President Joe Biden has enjoyed a summer revival of sorts, meaning a rise in his public job approval number from a grotesquely low 36.8% in the RealClearPolitics average to a still lamentable 42%. In parallel, his disapproval fell from 57.4% to 54.7%.
This is enough for Democratic congressional candidates to rethink shunning the president on the campaign trail but is hardly a ringing endorsement.
Biden’s small but significant rebound is widely attributed to legislative “wins” such as the passage of the CHIPS Act, trumpeted as helping American computer chip makers compete with China, and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act — three-quarters of a trillion dollars’ worth of warmed up leftovers from the more costly failure, Build Back Better.
But although the public does not like ineptness and gridlock in Washington and might therefore like signs of life in the federal government, the passage of these bills is unlikely to have improved Biden’s image substantively.
More significant is that he was in hiding during midsummer, “strictly” isolating because he had COVID. This removed him from the public eye for weeks, and it is remarkable how much better he looks when you can’t see him. Biden is no hero, but if he has a superpower, it is invisibility. Being an empty suit has taken him to the top. His absence made voters’ hearts grow fonder in 2020. He won the presidency, remember, by retiring to his Delaware basement, avoiding the public gaze, and limiting his visible weirdness and blunders to occasional video appearances.
He is only now restarting his delayed midterm election tour, holding events postponed earlier this month and last month. It’s a fair bet these will do him less good than removing himself entirely from voter scrutiny.
It is not just Biden but many Democrats who prosper when out of view. Hillary Clinton has always alienated people when she’s in the limelight, including her campaign 30 years ago to foist Hillarycare on the nation during her husband’s presidency. Whenever the public hears her speak, let alone when it hears her laugh, it is repelled.
This dichotomy — seeming plausible and attractive only until scrutinized — is common among Democrats. Republicans probably look uglier on the surface, being easily portrayed as obsessed with cutting taxes for the rich or as misogynistic haters of equality because they oppose “a woman’s right to choose.” But wash off the mud flung at them by the Left and look beneath the superficial analysis, and you find sounder economic policy and deeper, humane thinking.
With Democrats, it’s the reverse. As Varad Mehta wrote in the Washington Examiner, under the oily, glossy surface of today’s Democrats, you find adherence to extreme, left-wing policies that are deeply damaging.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a tough black woman and former police chief, as is Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), or a photogenic, left-coast ex-mayor, as is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or a lanky Texan with Camelot pretensions and a bacterial infection, as is Beto O’Rourke — a little scrutiny reveals that you are the same lockstep left-winger underneath. You’re all-in for policies that voters don’t like, such as abortion extremism, ruinous federal spending, the takeover of children by a malicious nanny state, and every other woke fad, no matter how delusional and culturally corrosive.
This is partly because on the postmodern sub-Marxist Left, the personal is political. Who you are matters more than what skills you possess and what you think. Vice President Kamala Harris was chosen because she is black and a woman — Biden made that explicit — so she had the appearance he required and that Democrats deem attractive. But set aside her intersectional credentials and listen to her, and it’s clear that she is, like her boss, an empty suit — grating and incompetent.
The success of Democrats, such as it is, is the triumph of form over substance. They look the part, and they can color their resumes appealingly, but the public likes them less as soon as it actually examines them. They are inescapably in our faces, and yet what we see is not what we get.
Everyone likes the idea of free college, free childcare, free money — who doesn’t want free stuff? — but the consequences, once examined, such as inflation, moral hazard, goodies for the wealthy at the expense of the working class, leave the public naturally and sensibly cold.
The phantasm of the modern Democrat puts one in mind of “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There,” an amusing rhyme by William Hughes Mearns which opens, “Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there! He wasn’t there again today, Oh how I wish he’d go away!”
How one wishes the ghostly and ghastly Democrats would go away.
