When President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address on Feb. 7, he’ll blame Republicans for his failures and take credit for things he hasn’t done. That’s what he does. It’s what many Democrats are doing intensely right now — a strategy I wrote about recently — but Biden has a special sauce that allows him to get away with it more than any of his colleagues.
Unofficially launching his reelection campaign, he’ll cast the GOP as the inflation party for opposing his inflationary Inflation Reduction Act, which spent hundreds of billions of borrowed federal dollars on subsidies. Biden will boast that inflation is falling fast without giving credit where it is due, to the Federal Reserve raising its target interest rate from zero to 4.5% since March. This was necessary because Biden’s policies stoked the worst inflation in 40 years. But he will get away with his casuistry.
He’ll also boast of cutting deficits faster than any president before despite the truth of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comment that Biden has presided over “runaway, reckless, party-line spending” that has pushed our grandchildren’s debt above $31 trillion. The deficit has fallen only because Biden’s baseline is America’s prostrate condition at the start of the lockdown when Washington hurled buckets of emergency money on the economy to revive it. This president is no deficit cutter, but again, he’ll take credit.
He'll say Republicans cause chaos at the southern border even though opportunistic migrants pretending to need asylum began flooding in in record numbers because Biden invited them and scrapped policies that kept them out, abandoning his constitutional duty to uphold the law and defend the frontier.
He’ll talk of right-wing threats to democracy even as he boasts of his efforts to bypass Congress and forgive $1.7 trillion of student debt by fiat.
The public knows he’s bad at his job — his approval ratings have skittered between 37% and 44% for the past year. So, how does he get away with hollow boasts and embarrassing fabrications?
Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman noted that people aren’t persuaded by facts and solid arguments but by people they like. I’ve always found Biden’s bursts of anger and rudeness unappealing; the New York Times noted his tendency to “snap” and have “a short fuse.”
But most people, even those who recognize his incompetence, think Biden is a folksy nice guy. This is his special sauce. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a Trump ally, called Biden “the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics.”
The public takes Biden’s carefully crafted image at face value — a blue-collar, Camaro-driving, ordinary Joe, who modestly commuted to Washington each day and rose to the top. People think he’s too old and know he has a bottomless ability to “f*** things up” (as former President Barack Obama put it). But they still like him. When asked about this, irrespective of whether they agree with him, Americans like him more than dislike him. Right now, he’s 10 points on the plus side.
That’s a big reason why people think Joe is just being Joe when he’s trying to fool them. Their judgment is right in this, even though it’s regrettable that their response is to shrug, or even smile.