On Tuesday, September 12, beginning at 11:30 a.m, the David Horowitz Freedom Center will be hosting a talk and book signing featuring journalist and author Kimberley Strassel at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. If you plan to be in the Southern California area on that date, don’t miss this special event. Click HERE for more information – and to attend!
Remember those blissful days of yesteryear, when Barack Obama was President and we thought that even though he was worse than the previous Worst U.S. President Ever, Jimmy Carter, we naively assumed no one who came after Obama could possibly be as bad? Good times.
Fast forward to today, and Barack Obama is again President of the United States, albeit jointly with Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett. That subversive triumvirate is behind the curtain pulling the strings of decrepit puppet Joe Biden, whose wrecking-ball impact on the nation is managing to make Americans nostalgic for Carter.
But in her new book, The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back From Joe Biden’s Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years, award-winning journalist Kimberley Strassel demonstrates that, although Biden is worse, the parallels between his and Carter’s presidencies are striking – and worth examining closely, because it is precisely by applying the lessons of how Ronald Reagan ended the disastrous Carter era that we can wrench ourselves free from our current morass under Biden.
A member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, with a weekly must-read column called “Potomac Watch,” Ms. Strassel is also the author of the bestsellers Resistance (At All Costs) and The Intimidation Game. She is a razor-sharp observer of the political arena who brings an insightful historical perspective to her commentary. Her new book is a must-read for understanding how and why the two Democrat Presidents have overseen similar domestic and foreign policy debacles, and for understanding what that means for America going forward.
How are Biden and Carter similar as occupiers of the Oval Office? Ms. Strassel counts the ways. “The peanut farmer from Georgia in 1977 took the reins of a nation already beset by the Great Inflation, sky-high crime, and declining U.S. oil production,” she writes, and he made all of it worse. Forty-four years later, the Biden administration is an eerie echo of its ‘70s predecessor, “[f]rom how they came to office, to their hot messes of inflation, energy, and crime, to their foreign policy travails, to their public unpopularity.”
Both men, despite promising healing and moderation before taking office, “governed in a far more liberal fashion than their divided electorates expected – and became lightning rods themselves. They both had the unfortunate knack for creating or exacerbating the types of messes that most infuriate average Americans.”
Moreover, the “Carter and Biden years were similarly shaped by foreign policy fiascoes, the consequence of shared and naive notions of sanctions, multilateralism and appeasement. Both men weakened America on the world stage and invited aggression…” Both Presidents also sabotaged America’s energy security and oversaw “oddly similar social upheaval, with public angst over race conscious governance, gay rights, education, court decisions, and rising crime.”
Generally speaking, both Biden and Carter “reflexively turned to government as the answer to every problem, demagoguing the private sector and larding it down with new regulations that stifled economic growth.”
Strassel elaborates comprehensively on these similarities and more, ultimately concluding that the comparison is “unfair – to Carter,” who at least arguably had the excuse of being too inexperienced for the domestic and foreign crises that engulfed his administration. Biden has no such excuse, and yet has doubled down on Carter’s ineptitude.
But The Biden Malaise isn’t simply an issue-by-issue comparison about the havoc wrought by the two Democrat administrations. In the final chapters of the book – “Morning in America,” “Bouncing Back,” and “It Takes a Reagan” – Ms. Strassel shifts gears to point us toward a renewal of American exceptionalism, including walking conservative voters through a checklist of what they should look for in the candidate who can lift us out of the Biden malaise and make America great again. Rather than give away spoilers, I’ll simply note that she asserts that the question that must guide voters through the turbulent election rapids ahead is, “Does the GOP have a new Reagan?’
For Strassel, the candidate who can save us is not Donald Trump. While acknowledging the ways in which Trump was a bold and effective leader – his refusal to bow to progressive media pressure, for example – Strassel explains that this time around, Americans must jettison the polarizing baggage Trump unavoidably brings. Having met him, she writes, she is confident that “he has an abiding belief in America and in American exceptionalism. The problem is that Trump has an even ‘huger’ and more abiding belief in Trump and in Trump exceptionalism. And that always takes precedence.” Some Republicans no doubt feel they owe a debt to Trump, she concludes. “The question is whether the debt is worth another four years of pandemonium.”
Noting that Ronald Reagan’s formula for obliterating Jimmy Carter in 1980 in one of the biggest landslide victories in the history of presidential elections was simply to run as the anti-Carter, Strassel reminds us that Trump didn’t come up with the MAGA slogan. It was Reagan’s 1980 campaign that coined, “Let’s Make America Great Again.”
The Great Communicator’s “greatest contrast [with Carter] was his tone – his unrelenting optimism in the future of the country. He had over the years ditched the pessimism that haunted conservative intellectual thought, its perpetual, hand-wringing belief that it was already too late.” Reagan’s genius, she adds, was that it is “totally possible to be both tough and principled – yet to also be inviting.”
“Like Carter in 1980, Biden has created the conditions for a lasting shift among the electorate,” she writes. “Democrats are becoming the party of wealthy, coastal elites enamored with European style welfare policies. This is providing Republicans the opportunity to form a broad and wide coalition of multiracial, working-, and middle-class Americans.” But, she warns, the GOP risks throwing it all away:
Too many Republicans are abandoning sound principles, chasing populist sentiment, hoping to buy voters with Democrat-lite promises.
[…]
If Republicans want to take full advantage of today’s economic and political situation – if they want to step toward another Reagan era – they’re going to have to embrace an overhaul. The movement needs to recommit itself to a principled, conservative agenda. It needs to become again the party of ideas, optimism, and outreach.
A relentlessly compelling and convincing read, Kimberley Strassel’s The Biden Malaise is brimming on every page with political wisdom and inspiring optimism – just the book America needs as the 2024 campaign season heats up. “This book is meant to be a guide – to the enormous opportunity that suddenly exists for the party of free markets and free people,” Strassel writes. “America can bounce back from the Biden malaise; it has the desire, the energy, and the formula” in the example of the Reagan Revolution. But as she reminds us, “There was no Reagan Revolution without… Reagan.”
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior