Photo: Strassel-Wayne Fisk
"The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden's Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years." Best-selling author Kim Strassel, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board spoke to Bill about her new book. One thing that most people can agree on, is that Jimmy Carter was a pretty disastrous president. Runaway inflation, recession, bungled foreign policy, misguided domestic agenda... you name it. And to top it off, Carter blamed it all on a "malaise" permeating the country. The silver lining, his dismal presidency helped pave the way for the Reagan Revolution. In it, Strassel points out all the similarities between the Carter policy missteps, and the Biden missteps today. Their comparable dismal performances. And how it has made things ripe for a new GOP-led "revolution" for 2024, though Republicans must choose the right leader. The next Reagan.
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Progressives today call for more spending, more entitlements, federal domination of states, a cradle-to-grave government experience, and Biden has recklessly plowed ahead with their agenda. By the end of inauguration day, Biden had also signed seventeen executive orders, several designed to tell business that a new, antigrowth sheriff was in town.
Carter fell victim to rising gas prices due to oil shortages mainly caused by wars in the Middle East interrupting the supply chain. Biden’s first-day actions took a wrecking ball to every part of the domestic energy industry, then resorted to blame shifting and gimmicks. He began referring to the run-up in energy prices as “Putin’s price hike.”
There was Carter’s attempted rescue of the Iranian hostages. The same April that Biden announced the U.S. would abandon Afghanistan, Putin began major military exercises on Ukraine’s southern border
Every president in modern times has struggled to police the U.S.’s southern border. But only two invited a full-blown refugee crisis. Carter with his asylum offer to Cuban-Americans, and Biden’s offer to welcome all refugees, resulting in more than one million illegal migrants claiming asylum in the United States by September 2022. .
Carter nabbed NEA’s first endorsement in 1976, along with AFT’s. The teachers’ unions have since grown in size and party influence. Biden has now managed to expose the disaster of that toxic relationship: his lockdown and vaccine policies, his antichoice positions, and his radical cultural agenda—finally provoked a rebellion.
Carter’s self-righteous language left the impression he was blaming problems on everyone but himself. Biden doesn’t leave an impression. He outright blames problems on everyone else.
What did the midterm elections show? Voters don’t approve of the Biden agenda. They just happened in many important races in 2022 to dislike the Republican candidate more than they disliked the Democrat. And most of those disfavored Republicans had something in common: strong ties to Trump.
Reagan’s election realigned the electorate. People flocked to the GOP. The “New Right”—which favors so-called “national conservatism”—claims that Reaganism is dead, and we must fight, fight, fight, and remain in a state of perpetual outrage. The problem here is that not a thing NatCons offer is new. Americans who want bigger government and class warfare already have a party: Democrats.
Too many Republicans have fallen for the view that Trump’s secret sauce is rabble-rousing and catering to the masses. This is convenient for liberals and the media, who hate the proven success of Reagan policies. Trump absolutely employs populist rhetoric. But everything else about Trump was straight out of the Reagan policy playbook. And that playbook was the basis of his success in the presidency.
Give Trump his due. The man gave GOP leaders the wake-up call they needed. The problem is that Trump has an even “huger” and more abiding belief in Trump, which takes precedence. What propelled the Reagan revolution was Reagan himself. Today’s Republicans can have all the best ideas in the world, but without a competent spokesperson they will never capitalize on the opportunity Biden Democrats have provided for another 1980.