” memory problems. “Whether one ascribes the Biden inability to reckon with the facts of the economy to declining faculties or dishonesty, the message to voters is clear. Don’t expect better policies from a man who cannot grasp the reality of his failures or simply chooses to lie about them.”
Liberal: Joe’s Big Working-Class Loss
Working-class voters will “dominate” the 2024 election, predicts The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira, yet Democrats aren’t looking “good at all” on that front. A recent New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll found these voters in six “battleground states” favor Trump over Biden by 16 points, up from just a 4-point national margin in 2020. And the issues that would help Biden most here — “mundane” issues like economic fairness — go “against the grain of the Democrats’ shadow party and their amen corner” in the media and academia. The Biden camp “would rather think about this election” as “the democracy election” or “abortion rights election,” but that won’t “resonate” where “it counts the most: with the working class.”
From the right: Tapper Ensures an Unfair Debate
CNN anchor Jake “Tapper has a long track record as a partisan hack for the Democrat party, and that makes him the perfect candidate to join his moderator predecessor’s ranks in helping Biden survive the first presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle,” fumes The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd. Tapper “spent years helping Clinton’s campaign sell the lie that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election,” and “repeatedly wondered if Trump’s tenure in the White House was illegitimate.” “It’s no secret that the presidential debate system implicitly favors Democrats,” and “Tapper’s involvement as moderator” in the first Trump-Biden debate “ensures that it won’t be free of the partisanship that’s plagued the stage in recent years.”
Gaza watch: The New-Gov’t Dilemma
“The debate over future governance in Gaza shows why it’s been so difficult for any ideas to get farther than the drawing board,” explains Commentary’s Seth Mandel. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant “made headlines with a speech” ruling “out two of the obvious candidates: Israel or Hamas,” making it clear that “the ‘day after Hamas’ will only be achieved with Palestinian entities taking control of Gaza.” “The only existing Palestinian governing structure that could conceivably take over immediately is the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas,” but Israel “can’t force Abbas to take the handoff.” The “next-best option” seems “some kind of stewardship by Arab allies,” but they’re likely to “refuse to do so unless the U.S. recognizes a Palestinian state, which would make the need for an in-between peacekeeping force unnecessary” — an unsolvable riddle.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board