Unable to run on his stunning record of failure, President Biden has resorted to the lowest of campaign tricks: buying votes — and he’s doing it with your dollars.
No, it’s not actually a quid pro quo; no one he’s trying to bribe is obliged to back him in November.
But he’s trying, with the full faith and credit of the United States as his stake.
The latest: Wednesday, he announced yet another student-loan bailout, another $7.7 billion to 160,000 young Americans — bringing his total college-debt handout to a whopping $167 billion to some 4.75 million folks.
Never mind that he has no congressional authority to cancel many of these loans. Or that the Supreme Court explicitly struck down his first bid to forgive as much as $20,000 per student.
On another front, the day before he announced plans to drain another million barrels of gasoline from supplies in the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
This is a bid to ease the soaring of pump prices from $2.39 a gallon when he took office to $3.59 on Monday — a 50% spike.
And never mind that it’s his own war on fossil fuel that’s driven that rise.
Nor that those reserves are meant for true emergencies — not for “lowering prices at the pump,” as Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm openly boasted, because you fear a voter backlash.
There’s more: Biden’s pretending to champion consumers — who’ve been clobbered by Bidenflation — by, for example, promising first-time home buyers $400 a month in tax credits. (So what if that also guarantees higher housing costs? He figures voters won’t draw the connection, at least not ’til after Election Day.)
For the record, he’s also selling out national security: His hostility toward Israel is entirely a bid to shoring up his support with lefties and “anti-Zionist” voters in places like swing-state Michigan.
This strategy isn’t just despicable, it’s lame: Biden’s efforts to buy off this group or that — Greens, college kids, antisemites, open-border fanatics, whoever — come at a cost to the nation as a whole.
His approval ratings are in the sewer not because voters want more bribes — but because they want a better president.