Joe Biden’s Pathetic Valedictory Address
[guest post by JVW]
As he shuffles his way out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — needing to be led, no doubt, by people who still can recall where the exit doors are — Joe Biden has delivered a valediction of sorts on his horrible four year reign. Not in a mainstream progressive publication such as The Atlantic, let alone a more center-left sometimes heterodox publication like Harper’s; no, the President (more accurately the people who have been acting on his behalf for at least the last nine or so months, if not longer) chose the unambiguously left-wing toilet read The American Prospect to unload his special pleadings upon an audience who he hopes is inclined to accept it. Noah Rothman calls out Team Biden on their mendacity, and thus spares us the torture of having to read the piece attributed to the President:
Biden admonished readers who thoughtlessly expected to see their economic conditions improve under this administration. It will “take years to see the full effects” of his policies, the essay promises. You see, all the good stuff is backloaded. But, as the author repeatedly stressed, building “the economy from the middle out and bottom up,” a new economy that dispenses with “a failed approach called trickle-down economics,” is a complex undertaking. So complex, in fact, that the president himself doesn’t seem to understand it.
Biden tickled progressive erogenous zones by repeating the words “invest” and “investment” like a mantra. Indeed, the op-ed boasted, the legislation passed in Biden’s first two years marks “the most significant investment in the United States since the New Deal.” It was stimulus the already overheated American economy couldn’t painlessly absorb. Team Biden even has the gall to admit that the “Inflation Reduction Act is the largest single investment in clean energy in the history of the world.” For those of us who know what inflation is, that sentence contains a contradiction. It’s telling that Biden thought it was one he didn’t have to address given his intended audience.
And, given the man and the moment, the essay naturally made hash out of the complexities of globalization:
[. . .] He mourned a status quo he inherited in which the fruits of American innovation are shared all the world over: “Scientific discoveries and inventions developed in America were commercialized in countries abroad, bolstering their manufacturing instead of ours.” By “commercialized,” we must assume he means American-designed goods being manufactured abroad, which is a convoluted way of describing comparative advantage. [. . .]
In promoting the CHIPS act, which seeks to create a domestic semiconductor industry from whole cloth, Biden touted the output from three Taiwanese-owned TSMC chip plants in Arizona: “America will be the only economy in the world to have all five of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturers in the world operating on its shores.” This is the same phenomenon. The only difference is that Biden seems to like it when Americans are manufacturing products innovated abroad — an economic step backward that is obvious to all who haven’t romanticized America’s industrial past.
Noah Rothman goes on to refer to the point which I made back in September about the Administration’s increase in IRS spending being a colossal failure; he reflects upon the irony of blue-collar Joe presiding over a Presidential term in which private-sector unions actually lost membership; and he ridicules the Democrats’ predilection for moving a double-sawbuck from your left front pocket to your right front pocket and pretending that you are somehow twenty dollars wealthier. He laments that Joe Biden ran as the normal Democrat among the 2020 contenders, yet upon his inauguration immediately allowed himself to be flattered by left-wing historians who told him he could be FDR or LBJ (instead, he unwittingly ended up as FJB) and young activists who convinced him to fight all of their self-righteous culture wars. And it leads Mr. Rothman to draw a very sad conclusion:
It’s the same mistake, over and over again. Perhaps Team Biden kept making it because they bought into the Left’s hype, or maybe they were so lethargic and unimaginative that they couldn’t conceive of an alternative approach. In either case, the president should not expect anyone, much less the progressive Left, to salvage his legacy.
As Joe Biden’s disastrous administration ends in scandal, incompetence, and pathos, we should all take a moment to acknowledge the myriad lessons to be learned by his malodorous leadership. Whether it be the folly of electing a man who clearly is in cognitive decline, the problems stemming from pandering to the loudest and most online members of your coalition rather than the people who may have held their nose and voted for you, or the perils of building your administration from hacks, time-servers, cronies, and yes-men rather than trying to find a broad swath of experience and ability, the Biden Administration will forever be tainted with the fetid stench of failure. We can only hope and pray that the next guys up are at least to some degree an improvement. We’ll find out soon enough.
– JVW