This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden under fire by Democrats for not doing more to counter bad 2024 polls, unable to free up more billions for Ukraine, and flip-flopping on his Israel support.
But it wasn’t a totally bad week. In a series of state elections in battlegrounds, including Virginia and Ohio, his side won, outperforming expectations just like in the 2022 midterm congressional elections. The abortion issue played large in Democratic victories, a likely top issue in the 2024 elections.
BIDEN-XI MEETING: FAMILIES OF AMERICANS WRONGFULLY DETAINED IN CHINA NOT OPTIMISTIC
Next week, Biden could add helpful news if he can bring China under control during his meeting with President Xi Jinping and work out a deal with House Republicans to keep the government open.
Conservative grader Jed Babbin said the week was “another bad one” for Biden. He was especially concerned about the administration revealing that it was sending an Ohio-class nuclear submarine to the Middle East. Those movements have historically been kept secret.
Democratic pollster John Zogby was unavailable this week but said in his Thursday podcast that while the week’s elections had some good news for Biden, several polls came out showing the president losing key support groups such as younger voters.
And, he added, he’s not sold that Biden will be able to withstand the pressure to drop out due to the bad polls and questions about his age. “I’m just not sure that two old guys can sustain the huge leads that they currently have within their own parties. Remember, it just took chiseling away at LBJ and, and he was gone. The Democrats have a history of chewing up and spitting out their frontrunners in many instances,” he said.
Jed Babbin
Grade: D-
Last week was another bad one for President Joe Biden and his team. They published the fact that a Navy Ohio-class guided-missile submarine had transited the Suez Canal, issued an important executive order on artificial intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security issued a new gender pronoun mandate, which is illegal on its face. And the Government Accountability Office found that government agencies were concealing their spending.
Before we even get to those matters, the expert diplomacy of Team Biden led Russia to cancel the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. No big deal? Well, think about this. Russia and Iran are now closely allied, and it would be legal for Russia to test Iranian nukes, which Iran won’t do itself because it wants to keep its nuclear capabilities secret.
The big EO on AI is a 60-plus page document that requires the government to be involved in developing all systems, both government and private. Not only will this slow the development of artificial intelligence, government involvement guarantees increased costs and increases the likelihood of leaks to competing nations. What could possibly go wrong?
The movement of submarines has been kept secret as a matter of policy going back to before the Cold War. Now the Biden crew has leaked the passage of a nuclear-armed “boomer” through the Suez Canal. What good could that possibly do? Does Biden mean to threaten nuclear war?
The GAO reported that nearly 50 government agencies have under-reported their spending. The worst was the Treasury Department which reported only $36 billion in COVID-related spending but actually spent over $231 billion. How much more money was unreported and probably misspent? We’ll never know. It can’t be done without White House complicity.
And while all of this was going on, anti-Semitic incidents, according to the Anti-Defamation League, rose nearly 400% since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on Oct. 7. In response, last week, the Biden White House announced a task force to fight Islamophobia. (Because it happened last week, it can’t count against this week’s grade, but it has to be mentioned.)
And, of course, DHS imposed a gender pronoun mandate that requires employees — on penalty of firing — to use whatever transgender pronouns a trans person demands regardless of their gender. It’s perfectly Orwellian and likely illegal because it imposes political beliefs that may be contrary to an employee’s religion. Not that the wokistas at DHS care.
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Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on Twitter @jedbabbin.
John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His podcast with son and managing partner and pollster Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Follow him on Twitter @ZogbyStrategies.
