Zogby: Infrastructure not enough to overcome election drubbing
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
This week's White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden hugging a week-ending $1.2 trillion infrastructure victory after suffering an election drubbing and ho-hum performance on his latest overseas trip.
"Finally, infrastructure week," he said Saturday morning after the House OK'd the infrastructure bill a bipartisan Senate had long ago approved. He immediately left the city for his beach house.
It came after he spent a few days licking the wounds of the Tuesday elections where his endorsed Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe, was defeated in a shocker by Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin and the Republican in New Jersey governor race also nearly won.
Democratic pollster John Zogby noted both events plus the good jobs report and Biden's lackluster scorecard during his trip to Scotland for a climate summit and said that he'll need more than the lone infrastructure victory to turn his presidency around. In grading a "C," he said, "It will take more success to erase the drubbing the Democrats received on Tuesday."
Conservative analyst Jed Babbin, grading a D-, pointed to continued flip-flops by the sometimes conflicted and confusing administration, this time on Taiwan policy and whether the president planned to give illegal immigrants hundreds of thousands of dollars.
John Zogby
GRADE: C
Let's call this a bifurcated week for President Biden.
The first part of the week was a huge failure as the president completed his meetings in Glasgow weakened by the failure of Congress to arm him with legislation that would have strengthened his hand and supported his commitment to the war on climate change. The bottom fell out when Virginia and New Jersey voters embarrassed him and the Democratic Party.
But then a much better than expected jobs report seemed to get his presidency back on track. Over 600,000 new jobs, a drop in the unemployment down to 4.6%, a revised report up dramatically for the month before, wages up and economic growth back on track.
Then late Friday night, the House passed the hard infrastructure bill already passed in a bipartisan vote in the Senate. Biden will sign the first major infrastructure bill in over a decade and deliver on a key promise.
Can this trajectory continue? It will take more success to erase the drubbing the Democrats received on Tuesday.
Jed Babbin
GRADE: D-
It was a pretty dismal week for sleepy Joe and the rest of the Brandon administration.
Where to start? How about with Biden's refusal to take any blame for the Democrat's election faceplant on Tuesday? In a Wednesday presser he ducked the question but said that maybe it would have helped Terry McAuliffe in Virginia had his $3.5 trillion plan been passed by Congress. Republicans are talking as if they'd already won the 2022 midterms. They haven't and shouldn't take that for granted. People will forget Biden's disasters of 2021, but the Republicans will probably blow away the Democrats next year anyway because Biden will continue to manufacture one disaster after another as long as he's president. And then there's President Biden's falling asleep at the United Nations climate meetings while others spoke. When Biden spoke, he apologized for repeating himself and then did it again. And when he wasn't repeating himself, he was creating messes that his staff had to correct.
Does Biden have a clue about what's really going one? For the second time in two months, Biden promised to defend Taiwan. His staff quickly corrected him to say that our policy toward China hasn't changed. When Fox's Peter Doocy asked Biden if the reports were true that illegal aliens separated from their families would each get payments of $450,000, Biden said it wouldn't happen. The cleanup crew had to correct him again. So illegal aliens who sued for the anguish they supposedly suffered as the result of breaking our laws are likely to be paid $450k each, or $1.8 million for a family of four. The maximum benefit paid to the family of a soldier killed in action is $400,000.
BIden's new normal continues. Food prices are the highest in 10 years and getting higher. U.S. civilians are still trapped in Afghanistan, Bidenflation continues and Biden's open borders are still being flooded with illegal aliens coming across. The only good news is that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said he won't vote for Biden's Build Back Bonanza unless border security accompanies its amnesty provision.
Meanwhile, back at the White House, Biden is sending $144 million in aid to Afghanistan for humanitarian purposes. It'll be paid through humanitarian organizations which doesn't guarantee that the Taliban won't divert much of it for its own purposes.
Biden's hugely unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris, who he put in charge of the border crisis, is finally going to pay attention to it. She'll be doing so in Paris at another conference of whatever representatives of other nations want. The results will do precisely nothing to secure our border.
The "Let's go Brandon" and "F*** Joe Biden" chants are still very popular at college football games. At the rate the Brandon administration is going, that's not going to change any time soon.
John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Poll and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His weekly podcast with son and 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
Tags:Washington Secrets, Biden Administration, Joe Biden, Infrastructure, Campaigns, Budgets and Deficits, Congress, Foreign Policy
Original Author:Paul Bedard
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Evidently he agreed to shower with a few legislators to get their vote. What ever works.