In a world where the botched Afghanistan withdrawal never happened, and the Biden administration leads a coherent fight against Covid-19, unvaccinated Americans are the root cause of Joe Biden’s cratering approval numbers according to the White House. That world, of course, does not exist, but the Biden administration is nonetheless blaming unvaccinated Americans for the missteps and bad policies of President Biden over the past few months.
When asked last week about Biden’s record-low 38% approval in the latest Quinnipiac poll, Press Secretary Jen Psaki provided a word salad of blame-shifting that eventually end by faulting unvaccinated Americans for Biden’s poll numbers:
Psaki replied: ‘Well, look, I would say that this is a really tough time in our country. We’re still battling Covid and a lot of people thought we’d be through it – including us.
‘Because of the rise of the Delta variant, because of the fact that even though it was a vaccine that was approved under a Republican administration, even though we now have full FDA approval and even though it’s widely available across the country we still have a quarter of the country – less than that, 20 percent of the country – who’ve decided not to get vaccinated.
‘No question that’s having an impact,’ Psaki said, adding that, ‘as the President has said, the buck stops with him’ before signing off.
In other words, if not for those damn unvaccinated people, Biden’s approval would be near 70% and the country would be awesome! Never mind the failures that Biden has wrought on the American people with his own bad decisions and poorly conceived plans.
Biden’s approval has tanked across the board, from foreign policy to domestic issues like education and handling Covid-19. The public has lost trust in the President, and for good reason. We’re drifting slowly into an inflation nightmare where the price of common household goods is skyrocketing and nothing seems to be slowing the trajectory.
Add to that mess Biden’s sloppy Covid-19 vaccine mandate, which is hurting the economy far more than any media outlet or analyst is willing to admit, and you have the current recipe for why Biden has lost touch with his own campaign promises and commitments.
The audacity and the hubris required to blame people who choose not to be vaccinated for whatever reason as the primary cause of Joe Biden’s unpopularity reaks of denial or blatant ignorance. It’s the epitome of tone-deaf political misdirection aimed at pitting Americans against each other and trying to reassure Democrats that Biden’s policies aren’t failing, it’s their fellow Americans that are failing Biden.
As FiveThirtyEight noted days ago, since Biden’s Afghanistan debacle with 13 dead U.S. troops, his poll numbers have continued a downward trend and show no sign of bouncing back, even as the Aghan withdrawal mess fades from the headlines:
Biden’s approval rating has failed to improve even as Afghanistan has faded from the headlines.
This is consistent with the argument that the decline in Biden’s approval rating was never just about Afghanistan. The timing of it suggested it was also driven by the resurgent pandemic, dissatisfaction with the economy, or even natural post-honeymoon reversion to a mean that is more realistic in these polarized times. In other words, a myriad of factors.
In other words, just six months into his presidency, Joe Biden is churning out numbers so bad, his party is already bracing itself for massive losses in the 2022 midterms with no course correction on the horizon. The Covid situation related to the labor market will continue to deteriorate as more companies impose Biden’s vaccine mandate on their employees, which in turn leads to quitting or terminations, which then helps to drive up the cost of goods by impacting supply chains.
It’s all intertwined, and any effort to explain it away or deflect by the White House is political maneuvering designed to distract and hide Biden’s failures from public view. Call it supply chain issues, labor issues, or issues of vaccination rates, it all leads back to the Biden-Harris administration and their embarrassing leadership dearth.
