White House Report Card: Heading south at worst time for Biden and Democrats

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Democratic pollster John Zogby said he sees the problems in the numbers and lack of surrogates talking up the president. “Bad week,” he said in grading it a C-minus.

Conservative analyst Jed Babbin cited the president’s weak energy policies and focus on fringe social policy to portray Biden as out of touch. He graded a D-minus.

John Zogby
Grade: C-

This is the week that most of the Senate polls changed and swung back toward the Republican candidates.

Note to the wise: Most of these races are very close with less than three weeks to go. Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada are within razor-thin margins. Wisconsin is leaning to reelecting its GOP incumbent. Only Pennsylvania seems to welcome its native President Joe Biden to campaign. Other candidates have made it clear they do not want him.

A drumbeat is building among Democrats that they have lost the battle.

First, the New York Times relies on one national poll to show the GOP in a negligible lead in the congressional generic. Then aggregators such as RealClearPolitics and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight are projecting a Republican takeover of the House and either a GOP victory in the Senate (in the case of RCP) or a reduced chance of a Democratic victory in the Senate (in the case of FiveThirtyEight).

Then the Democratic “strategists” — I love that term! — are lining up (anonymously) to declare two things: Their own party will lose, and it is not their fault. This sort of behavior has a way of being self-fulfilling.

Call me old-fashioned, but we may have one or two lifetimes until Nov. 8. The races have already switched back-and-forth and back-and-forth and back-and-forth.

As for the president, it is hard to get any message out when your party’s hangers-on and mouthpieces are lining up against you. Bad week.

Jed Babbin
Grade: D-

It was another “Big Lie” week for Biden and his minions. Biden proclaimed that the U.S. economy is “strong as hell,” made a speech promising to codify abortion rights, and his State Department, we discovered, is paying for drag queen shows in Ecuador.

What the Washington Times’s Charlie Hurt describes as “Biden’s financial pandemic” is continuing to hammer people across America with inflation and high mortgage interest rates. It’s creating a Jimmy Carter-like malaise among the voters. One-quarter of the country is reportedly going to skip having a big Thanksgiving dinner because of rising prices. That’s both frightening and depressing.

Meanwhile, Biden is going to release another 15 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in his continuing effort to depress gasoline prices artificially before the Nov. 8 election. Look for prices to rise radically after Election Day. Biden insists that he’s not doing that for political purposes. (Cue the laugh track.)

The SPR release is the first of Biden’s new three-part plan to reduce gasoline prices, the White House announced this week. The other two parts are even more absurd.

The second point is “debunking myths” that Biden & Co. are anti-oil. Yeah, sure, they aren’t anti-oil. That was demonstrated on Biden’s first day in office when he canceled the Keystone pipeline. How about the new restrictions on oil and gas drilling and the near ban on new offshore drilling? How about Biden begging the Saudis and Venezuelans for oil instead of unleashing America’s energy producers? Is that all “mythology”?

The third part of Biden’s plan is for oil companies to sacrifice profits to reduce profits. And why would they do that when Biden & Co. are trying to drive them out of business?

Then there is something called the “Centro Ecuatoriano Norteamericano,” which received a State Department grant of about $20,000 to hold drag queen shows in Ecuador. It’s a tiny amount of money compared to the other wasteful spending in the State Department that the drag queen item is just budget dust. But it is more proof of the Biden gang’s contempt for America’s values. Another demonstration is Biden’s lowering the bar for U.S. citizenship, making it easy for people with mental disabilities to avoid passing English proficiency and American history tests.

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What’s not just budget dust is the Biden administration’s grant of almost $3 billion to battery-producing companies that sign on to the “ESG” system of investing and hiring based on “equity.” It’s another way Biden is forcing capitalism to convert to socialism.

Biden’s big abortion speech promised to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law if the Democrats keep control of Congress. The big problem with that isn’t the considerable likelihood that the Democrats are going to lose in November. The problem is that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization returns the abortion issue to the states for their decision. Any new federal law governing abortion would be unconstitutional. Not that Joe & Co. would care.

John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His weekly podcast with son and managing partner Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Follow him on Twitter @ZogbyStrategies

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