Joe Biden woke up on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
Someone has told the president that he was elected by the American people to fundamentally change our country. He thinks he has a mandate, and that all that stands between him and success is a few ornery Republicans in the Senate who refuse to get out of the way.
Correction. Biden believes that the only thing standing between him and greatness are cranky senators who do not see the United States as systemically racist, who don’t believe in vastly expanding the welfare state, who think that individual creativity and achievement have built our great country and who are absolutely positive that Democrats are leading us down a very dangerous path.
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Because, as hard as it is to imagine, it is greatness to which this hesitant, stumbling reciter of platitudes aspires.
Our president, who needs Cliff notes to get through a press conference, wants to be the next FDR and held a two-hour off-the-books meeting with presidential historians to figure out how best to accomplish that. Biden wants to be carved into Mount Rushmore, and the liberal media is egging him on.
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Someone needs to interrupt Biden’s afternoon nap and tell him the truth. He was not elected to “get things done,” as he claimed during his recent (rare) encounter with the media. He was not “hired to solve problems”.
He was elected because he was not Donald Trump. This is not supposition; it is fact. More people voted against Donald Trump than for Joe Biden. That is the truth.
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The fact is that Biden was barely elected. He is in the Oval Office today by virtue of some 44,000 votes in three states – Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. That’s it. In addition, Biden’s party has the slimmest of majorities in the House – only eight seats – and no majority at all in the senate.
Biden has no mandate.
Americans certainly did not deliver a mandate to enact a far-left agenda. They believed that Biden was a moderate, because they had been told so by such eminent Democrats as Rep. James Clyburn, who on that premise helped him win the pivotal primary in South Carolina.
Party officials panicked when it appeared Bernie Sanders might become their candidate. They knew voters would consider the Vermont self-proclaimed democratic socialist too progressive, no matter how mad they were at Trump.
If Democrats feared Sanders was too radical to win an election, why does Biden think the country wants him to adopt the Sanders agenda?
The media would have us think that on all these issues far-left Democrats are in the mainstream. They are not.
The prevailing narrative from the leftist media, on full display during the president’s press conference, is that Democrats need to ditch the filibuster to push their “popular” agenda forward. But much of the agenda is not popular except with progressives, which includes much of the impatient, demanding media.
It is exactly this moment for which the 60-vote rule in the Senate was created.
The filibuster is essential because our nation is profoundly divided. We disagree on many issues, and the GOP, which is barely in the minority, holds the more popular position on several proposals currently under consideration. They should stand firm.
Take voting laws. Democrats are eager to pass H.R. 1, the so-called For the People Act, which would federally dictate how the country votes and, among other things, prohibit voter ID requirements. But a Rasmussen poll shows that 75% of likely voters support demanding some form of photo identification for voting, including 60% of Democrats, 77% of Independents and even 69% of Black voters.
Or consider Democrats’ pro-union PRO Act, which would outlaw right-to-work laws adopted by 27 states. Polling historically has shown popular support for those RTW laws that give workers the freedom to opt out of joining a union.
In Virginia, where Democrats now control the state government, progressives have pushed to abolish the state’s right-to-work statute, but moderates have stood in the way. They know the laws are important to creating a pro-business climate and attracting jobs.
How about reparations, which are getting a trial run in Chicago’s suburbs and which the Biden White House says we should consider? Last summer, even as Black Lives Matter protests spotlighted racial grievances, only about 20% of Americans thought that taxpayer funds should go to righting wrongs that occurred over one hundred years ago.
How do Americans feel about the surge of people trying to illegally cross our southern border, encouraged by welcoming words and acts from President Biden? A new ABC News/Ipsos poll shows 57% of voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of immigration.
Americans are not on board with open borders; they know that a wave of undocumented workers will crush wages for people at the bottom of the income ladder. They know that unchecked in-migration brings security risks and, in the midst of a pandemic, a serious health threat.
A Morning Consult/Politico poll shows 48% of voters oppose Biden’s plan to welcome as many as 125,000 refugees during the next fiscal year, up from 15,000, while fewer than 40% approve it. Among the 28 executive orders Biden signed in the early weeks of his presidency, the order mandating the jump in refugees was the least popular by a wide margin.
The media would have us think that on all these issues far-left Democrats are in the mainstream. They are not.
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The only part of the progressive agenda that garners widespread support is giving people “free” money. Biden thinks that because most Americans enjoyed getting a $1,400 check in the mail, his agenda is widely popular. He could not be more wrong. Once those checks are spent, Biden’s popularity will be spent, too.
And Mount Rushmore will recede further and further from his grasp.
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