South Korea’s president was in New York at the United Nations on Friday. After posing in a photo with President Joe Biden, he apparently had some salty language about our system of government that was caught on a hot mic.
This is what Nancy Vu wrote at Politico:
Here’s what Yoon said:
“How could Biden not lose damn face if these f—ers do not pass it in Congress?”
To tell you the truth, I don’t even see how this is an actual insult to Congress. To me, it looks a lot more like a comment on Biden’s doubtful agility with legislation.
But if Yoon wants to call Congress a bunch of f***ers, he’s going to have to get in line.
Congress has a 76% disapproval rating right now, according to Gallup. Fully 77% said in June that “most members of Congress” do not deserve to be reelected. And that’s actually not too bad, considering.
It is an enduring feature of Congress that it has very low approval ratings. Why? Well, it’s a lot harder to defend Congress than it is to defend a specific person. Even when people tend to like their own member of Congress — and just this June, 53% told Gallup that their own member of Congress deserves reelection — they usually despise the institution as a whole. And why shouldn’t they? It’s a faceless group of people that’s always bickering and accomplishes little. In fact, the bickering is the single most important factor in Gallup’s polling (at 28%) accounting for why so many people disapprove of Congress’s job performance. The second most frequent criticism is its inaction (21%).
When Congress passes new laws, people tend to notice only if the laws are bad or if someone tries to describe them in scary terms. There is no one person you can look to who can give a good explanation that will make people less apprehensive about what Congress is doing.
This isn’t as easy as sending Joe Biden out to lie to the media. People get defensive of “their guy” if it’s someone like Biden or Trump, but not so much for Congress.
That’s why Congress has persistently low approval ratings even at the best of times, and it has lower ratings now even than someone very unpopular, such as Biden. The last time Gallup put Congress’ approval rating higher than 39% was in 2005, when there was still some residual goodwill toward many of the nation’s institutions from the 9/11 attacks. Last month’s rating of 22% approval is actually nothing unusual. Congress’s approval rating went all the way down to 9% at the time of the 2014 midterm elections.
