I have no clue how Joe Biden will deliver the State of the Union on March 7. First, it will be dark, and being the world’s most famous sundowner, he might not know where he is for the address. The number of drugs they will need to pump into Joey will probably rival that of Anna Nicole Smith, but leaks from the White House suggest that the man who can’t remember when his son died will treat us like idiots during his speech.
Noah Rothman at National Review touched upon how the speech will lean heavily into trying to convince us, the voters, that shrinkflation is a corporate greed problem, that this administration has been devoid of crises, and that the economy has never been better. Is that why 61 percent of voters don’t think you deserve a second term—86 percent think you’re too old to run, Joe?
The Biden White House’s poor numbers aren’t because of misinformation. This administration is an all-around circus that’s been a near-constant trainwreck since day one, crashing into one crisis after another and doing nothing to clean up the debris. You all remember Joe Biden’s ‘shrinkflation’ video during the Super Bowl—it was painful to watch. Imagine an hour of that on national television. The lack of respect is astounding, and Rothman is right: they think we’re all idiots (via NRO):
While you were Super Bowl shopping, did you notice smaller-than-usual products where the price stays the same?
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 11, 2024
Folks are calling it Shrinkflation and it means companies are giving you less for every dollar you spend.
I’m calling on the big consumer brands to put a stop to it. pic.twitter.com/wL1NsEh78F
President Joe Biden reportedly plans to spend a portion of his State of the Union Address leaning heavily into the notion that his fellow Americans are idiots.
[…]
“It’s about framing this for the American people,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Biden’s open frustration with tactics like shrinkflation, the official added, “speaks to what they feel in a way that’s useful for us both in terms of messaging and making sure they understand that the president sees what’s going on.”
It requires an exceptional level of economic illiteracy to buy what the White House is selling here. Indeed, the only Americans who could fail to simply intuit the ways in which the president is misleading the public are likely insulated from the rising costs of daily life, which extend well beyond the number of ounces in a bottle of Gatorade.
The last Consumer Price Index survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that food costs across the board continued to rise last month, contributing to a 2.6 percent increase in the overall cost of food from one year ago (when, by the way, food costs were 10 percent higher than they were in January 2022). But it’s not just food that is pricier today than it used to be. Electricity is more expensive. Cars are more expensive. Medical costs are more expensive. Shelter and transportation services are more expensive. None of these increased expenditures fit within the rubric of “shrinkflation.”
It circles back to the Obama days, where Rothman notes that Joe appears to be suffering from the same problem as Barry—the overestimation of the power of their oratory. Obama could deliver a speech well, but did it have an impact? The world was also ablaze under the Obama White House, albeit not this badly. Obama set red lines in Syria—Bashar al-Assad crossed them multiple times with impunity because he knew nothing would happen. Both men’s moves can be anticipated with ease.
Biden has zero communications skills and no political skills, so I don’t know why he thought going this route would be best:
Biden’s foremost task between today and Election Day is to incept in voters’ minds the notion that inflation is going down. Highlighting inflation’s undesirable effects on consumer products wouldn’t seem like the best way to go about that.
Even flirting with this strategy is more evidence that the Biden White House is possessed of entirely unearned faith in its own ability to shape our shared reality through its own cleverness. Why they would be laboring under that delusion still, at this late date, is anyone’s guess. It didn’t work for “Bidenomics” … It didn’t work when the administration indicated it planned to pin the blame for the border crisis over which Joe Biden presided, and which Democrats insisted did not even exist until its existence became undeniable, on the GOP.
We’ve finally reached that point where the Simpsons meme of Principal Skinner is about to come to life and be entered into the history books:
It wouldn’t shock me if Biden’s team thinks this is true. Their approval numbers are in the toilet, not because they’ve peddled bad domestic policy but because we’re wrong. Let’s stop trying to win hearts and minds because the American voter is misinformed. We need to educate them. Again, not a good route. When you’re explaining, you’re losing. And you look mentally ill when you have over-educated and snobby White House aides and staffers trying to tell Americans that they’re imagining their brutal, wallet-torching trips to the grocery store.You're a fool if you feel the country is on the wrong path. That’s the uniting and positive message President ‘I Don’t Know That My Son Died’ might convey next week.
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